A Pastor and a Philosopher Walk into a Bar
Mixing a cocktail of philosophy, theology, and spirituality.
We're a pastor and a philosopher who have discovered that sometimes pastors need philosophy, and sometimes philosophers need pastors. We tackle topics and interview guests that straddle the divide between our interests.
Who we are:
Randy Knie (Co-Host) - Randy is the founding and Lead Pastor of Brew City Church in Milwaukee, WI. Randy loves his family, the Church, cooking, and the sound of his own voice. He drinks boring pilsners.
Kyle Whitaker (Co-Host) - Kyle is a philosophy PhD and an expert in disagreement and philosophy of religion. Kyle loves his wife, sarcasm, kindness, and making fun of pop psychology. He drinks childish slushy beers.
Elliot Lund (Producer) - Elliot is a recovering fundamentalist. His favorite people are his wife and three boys, and his favorite things are computers and hamburgers. Elliot loves mixing with a variety of ingredients, including rye, compression, EQ, and bitters.
A Pastor and a Philosopher Walk into a Bar
Reframing the Bible with Zach Lambert
Ready to transform your relationship with the Bible? Zach Lambert, pastor of Restore Church in Austin and author of Better Ways to Read the Bible, offers a healing pathway for those wounded by scripture in this candid conversation.
Growing up in a Southern Baptist megachurch during the "fundamentalist takeover," Lambert experienced firsthand how the Bible can be weaponized. Disagreeing with the pastor's interpretation is often treated as disagreeing with God. This authoritarian approach created spiritual trauma that eventually led Zach to seek healthier ways of engaging with scripture.
Zach challenges the notion that there's one "plain reading" of the Bible, noting that everyone interprets scripture through various lenses. Some lenses—like literalism, apocalypse, moralism, and hierarchy—often produce harm, while others—focused on Jesus, context, flourishing, and fruitfulness—lead to healing. The key differentiator is the fruit they produce. "We should be asking with any given biblical interpretation: is it producing more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness in me and in the world around me?"
The conversation tackles difficult topics like biblical violence, the subjugation of women, and LGBTQ+ inclusion, offering fresh perspectives without abandoning the text. Zach suggests we view scripture as John the Baptist pointing to Jesus rather than an end in itself: "Jesus didn't say 'here is the truth, believe it.' He said 'I am the truth, follow me.'" This shift from a text-centered to a person-centered faith can transform our approach to scripture.
Whether you're deconstructing harmful theology, seeking to reintegrate the Bible into your spiritual life, or simply curious about healthier interpretive frameworks, this episode provides thoughtful guidance for transforming scripture from a weapon of harm into a tool of healing.
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Cheers!
I'm Randy, the pastor, half of the podcast, and my friend Kyle is a philosopher. This podcast hosts conversations at the intersection of philosophy, theology and spirituality.
Kyle:We also invite experts to join us, making public a space that we've often enjoyed off-air, around the proverbial table with a good drink in the back corner of a dark pub.
Randy:Thanks for joining us and welcome to A Pastor and a Philosopher. Walk into a Bar. There's all sorts of things we talk about on this podcast all sorts of big issues, topics, things, whatnot but something that we keep coming back to over and over again inevitably is the Bible, because when we talk about deconstructing our faith or when we talk about embodying a new kind of faith, the Bible kind of sits at the foundation of it all, because the Bible is where we've learned all of these things that we want to disentangle ourselves from and deconstruct. The Bible is where our ideas of who God is and what it's like to, what it looks like to be a Christian, to follow Jesus, to be a good person in the world All of those things are rooted in there, and we've been told some really fairly harmful and scary things that if we reject certain readings of the Bible or certain ways of interpreting the Bible, we're rejecting Jesus himself and the church itself and we're walking away and we might be headed to hell, which means eternal conscious torment, right?
Randy:So my friend, zach Lambert wrote a book called Better Ways to Read the Bible Transforming a Weapon of Harm into a Tool of Healing, and Zach is someone I trust immensely when it comes to how to handle the Bible, how to read the Bible, how to treat the Bible, how to integrate the Bible into our lives and how not to. Zach is a really, really wonderful and important voice in the church. He passes a church in Austin, texas, called Restore, and it's doing beautiful and amazing things. So I'm really excited. I've been excited to talk to Zach for a bit and I'm excited that we finally have a reason to do that.
Kyle:Yeah, and I was glad to meet him. I've heard you say great things about him and I know that you guys have interacted a bit and I have seen some of his tweets back before.
Randy:I left Twitter. He's a good time on Twitter. He's a good time my full experience of Zach.
Kyle:Yeah, but it's a really interesting book and it was a good conversation. And maybe we should also say he's involved with the Post-Evangelical Collective, of which you are a part, and so very involved in that movement, and came from a fundamentalist background, as you're gonna hear some of that about. So his bona fides are legit. He knows what he's talking about when it comes to certain ways to read the Bible and the kinds of entrenchment that those ways can have in certain church structures. And, yeah, this is, I think, a good book for somebody who is starting that journey towards. I'm now ready to think of new ways. Maybe you've taken a break from the Bible entirely, which is totally understandable, but now you're trying to think about how you might incorporate it back into your life again and shed some of that baggage.
Randy:This is a great place to start A hundred percent, yep, or even if you're just in that place of like, I'm just, I got sick of the Bible. I couldn't pick it up, but now maybe I feel like I need to do something different. Yeah, exactly what you said, kyle. This is perfect for that. So yeah, so we cover several things here.
Kyle:I tried to avoid as much nerdiness as possible, but there is a little bit in here about hermeneutics I don't think we use that word, but it's in there and, yeah, zach is both a pastor, but he's also educated and he has some more nuanced thoughts as well about ways to read the Bible, ways to approach how to decide how to read the Bible, so like methodology stuff, which is that deeper stuff that I love to talk about. And so, yeah, this is a rich conversation, whether you're approaching it as that person who is in that place wondering what you should do, or as a pastor, wondering what you should tell that person, or also somebody who's thought about it for a little bit of time and has some maybe more nuanced questions as well.
Randy:Well, zach Lambert, thank you for joining us on A Pastor and a Philosopher walking to a bar. It's so good to have you, my friend.
Zach:Yeah, man, it's great to be with you. Randy, we are, I think, old friends at this point now, are we allowed to say that?
Randy:I think so. I think we've moved from new to old Absolutely. That feels like a virtual high five. We made it. I'm excited to talk. We've been talking about talking for a while and you're like, how about we just wait until my book comes out and here, we are. When does the book come out? We are recording on what is today, july 23rd, 24th, something like that.
Zach:Yeah, and it comes out August 12th, so we're getting very close, just a couple weeks away.
Randy:Awesome. So the book is Better Ways to Read the Bible, transforming a Weapon of Harm into a Tool of Healing, which I love and I'm excited to talk about. It's a great book. I read it, loved it. This is your first book, correct, zach? It is. So you could have written a book about a lot of things. You could have written a book about starting a progressive church, or your journey in the church, or your LGBTQ community in the church and that situation. You could have written a number of books, but you chose to write a book about the Bible. Tell me why you want to start with the Bible.
Zach:Yeah, you know, I think it's because, well, the whole book and you know, since you read it and because of what you do for work as a pastor, the book is very pastoral and it touches on a lot of those things you just mentioned.
Zach:But I wanted to figure out how to do so in a more holistic way than just writing something. That was a little bit more niche. You know, like I have a whole chapter on how the subjugation of women engages with scripture and how it's justified through kind of the plucking of some text out of context and that could have been a book. But that book was already written a few times and they're great. Same thing with, like, affirming theology or LGBTQ inclusion stuff, and so what I really wanted to do was offer this more, yeah, holistic resource and it really came from a wanting to have a resource myself, like to give to people, because I got this question for the last decade of pastoring our church here in Austin. After I preach, I get this question all the time of like how do you know that? You know, like, where'd you get that interpretation of that story? I've never heard that, and obviously some people can jump in and do seminary or they can do more academic, commentary-based things, but I didn't feel like there was more of a popular level book that I could just hand to say, hey, here's a framework for how to engage, not just some problematic texts but really the whole Bible. And you know, like I said, there are great resources out there. Like you know, I give out Rachel Held Evans' inspired book all the time.
Zach:Pete Innes has a number of great books connected to the Bible and specifically, you know, kind of interpretation or Old Testament texts that you know feel difficult.
Zach:There are some more like what is the Bible type books, like Rob Bell has and things like that.
Zach:But didn't really, again, feel like there was more of a holistic framework for, okay, here's just how we read the Bible, what are some bad ways that we do it, what are some better ways to do it?
Zach:That again could be applied to anything. So, because that resource didn't exist, I thought you know what, maybe I can work through a process of putting some things down that we've learned and then really bringing together a bunch of authors, scholars, activists, people that I've been reading for 20 years to expose folks to them. So like, for instance, I have a chapter that's mostly about liberation theology, and so I make the joke all the time that, like if the only thing that occurs from people reading my book is that they read more like James Cone or bell hooks or something like that you know because they got mentioned and cited in this book then it will have been a huge win. So I also wanted to just expose people to all these different folks, whereas they might not have had a you know a reason, or they might have had even the time to engage with all of them individually.
Randy:Yeah, I mean you quote scholars and thinkers and incredible people all throughout the book and each chapter begins with a quote and I, halfway through, I just stopped circling each quote because I was like they're all freaking awesome.
Zach:Those are good.
Randy:They're really good. So because I know you and because obviously I've read the book, I can say I know that you love the Bible deeply, zach, and you have a rich and beautiful relationship with the Bible. But I know that's been a complicated relationship. So can you just bring our listeners who don't know you or haven't read the book yet through. What has your relationship with the Bible been, through your life as a follower of Jesus?
Zach:For sure. I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, a Southern Baptist megachurch here in Austin, and this was in the late 80s and then in the 90s, and so this was kind of the height of what's called the conservative resurgence or the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention or the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, and that was really. It was built a lot around a very wooden, literalistic interpretation of the Bible and really a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, and so that's what I grew up under Massive elevation too of Scripture, Like, again, I love the Bible, but in the churches I grew up in it was like the Trinity was Father, Son, Holy Bible, you know. I mean it was like we mostly ignored the Spirit of God at work and we really elevated the Bible to a divine level. There was also a prevailing thought in the churches I grew up in that the pastors that were preaching weren't interpreting the Bible, they were just reading it. It was just God says that I believe it. That settles it. It's the text in black and white.
Zach:And so there was a massive conflation in my young mind between my individual pastor's biblical interpretation and God's word, so to speak. So to disagree with something my pastor said was tantamount to disagreeing with God. And I began to disagree a lot with what my childhood pastor said, and so I felt this massive disconnect between my faith and especially the faith of my family members. My parents were both in vocational ministry their entire, most of their entire careers, my entire life. And so it was, like everybody in my life, ascribed to this very specific understanding of Christianity that was built on this very wooden, literalistic interpretation, fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. And when I began to not share that, I began to both be pushed out and start to kind of walk away from those spaces. And that was hard and it made me really not want to engage with the Bible at all.
Randy:Yeah, yeah, what you just said reminded me of in the chapter I don't know what chapter it is, but the Literalism Lens, which is a great chapter, talking about the Chicago Statement from 1978. You quote the Chicago Statement from 1978, you quote the Chicago Statement from 1978, and it says this we are persuaded that to deny it and it being inerrancy, biblical inerrancy, we are persuaded that to deny it is to set aside the witness of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit and to refuse that submission to the claims of God's own word, which marks true Christian faith, to the claims of God's own word, which marks true Christian faith. Now talk about you said, you know, felt like if I disagreed with my pastor, it's tantamount to disagreeing with God. I mean, it says it right there, Right there, If you disagree, with us and these bros, all these white bros in 1978 in the Chicago Statement.
Randy:That's basically you're disobeying God's own word, you're disobeying the spirit of God, you're disobeying God's own word, you're disobeying the spirit of God, you're disobeying God and you're out of the circle of Christianity. How do we work our way out of a worldview like that? How do we get out of that when you say that you're disagreeing with God? This is why I think we see so many nuns. I'm just kind of riffing off of this reality that these gatekeepers are really good at making it just completely impossible to leave behind these ways of seeing the Bible.
Zach:Yes, and I think the first thing we have to do is recognize some of these statements or some of these ideologies for what they are, like you just said, you know this is they are very explicitly saying disagreeing with our specific and new understanding of inerrancy is disagreeing with Christianity. So they have done that and it's a very classic strategy inside of really authoritarianism. And so we're seeing this right now. Right, we're seeing it on a not to get all political, but we're seeing it currently from the Trump administration, where they have said to be someone who loves America, you know, to be a patriot, to be a true quote, unquote true citizen, this is what that means. Right, to be a real American.
Zach:It means all of these things that really actually don't have anything to do with any kind of classic understanding of patriotism or anything like that, but they've conflated those two things, right, and so now it's not just that you disagree with us, it's that you hate America. And the same thing happens in fundamentalist churches, including the church I grew up in and including most of the churches that were influenced by the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, and that is, if you disagree with our understanding of how to read and interpret the Bible, then you have disagreed with Christianity, you have disagreed with God and you are outside the faith, and so we have to recognize and call that out for what it is, which is what I try to do in that chapter. To say this is just simply not true. To say this is just simply not true, you know, like Christianity is so much bigger and more beautiful than the writers of the Chicago Statement would lead you to believe.
Randy:Yes, yes, and the ripple effects are profound. I remember this is reminding me of a conversation with a friend I had at the gym, a friend of mine and my wife's. We were talking. She's a believer and she was talking about her struggle with the violence in the Old Testament in particular, and I was like, yep, well, welcome, you know, like good You're struggling with the violence in the Bible, you should. So she had some questions, some pastoral questions, so I forwarded her an article by Pete Enns and then another one by Brian Zant Brilliant stuff which is basically just saying maybe the violence in the Bible isn't God-ordained, Maybe it's kind of God letting God's people tell the story. You know is one way of looking at it.
Randy:There's a number of healthier ways of looking at it. She read them and then she came back to me and she said I found them really compelling except what does that mean about inerrancy? And I was like wah, wah wah. Because it's almost like Because it's almost like I could feel in this person. This is going to be an impossible task to get you on the other side of saying maybe inerrancy isn't what we thought it was, or maybe we can just leave behind inerrancy.
Zach:You run into so many dead ends when you give yourself to that inerrancy camp and then you buy that line that says to disagree with it is to disagree with God. Yes, yes, that's exactly right, and I think that's such a great anecdote because inerrancy is such a trump card in that way right, and especially when paired with eternal conscious torment and hell, which I talk a lot about in the Apocalypse Lens chapter. So this is a very specific strategy. What you're telling people is if you disagree with my biblical interpretation on anything, right, that's the age of the earth, that's what marriage is, that's absolutely anything and everything.
Zach:If you disagree with my interpretation of the Bible, you have disagreed with God and God's word and you have left the faith. And if you leave the faith, you will burn eternally, consciously in forever torment in hell. Right, that's what they're saying and so like. If the alternative is probably burning in hell forever, then I think I'll probably just agree with whatever you say. The Bible tells me to say right, like, it is the ultimate trump card and it's so effective and used to control through fear and manipulation. And that's why yeah, I mean, that's why a lot of like more authoritarian and fundamentalist churches continue to grow, sadly and tragically is because that is an effective message.
Randy:Yep, yep. So we're talking about biblical interpretation, and in the book you say over and over again that you know everyone is interpreting, we're all interpreting. There is no plain reading of the Bible, as we've been told there is. So my question, though, zach, as good progressive Christians as we are, perhaps, how do we know when we're actually doing a better job of not reading our context and our reality and our world and our biases onto the Bible? How do we know? What are some clues? Are there some clues that can tell us actually, this might be a better way to read the Bible?
Zach:It's a great question. I think it starts with some level of humility and introspection. And honestly, I think that if you can approach the Bible humbly, with curiosity, appreciating the diversity not only of the biblical authors but of 2,000 years of biblical interpretation, and you can do some engaging of your own biases and social location and all that stuff, you're like 90% of the way there, really Like you don't need this book, you don't need all the commentaries. If you will approach the Bible with humility, and especially inside of healthy and diverse community, you are like 90% of the way there. So that's where I would say to start. And then, yeah, the entire thesis of the book is that we're all interpreting that and the set of criterion that we're using to interpret is usually unique to any given person and it's based on your background and beliefs and you know the spiritual heritage that you've been handed, et cetera, et cetera. But my proposition is that there are better ways than others, that some ways are not good and that some ways are much better, and so the second piece of advice I would give is to say we should be really judging our biblical interpretations by the fruit that they're producing, and that's the final healthy lens that I lay out, and I put it last on purpose, because I do think it should be kind of the final filter through which we engage with not even just our biblical interpretation, randy, but really like our beliefs and behaviors holistically. Yes, because Jesus said that you know, the singular identifying characteristic of his followers is their fruit. He said you will know them by their fruit. And the fruit of the spirit is love in the primary position, and then love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. So we should be asking with any given biblical interpretation, is it producing more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, et cetera, in me and in the world around me? And if the answer is yes, then I would say it would say I think it's the Spirit of God at work in that interpretation, because they're not called the fruit of our brilliance or the fruit of our hard work, it's called the fruit of the Spirit of God. And then, secondarily, on the flip side of that, the other side of the coin, is if they're not, if our Bible interpretations are not leading to more love, joy, peace, patience, etc. Then that should be a massive clue that the Spirit of God is not in those things, right.
Zach:And so what I talk about specifically as an example in that chapter is how we've treated the LGBTQ plus community in the church for a really long time and the toxic fruit that has come from that biblical interpretation and application. And that was such a huge piece for me to say. Okay, I've met now, christians who have been excluded. I've met Christians who've been forced to go through conversion therapy, all these queer Christians who yet still try to follow Jesus and still want to join a church and all of that stuff and to watch not just how the toxic fruit had hurt them and how it had hurt the church, but also the good and beautiful fruit that they were producing even outside of these church institutional structures. And I thought we have to have gotten this wrong.
Randy:We have to have gotten this wrong. Percent of LGBTQ people grow up in the church, which is way more than the percentage of just straight people who grow up in the church. That blows me away and I would love to like dig into that a little bit to be like is there a correlation there or what's happening?
Zach:No, I know it's fascinating. Yeah, andrew, andrew Marin's book Us Versus Us is where a lot of those statistics are cited from. He did a massive survey of LGBTQ plus folks. That number is probably a little bit skewed because of how Christian his network is and so a lot of those people probably did grow up in church and it's more heavily. But it's still a very substantial survey, I think, with at least a few thousand people in it. So it's a pretty representative thing. But yeah, I would love to go deeper into that too and figure out where that comes from.
Randy:Yep, some other day, Kyle. Let me ask just one more question that I've got in there that I'd like to hear. Yeah, that's great. I'd love to give Walter Brueggemann a little shout out. The late great Walter In a lecture, and this reminded me of your book, zach, so I want to get your thoughts on this. In a lecture, walter said the Bible itself is not a package of certitudes but an act of faithful imagination. What a Brueggemann quote. Right, like, what does that mean to you that the Bible isn't a package of certitudes but maybe an act of faithful imagination?
Zach:Well, first of all, I'm incredibly honored that the book reminded you of Walter Brogan. That makes me feel very good. Secondarily, yeah, I think it's a really good encapsulation of what I'm trying to say throughout the entire book, which is, you know, the Bible. The biblical authors are not univocal on a myriad of things, right, and I think when we try to take this big, diverse, messy collection of writings and make it fit the exact framework that we try to put on it, to make it say one thing, when it's probably saying multiple things, that we try to make it into this collection of certitudes, you know, as Bruckman says, but it's just not. That's just not what it is.
Zach:And I think the problem is and the reason that I love the imagination part of that quote is because a lot of times when folks do some deconstruction around the Bible, they get to that place right when it's like, okay, this is not what I thought it was, it's not a collection of certitudes, and it stops there and a lot of times they walk away from the Bible, which, again, zero judgment.
Zach:I totally get it, but they have no, they've been given no imagination for what something better could look like. And that's really like the hope of the book is to say, yeah, let's dismantle all of the horrible ways the Bible has been weaponized and used to hurt people, but let's also, you know, develop imagination for what it could look like when it's used in a much better way. And the cool part is we don't have to, like, do all that on our own. Christians have been doing this for 2,000 years. They have been coming up with more beautiful I think, led by the Spirit of God more beautiful and better interpretations of biblical texts for a really, really long time, and so we can actually lean into that kind of great cloud of witnesses to have our imagination, our modern imagination, sparked, even if it's, you know, an ancient source.
Randy:Yeah, yep, yeah. I just love the idea of the Bible as an act of faithful imagination because it requires something of us. Then, right, it's not just this thing that we get to come to and it tells us all the answers. It's not a textbook, it's something that we actually have to engage with, with our imagination and with our faithful imaginations that, hopefully, have been redeemed and reformed and reoriented by the person of Christ.
Randy:And then, once we actually engage it through those lenses, like you say in the Jesus lens chapter, all of a sudden it becomes this dynamic encounter, rather than the static reading that we get. You know, we get for religious purposes, and religious purposes alone. Kyle, I took a bunch of the first questions, so I'm just going to let you go for a little bit with Zach here.
Kyle:So, Zach, am I correct that you're currently at Duke studying?
Zach:I am, yeah, doing a doctorate of ministry there.
Kyle:That is really cool. Congratulations on that. I know it's hard to get in. You used to be, though, at Dallas Theological Seminary. You talk about that a lot in your book.
Zach:What is that juxtaposition? Like Massive in a word, it is substantial. I actually make this joke, but it's true.
Zach:I chose Dallas Theological Seminary as a progressive choice because I was coming out of the Southern Baptist world and everybody I knew went to Southwestern or Southern Baptist Theological Seminaries. And I gotta tell you this is a great story. I don't think that I tell it in the book, but we went and visited Southwestern, my wife and I, and thinking like we were probably going to go there because, again, she grew up Southern Baptist, which is like what we knew. And so we go and visit and we're doing a little tour and there's just this like random house on the middle of campus. That's in Fort Worth, this random little house. And we're like what is that? Cause it's obviously like not the president, you know, like the presidential residence or whatever. It looks just like a house in the middle of campus. We're like what is this? And they were like, oh, the tour guide, oh, this is such a great thing. It's where seminary wives, you know, can do like their own classes. And even you know, like I was flirting with egalitarianism at the time we were trying to figure all that out. We were in our I think we were both 21 at the time.
Zach:My wife and I we'd been married like six months and she's also brilliant. She was on her way to grad school at UT Dallas. She's a speech therapist and so she was like oh, I'd love to take some classes. So we walk in, like, can we see the house? Yeah, yeah. So we walk in, they open the front door and it's just a house. Like on the inside too I thought there would be, like it renovated to like you know, chairs and desks or whatever, and I was like, where do they do the classes? And the tour guide was like oh well, here in the kitchen they learn how to make meals for when people from church comes over, and here in the dining room they learn how to set the table for a large group. Here in the bedroom they learn how to pack their husband's bag when he's gonna go on a trip.
Kyle:I got a little nervous when you said, here in the bedroom, I'm not gonna lie.
Zach:You thought I was gonna go full MTV Cribs on it. You thought I was going to go full MTV Cribs on it, but it was a wild experience. I mean, I probably still have the marks in my arm from where my wife was digging her nails in, like let's get the hell out of here. And so, even as 21-year-old kind of still exploring, still in the midst of the Southern Baptist world, we were like this is too much. So we went to Dallas Theological Seminary like for real, because it was like more open than Southwestern.
Kyle:That was the compromise choice.
Zach:It was the compromise choice and I will tell you I some of it was really hard. My time there Again, I started a week after I turned 22 and there were really difficult experiences. I was actually in the academic Dean's office five or six times for arguing with professors and stuff Almost got kicked out a couple of times. But I also had a handful of professors who were amazing, who slipped me books under the desk and said don't tell anyone, I gave this to you.
Kyle:But here's.
Zach:NT Wright or you know, Pete Enns or Walter Brueggemann or something like that, and I think they might help answer some of your questions.
Kyle:I think Pete would be proud to hear that people are slipping his books under the table.
Zach:I've told him this story too. He loved it and so, yeah, it was a really transformative time for me. It was where I even first encountered like missional theology and I started reading Alan Hirsch and Mike Frost and people like that, and so, yeah, I'm really grateful for it. There were they actually I mean, they don't recognize me at all as an alumni. They actually hate when I talk about that. I went to Dallas Theological Seminary so fast forward 10 years as I was looking to do doctoral work. I wanted something that had some shared values you know at this point, some institutional shared values and looked around and Duke was just such a great fit and was, like you said, blessed to get in. And it's been. I'm three semesters in right now in their hybrid doctorate and it's been a fantastic experience.
Kyle:That's awesome. You talk about in the book working at a megachurch during that time and something that the pastor said a pastor, I don't know which one said to you during your tour and it floored me. It was like I wrote down in the outline holy hell, could you share a little bit of that story?
Zach:Yeah, so my first day I started at DTS, at Dallas Seminary, and at this church the same day and I remember I went to this church and I get the full tour and this is a I mean it's, it's a massive church, 40 something, thousand members at the time. Um, it sprawls across I think like 40 or 50 acres of land in the North Dallas area. Um, and I'm getting the full tour and I remember we walk up to kind of like the highest point, um, in the sanctuary that set 7,500 people. So you're kind of looking out over the whole thing and this pastor turns to me and he says, zach, you've got three things in your life right now You've got seminary, you've got your family and you've got your job at this church, which was an internship too.
Zach:It was not even like this massive pastoral role. And he said you're not going to be able to do all of them, You're not going to have enough time and energy and focus, and so you're going to have to cheat at least one of them. And I don't care which one you cheat, but do not cheat this church. And it was, I gotta be honest, in the moment I was like it felt like a Rocky speech. I mean I was like, yeah, man, yeah, don't cheat God's church. No, he meant this church.
Zach:He meant this church, he meant this church and so, yeah, I was there two years. That certainly was prescient. I mean, it was prophetic out of his mouth that I was asked to cheat literally everything else and do some. You know what I find things morally reprehensible now that the church was a part of that I supported at the time and, yeah, I it's been. It's been a hard road to move forward.
Zach:After that experience I left that after two years thinking I'll never work at a church again Like it was just such a Like. It was just such a soul-sucking two years. But I am grateful because I learned so much about how I didn't want to do church, so to speak, and how I didn't want to pastor, and I really don't think that I would have been able to start, restore the way we started it or do the things I get to do today without those two years. I mean they broke me in the best way so that I think God could put me back together in a way that, yeah, I think looked a lot more like Jesus than I had for a long time.
Kyle:Feel free to refuse this, but it seemed to me like in the book you were talking about First Baptist Dallas.
Zach:I was not so it's a church called Prestonwood Baptist Church. Okay.
Kyle:I didn't know if you wanted to go on the record about which one it was. We can cut that out if you don't.
Zach:No, I don't mind. I don't mind. I was there all of from January of 2011 to December of 2012. So it was a full two years, okay, to December of 2012. So it was a full, full two years. Um, was there during the 2012 election. Uh, that was kind of one of the last straws leading up to 2012 election and watching how all that was was handled, um, but I mean, this was like I said. I was in my early twenties. I really had very little church experience, aside from the one in my childhood, uh, or the two from my childhood, and so, um, I thought it was. It felt like the Super Bowl every day at first. You know, like I said, it felt like the most important. They would tell us this is the most important thing you'll ever do.
Kyle:Yeah man that sounds so familiar. I had a quite different theological background, but that message seems to be ubiquitous across all of the ones that have some fundamentalist strain or take themselves very seriously. Let me get into the book just a little bit here and then I know Randy has a bunch of questions about the book as well. You cite a statistic pretty early on in the book that says that 26 million people stopped reading the Bible from 2021 to 2022. It seems like you think that's bad. Do you view that statistic as unfortunate? If so, why, and what do you hope your book can do about it, if anything?
Zach:I really appreciate the way you phrased that.
Zach:I would say the statistic makes me sad, not because they've stopped reading the Bible, but because of why they stopped reading the Bible.
Zach:Not because they've stopped reading the Bible, but because of why they stopped reading the Bible, because I believe that the majority of them I mean I'm sure there are some that you know just got tired or something like that, but I think for the majority of them, especially considering the years and the other survey anecdotal evidence that we have most of them stopped reading it because of how it had been used against them, against people that they love, the way that it had been weaponized, and so that makes me really sad and I think anytime something that is meant to be a tool for good gets turned into something that's harmful, especially when it's connected to God and faith, is a tragic thing.
Zach:And so I think my hope for them is and I think it's connected to my hope for the book is that this could be an on-ramp back into engaging the Bible in some healthier ways. But also I think it's important to just say like if and we tell this to people at our church all the time like if you're not ready to crack open the Bible like that's okay. You know, if you're so triggered every time you open it that you're having panic attacks like I don't want you to open it. I don't think God wants you to open it for a little while. I think you need to, you know, experience some healing and all that stuff before you even engage with that. So my hope, though, is that for people who have left it behind because of how weaponized it's been against them or people they love, that this book could be kind of a yeah, a healing thing for them. Yeah, that's really helpful.
Kyle:Let me ask one or two more general kind of questions and we can get into some of the specific lenses that you talk about. So you distinguish between several lenses. I'm going to call them good versus bad lenses. I don't remember the language you actually use. It might have been more measured than that, but let's say that's what it is so like. On the bad side, in other words, the lenses through which we should not be reading the Bible, probably you have literalism, apocalypse, moralism and hierarchy, and then on the more recommended side, you've got Jesus context, flourishing and fruitfulness. So can you say a little bit about how we're going to talk specifics about those? But how do you distinguish in general between a helpful versus an unhelpful way to read the Bible?
Zach:Yeah, I think it's connected to outcome for me, you know, and I can go much deeper into the flourishing lens in a minute, but to give a little bit of an overview, right like, I think that one of Jesus's most consistent messages is that he came so that people could experience flourishing. So you have like his first sermon in Luke four, when he gets up in his hometown synagogue and says I came to preach good news to the poor, to set the captives free, to recovery of sight for the blind, the year of God's favor for all people, you know, and then they get really mad at him. But first they're like that's awesome, yeah. And then he's like, hey, it's not just for us either, it's for absolutely everyone. And they get really mad and try to kill him. And so that's like that's his first sermon, you know.
Zach:And then you have John 10, 10, where he has, I think, his most concise mission statement I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.
Zach:You know, I have come so that people would experience this, this flourishing, this fullness of life. And then all the way through to Matthew 25, where he outlines, jesus outlines, like you know, when you feed the hungry, you're feeding me, when you give water to the thirsty, you're giving water to me, caring for immigrants and prisoners and all that kind of stuff. What he's saying there is, when you help people step into flourishing, you're actually doing the work that I have set out for you to do. So it's not just my work, it's actually our work together. He kind of democratizes his call for us to help, for us to step into flourishing for ourselves and help other people step into it too. And so all that to say, a great differentiator for a healthy way to read the Bible versus a harmful way is are your interpretations leading to people experiencing flourishing in their lives? Are they being set free from the things that harm them, that prevent them from experiencing that flourishing? So that's, I think, a barometer I use quite a bit to distinguish.
Kyle:Yeah, and to be clear, that's helpful. Thank you, to be clear, when we say flourishing, when you say flourishing, you've got something pretty specific in mind, I would imagine, because there are lots of folks who use those lenses you don't like, who think that their use of the Bible is leading to flourishing, and they can give you a pretty clear definition of what they think flourishing means. So this is a more substantive disagreement at an ethical level, before we get into the Bible. And you'd probably want to say I bet that your definition of flourishing is not coming from the Bible, or at least not specifically or exclusively from the Bible. Would that be fair?
Zach:Yeah, I do think that's fair. I think that I'm trying to take a multidisciplinary approach to the definition of flourishing, right. So talking about sociology and psychology, yeah, even evolutionary biology and things that we know about brain science and how social circles are formed and all of that kind of stuff, right, whether it's children to adults, trauma, being trauma-informed, like getting to a space where, if Jesus showed us what stepping into like what we were always supposed to, what being a human was always supposed to be like, then what does it look like to help all of us step into that as well, people that are guided by love of God and love of neighbor and love for self in a healthy way? Yeah, and I think I mean you make a great point, kyle that like some of this is not just like semantics, you know. I mean there are like really substantive differences that I would have with someone who is more of a fundamentalist, right, who would say to somebody who's gay, flourishing looks like you know pushing that down, ignoring that it looks like conversion therapy.
Zach:Or you know it looks like, you know entering into a heterosexual relationship, whatever, when I would say the exact opposite of that, you know, to a gay Christian or a gay person of that, you know, to a gay Christian or a gay person, um, and but again, I think that the when, when we try to take a, a, a burden of proof, approach, um, that we actually have a lot of really good evidence about where, um, some of those quote unquote flourishing paths out of fundamentalism lead um, because we have things like higher suicide rates and things like higher substance abuse rates and things like people leaving the church in droves and all of that kind of stuff, and I think that, to me, points to you know, not to bastardize the title of the book, but a better way to read the Bible, a better way to engage in faith.
Kyle:Yeah, that's interesting. So that burden of proof approach, I like that phrase, I can see that working well and maybe this is the target audience of the book, but like people who are already kind of engaged in asking those questions. But I wonder how much you still dialogue with folks who aren't, who are from the spaces that you came out of and who definitely still rely on these lenses that you're trying to expand beyond. And I wonder how much success you have seen in that kind of dialogue, Because you know it might be. For somebody like that, flourishing means going to heaven and maybe that's it, Maybe that's as far as that thought has ever gotten Right. And if this is not going to let you do that, then I can't support any reading of the text that would encourage it. So how has that kind of dialogue gone for you?
Zach:I think what I've learned in those spaces is that when people are in fundamentalism, in order for a conversation like that to be effective, they have to have some level of openness, and usually there's some kind of causative event that leads them to some openness. Right, so you could have, like the way I describe deconstruction is when something you believe or have been told comes into conflict with something you experience and you ask a question about it. So that has to have happened in order for someone who is in the midst of fundamentalism or kind of taking a step out to be able to engage with something like this in a way that actually makes significant change. And so I have completely left behind attempting to start the conversation with fundamentalists about this. You know what I mean. But I am happy to be responsive to questions when people have those and I get that a lot. I call them Nicodemus at night conversations. You know that famous story where Nicodemus goes to Jesus and he's like hey, don't tell anybody, I'm talking to you, but I have these questions. I get those.
Zach:I mean, not that long ago, but I think last month, I had a pastor here in Austin reach out to me. A more evangelical pastor asked me if we could get coffee. I said sure. He said, can we do it outside the city? So you know, drive an hour to meet this guy at a coffee shop in a little town that I've been to one time in my whole life, even though I've lived here my whole life, and we have this Nicodemus and Knight conversation and it's beautiful, right.
Zach:And that is where I think a book like this, or just this work in general, can be effective.
Zach:The other thing that I will say that I have a hope for inside of this and your question our church is filled with people of all ages, but especially Gen Z, millennial, gen X, who have really significant, painful disagreements with their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, other people about things like this, that they're still in those fundamental spaces of faith and now their kid or niece or whatever, goes to our church and it's like this is a heretical church, y'all are going to hell, blah, blah, blah.
Zach:So my hope and I actually do this for sermons too my hope is that a book like this could be given from a daughter to a father in that position I just described, and that that dad could read it and not be convinced of everything, but maybe be convinced that there are Jesus-loving people who take the Bible seriously, who come to different conclusions, and that his daughter is not on this path to apostasy or hell, but just has a different perspective than he does, even if he never changes his mind. So I do hope that it builds bridges in that way, even if it doesn't actually change people's minds, that it just kind of broadens their horizon a little bit.
Kyle:Yeah, I'll tell you, as I was reading it I did have the thought I thought of some friends and folks I know who would probably really benefit from it, based on where I think they are, and had the thought maybe next time I visit them I'll just leave this surreptitiously laying on a table somewhere.
Kyle:And so mostly I think you nailed that tone. There are a couple points where I wonder if I was still a fundamentalist. Would I feel judged by that, or would I feel like that was an invitation into a conversation or a way to stop me from asking the questions?
Zach:just real bluntly, I think it's a credit to my publisher and editor that there are only a few of those. To my publisher and editor that there were only a few of those. When I got my first round of edits back, I had so many underlines in red that it just said two words unnecessarily inflammatory.
Randy:Like, that's just all it said that's the new subtitle.
Zach:It's the new subtitle. My wife has started calling me just. You're just being unnecessarily inflammatory, so. So I really did try to minimize those as much as possible with the help of editors and stuff. But yeah, I think sometimes they end up still in there or there's some things that I feel like this shouldn't be judgmental at all, but you know, some people might take it that way. But yeah, that's. The hope is that there would be as few of those as possible.
Randy:Yeah, man, I hope my wife. I know she's going to listen, but if she does the unnecessary inflammatory thing, I hope that doesn't catch on in my house, because, man, that's, it's a nightmare, it's a nightmare?
Zach:I'm just kidding.
Randy:Let me ask you another question that maybe a friend can ask you. I'm a pastor. We do the same things and I know that I have this in me and I'm always kind of trying to watch myself on it. So just tell me your thoughts on this.
Randy:I think statements that many pastors and writers make about the Bible and when they say like here's what the Bible is really saying, can be dangerous and convey that there's one correct way of interpreting and reading the Bible. And I found it, I've got it, we've got it. And there were a couple of points in the Bible where I was like, oh man, it could feel like Zach's doing that kind of thing just on the other side. You know, like, particularly when you're talking about divorce, I think in chapter five, in the moral lens, you'll moralism lens you'll say like so yes, the Bible does say that God hates divorce, which was a great conversation.
Randy:I love the story, the pastoral stories you take out from Restore at your church. But you say so. Yes, the Bible does say that God hates divorce, but that's because God hates everything that oppresses and marginalizes people, which is exactly what happened to most divorced women in the ancient world. I like that thought. You also say just further on in the same thought when we use passages about divorce this way, we end up doing the exact opposite of what God desires. The Bible says God hates divorce because divorce marginalized women in biblical cultures. And it just left me thinking are you comfortable with saying this is what God meant when he said God hates divorce? Now, it's hard not to say that stuff when you're writing a book or you're preaching a sermon. How do we get through that and get around it? What are your thoughts on that, zach?
Zach:Yeah, I have no desire to create some progressive fundamentalism to your point. I think that that ends up being damaging in whole other ways, and I think the temptation to weaponize the Bible happens whether you are more progressive or more conservative or somewhere in between, because the weaponization of the Bible is not just that interpretation leads to harm, but it also looks like using a verse to make a point right, and I think that that can be unhelpful too, because what it ends up saying is yeah, then I've got the straight line on what God actually means and thinks. I know what that is. And so, yeah, I do think I tried to do it as many times. I tried to do it as few times as possible.
Zach:When I'm refuting something that I think is a bad Bible interpretation, I do want to offer a better one. I usually try to offer multiple better ones for this exact reason to say, hey, here are a few different ways that are much better to understand this. Sometimes I don't think that it doesn't feel possible. Maybe I just need to do more work to get there, you know, but sometimes it doesn't feel possible. It feels just like okay, well, it's the opposite of the one we've been given. The bad one it's, you know. The opposite is the good one. But I think also, I would say like, when it comes to this idea of, like the divorce passage, specifically when I, as a pastor, am sitting across from a woman who has been pressured to stay in an abusive marriage because of a passage like that, I do feel empowered to say that is not what God wants, even if I'm not sure what the answer is on the other side.
Zach:I do feel like there are times when it's clear-cut enough to say God does not want you to stay in this abusive space. And so I think again, I try to do that as few times as possible and lead with as many like hey, here are some options. But what I don't want people to think is all interpretations are equally valid. That is not at all what this book is about. The book is actually very specifically about how they are not all equally valid and some are really harmful and some are better. I try to do it with the least amount of prescription as possible to say here's a problematic verse, here's a problematic interpretation, here's the right one. But I am aware that sometimes, yeah, when you're trying to do the work of dismantling something that I find to be really harmful. You can move and pendulum swing into a place of like. Well, this is the only way of understanding it.
Randy:Yeah, and I found I mean it's. The dilemma for me personally is when you come across pretty certain in like the direct line from God thing, it's very effective communication-wise right, Like it's man, it lands heavy.
Randy:And when you get it a little bit more nuanced, people actually pick up on that nuance and they're like, oh, maybe I'll listen to that or maybe I won't, which might be whatever. Let me just go. I know we've got a limited amount of time we're running out here. Let me just go. I know we've got a limited amount of time we're running out here, but I want to. You had some really tasty quotes, particularly in chapter 7, but I want to talk about chapter 7 and 8 in specific for a little bit. Let me just read you a quote or two and then just I want to hear you just wax eloquently about that, if that's okay. You say this, and this is chapter 7, the Jesus Lens. The Bible is like the star the Magi follow in order to find Jesus after he is born in Bethlehem. The Bible is like John the Baptist who says look the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. I love that and I've never heard that before. Tell us elaborate on that a little bit, zach.
Zach:Yeah, I'll try to wax eloquently.
Zach:I have been, you know, pretty influenced by a number of folks who talk about the differentiation of Jesus as God's word, you know, kind of capital W, and the Bible as God's word, kind of lowercase w, I'm not sure that's the exact, you know best way to frame it, but the kind of idea that John 1 really is telling us that Jesus is what God has to say, which I think is a Brian Zahn quote, that really, when God wanted to give us a message, he didn't write a book, but God became a person, put on flesh in the incarnation of Jesus.
Zach:And I'm still very like I think the book probably reads very classic, trinitarian in that way, and very incarnation heavy, because, especially that chapter, because I really do think God, you know, jesus is the full expression we have of who God is and what God is like.
Zach:And so because of that, I think that we can right-size the Bible a little bit, not that it's not important, not that we don't love it, not that we don't engage with it in serious ways, but that we don't elevate it to the status of God or alongside Jesus, because it's not the Bible, I mean the New Testament, specifically the New Testament is amazing, not in and of itself, but because of what it tells us about Jesus, you know, and the whole idea of moving away from a text-centered faith into a person-centered faith around Jesus and an event-centered faith around the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. That, to me, is just so much more compelling than just another text-based faith, and so that's a lot of where that kind of comes from. I'm in debt to some much smarter people who I pulled from in that, but I was proud of those two analogies, so thank you for pointing that out.
Randy:Those are tasty dude. Yeah, seriously and that's an interesting case that I haven't thought of before is that most of the major religions in the world are text-centered faiths. You would say. Christianity is not, it's a person, it's a Christ-centered faith. How, without getting like saying that Christianity is superior to everything and with respect to all the other traditions, how might it look different to be a religious person who follows a person-centered, a Christ-centered faith, rather than a text-centered faith, because Jesus talks a lot about like, I don't care what you believe so much and what you think so much is how you live, right?
Zach:So how am?
Randy:I to look to follow less of a text-centered faith.
Zach:Yeah, you know, I make the statement in the book too, like Jesus didn't say here is the truth, believe it. He said I am the truth, follow me. And I think those are really different things. And, yeah, I have no desire to be a Christian supremacist or anything like that. I am a Christian because it is compelling for me and I find life in it and I'm grateful for the community that I have because of it and I am convinced by a lot of the kind of core claims of Christianity. But that is because of Jesus and that's what that entire chapter is really about.
Zach:The Jesus-centered lens is to say again the Bible is not univocal. The biblical authors are coming from all different places and this is not a controversial thing to say. In fundamentalist spaces it might be, but the idea that the Bible, all the biblical authors, don't say exactly the same thing or believe exactly the same way, is one of the least controversial things that I talk about in the book. And a great example is you have these Old Testament prophets, these Hebrew prophets, who some really emphasize mercy and some really emphasize sacrifice, right, and this is just this theme all throughout the Hebrew Bible, all throughout the Old Testament and Jesus. Basically, this is an ongoing argument that they're having in synagogue and as religious people, as Jews, and Jesus comes in as this Jewish rabbi and says go learn what it means.
Zach:I desire mercy, not sacrifice. Like he settles it, he says, like we've been arguing about this for a long time, I'm actually telling you mercy's more important than sacrifice, like he wasn't just saying that out of thin air. That was a decades, thousands, hundreds of thousands of years of long conversation argument, about which one was most important, and biblical authors felt differently about that. So my whole point with that chapter is just to say, when there are things that feel conflicting, that Jesus has to be the referee, the lens through which we decide which one that we follow as Christians, versus a much worse interpretation of that text.
Randy:Yep, yep, thank you.
Kyle:So last question from me you quote somebody at the end of the book that I suspect we all have fond feelings for, and that's the late Rachel Held Evans. But I wonder if your approving quote of her puts your position a little bit in tension with some of the other stuff that I've heard you say on this conversation. We'll see if that's true. So she says and I'm not going to read the whole quote, but it's a great one. She says the truth is you can bend scripture to say just about anything you want it to say. You can bend it until it breaks.
Kyle:For those who count the Bible as sacred, interpretation is not a matter of whether to pick and choose, but how to pick and choose. We're all selected. We all wrestle with how to interpret and apply the Bible to our lives. We all go to the text looking for something and we all have a tendency to find it. And you quote that approvingly, as I think you should. So I got the feeling from this book this goes back to my first question about whether you think it's bad that people have stopped reading the Bible Like I got the feeling that while you don't want to be a Christian supremacist, you still have a pretty high view of the Bible and you have pretty firm opinions about how to read it well or correctly, even while distancing yourself from the idea that there is an objective, correct reading.
Randy:I'm glad that Zach has pretty strong opinions on what are better ways to read the Bible.
Kyle:Well, I also do right.
Kyle:There's no doubt about that, but I wonder if we differ in our optimism about what the Bible actually means or contains, because it's common, I've noticed. We've talked to a lot of progressive Christian scholars in various fields and it's common to have a pretty optimistic take about what the Bible can mean and how useful its meanings could be in our current contexts. And I've always been just more pessimistic than I think most of the people we've talked to about that Like. I'm totally fine and have been for a long time saying the Bible says X, x is mistaken for reasons you know beta through zeta. Therefore we should hold this position over here. But the Bible is not the reason we should hold it and I'm fine. If there are good exegetical ways to drive wedges into some contemporary positions that we think are really important or morally significant, let's do that. If we can do that with authenticity and scholarly rigor, great. But I'm not as sanguine about our ability to do that as maybe it seems like you are.
Kyle:So, given what Rachel says there, how do you view that kind of ambiguity in approaching the text and square that with trying to as I take it in this book trying to encourage people to read the Bible afresh? Does that make sense? It does.
Zach:It does. I fully agree with Rachel's quote there and I think, like I said, my central thesis in the book is that we're all doing interpretation and that there are better interpretations than others. And how do we differentiate kind of harmful interpretations from healthy interpretations? That's basically the entire layout of the book. Here are some tools for how to identify and discard harmful interpretations and here are some tools for how to measure and elicit more healthy interpretations from the text. And so it really is in line with the rest of that quote she talks about.
Zach:If you're looking for reasons to wage war biblical reasons you'll find them. If you're looking for reasons to wage peace, you'll find it All the way through subjugate women, slavery, all that kind of stuff. So to your point about the Bible says X, like you're comfortable saying the Bible says X and the Bible is wrong. And here's why I'm not uncomfortable with that. I think that I'm running everything through, not just like a scholarly lens, but also through like a pastoral lens, and I would say that for a lot of our people that framework doesn't end up being all that helpful, you know, because then it just kind of leads to a place of like, well, what's right and wrong? Like what do I discard and what do I hold on to? And so what I I discard and what do I hold on to, and so what I try to say. I've actually tried to get completely away from saying the Bible says and that's why you'll hear me say a lot of like the biblical authors say. Or this biblical author says and I'm actually incredibly like I talk about this when I talk about the Canaanite genocide in the book I'm incredibly comfortable saying Joshua misunderstood what God told him to do and then he wrote it down as God telling him to commit genocide. But God never told Joshua to commit genocide. We know that because that's not who God is. And so I'm much more comfortable saying the biblical authors don't get everything right from a science perspective, from a historical perspective. They're also writing history completely differently than we write history. It's much more, especially in the Old Testament, like kind of propaganda in the way that they write history and things like that. So I'm much more interested in going beneath the surface of the Bible says X and that's wrong, and saying the biblical author wrote this and it got in there. Why was that? And is it helpful for us? Is it harmful for us? Are there better ways of understanding it.
Zach:So let me just like wrap it up by completing the thought about Joshua. So it's seemingly Joshua thinks that God has asked him to kill every man, woman, child and animal in Jericho right, because those people were in the way, this was supposed to be their land, the Israelites land and the Canaanites were in the way, and so let's kill them all. God told us to do this, but in reality, you have this incredible little passage where the angel, this angel, shows up to Joshua before the battle, and Joshua was like whoa, you're an angel. Like whose side are you on? And the angel's like I'm an angel of the Lord, I'm not on anybody's side, basically, and there's this like statement of neutrality from God there, which I think is actually the key to a better interpretation of that story, to say, well, actually, god did not order Joshua to do this. In fact, god sent a messenger to basically tell Joshua I'm not telling you to do this, but this is an important story, because how prevalent is this idea that God has told someone to commit violence on God's behalf, like we're seeing it in Israel and Gaza right now? Right, one of the first things after the horrors of October 7th 2023 and Hamas' slaughter of so many people.
Zach:Netanyahu gets up and says he quotes the Canaanite genocide and he says basically, like this is what God has told us to do in retribution. And now they've been doing that for two plus years, committing genocide against the Palestinian people, and like it's been horrific. And he is using a Bible verse, a bad interpretation of a Bible verse, to say it. So, all that to say, I'm much more comfortable saying the biblical author wrote this, why did they write it? Rather than saying the Bible says and that's right or wrong? Because I actually think when we use the terminology the Bible says, we're kind of giving into the framework of fundamentalism anyway to say like, well, the Bible is this one holistic, you know, univocal thing, when it's really not. Or the Bible is, like, exists in and of itself, as this entity that says things or doesn't say things, but in reality it's a collection of works. So it's a little bit of kind of helping right-size what the Bible actually is.
Randy:So in that quote which is at the very end of your book, I love that you put Rachel there. I love just one thing. I love the whole thing, but I love one particular thing that she says. And she said basically, with Scripture, and in Scripture we've been entrusted with some of the most powerful stories ever told. And I love that idea of being given the Bible. You're being entrusted with something not just kind of like here's life, read it and live by it. What does that mean to you, that idea of being entrusted with the scriptures, zach? What could that mean for us as Christ followers?
Zach:Yeah, I think it has massive implications for us as Christ followers. You know the stories that we find in the biblical narrative. A lot of them have completely transcended biblical interpretation, even Christianity, and it's gone into popular culture. You know how we colloquially say things like. You know reference Cain and Abel. Am I my brother's keeper? You know there's so many different things that have entered into kind of like popular society and that's because they're powerful stories. They are stories about right and wrong, stories about life and death, what's most important, stories about spiritual things and God and humanity and all that stuff. And so, again, it has massive implications for us as Christians.
Zach:But I would be remiss if I didn't say I feel an overwhelming responsibility for what that means for me as someone who writes and speaks about scripture all the time.
Zach:And I think you know there's this biblical text right where it says that something to the effect of teachers are judged more harshly. Um, and I again I'm maybe this is still like a little piece of my fundamentalist background, but I actually like take that really seriously. Along the lines of what Rachel says. There is that, yeah, like we have been, we have been entrusted with these stories. But you know me and you specifically, like as preachers and stuff like we've been entrusted with, like a community has asked us to teach and interpret these stories for them and or at least alongside them, um, and that is a massive responsibility that I think should cause us humility, it should cause some level of trepidation to say I better feel good about how I'm talking about this, um, and I do think also it makes me have what I hope is righteous anger against those who have used the text to really hurt people or control people or manipulate people, because I do think that that is a very serious sin, to use some very evangelical language. That is a very serious sin.
Randy:Yep, well done. Thanks for bringing it home. The book is Better Ways to Read the Bible Transforming a Weapon of Harm into a Tool of Healing by Zach Lambert. Zach, thanks so much for spending some time with us chatting with us about this book. I'm excited for the release date and excited for just people's view of the Bible to be transformed because of your view of the Bible. So thank you for writing this.
Zach:Thanks, randy, kyle. Randy, it's been a gift to be with you guys. What insightful questions I mentioned off before we started the podcast, that you would probably be shocked at how many podcasters that I talked to have not read the book and yet they're interviewing me about the book, and so it's so grateful to talk with two guys who are not just really smart but have also read and engaged with it and come away with such great questions. So thanks for all the prep and the work and, yeah, what y'all do on the. A Philosopher Walk into a Bar.
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Kyle:Find us on social media at atppwbpodcast, and find transcripts and links to all of our episodes at pastorandphilosopherbuzzsproutcom. See you next time, cheers.
