An Introduction to a Micro-Theology Series Introduction 🙂
getting your input
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‣ An Introduction to a Micro-Theology Series
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Last Week, I was able to get in on two abosolutely fantastic video conversations. First with my friends Dina and Leslie of
and . Watch it here. And then, and I were able to speak with Paul Young (The Shack), who couldn’t be a nicer human being. My apologies for those who were logging onto our video with Paul as we were logging off. Something wasn’t working right with the technology, but we presevered, and made it happen on zoom. If you’re looking for some insight, I highly recommend both of these videos. The former is more on grief and the latter more on theology, but there’s a lot of crossover.This Friday, we’ll be with Drs Chris Hanson of
and talking health, theology, parenting, and more. 1pm central.‣ An Introduction to a Micro-Theology Series
As I’ve previously mentioned, this Fall, I’m releasing a series of small books around some different theological ideas (i.e., atonement, sexuality, hell, etc.) Below is the introduction, which I think will be at the front of each book. Or maybe the end. Hmm .. 🤔 If you had time to read it and leave a comment, that’d be great.
I’m trying to keep it brief, as I’m calling it a micro-theology series, but I’m also trying to stress the importance of how life shapes our thinking and our thinking shapes our theology. I’m worried I may have already overstepped boundaries that demarcate something being brief or more accessible, 🤦🏼♂️ but I thought I’d get your opinion.
Target audience: The books are for curious people, probably college education level and up, who not only need encouragement to think freely but reassurance that it’s actually biblical to think freely. Who are those kind of people? Hmmm, imagine …
-4th-year college student, realizing that what they've been taught in school—critical thinking—cannot be employed in their bible study group.
-Mother, who's been watching their 12-year-old, now 15, now 18, wrestle with their sexuality. The mom isn't conditioned to think anything is permissiable outside of standard Americanized-christian tropes. However, love for her daughter is inviting her to rethink a lot of things.
-Church board member, growing concerned over the amount of energy given to what the church is against rather than what the church is for.
Yes, I continue to have compassion for those kinds of people. Probably because I continue to hear from them so consistently. So, that’s who this is for.
Thanks everyone. 👇🏼
Introduction: Love is the Lens
This series is "micro" in word count only—these topics span a wide breadth of theological inquiry, presented in accessible, Substack-sized reflections. My goal is to help you, the reader, engage theology through a lens marked less by exclusive, dogmatic religion and more by inclusive, open, and relational theology. This is not only permissible; it’s what our sacred text, with its undeniable interest in powerless nations, scorned victims, and scapegoated saviors, encourages us to do.
Note: this isn’t a lens-free approach. Such an approach doesn’t exist, for none of us comes to a text outside of a context. Context is informed by a variety of mimetic (imitation), mythic (symbols), and theoretic (conceptual) factors, all of which necessarily present themselves differently in different periods, cultures, traditions, languages, and families.
Even if we had an exact word or phrase that a Paul, a Moses, or a Zerubbabel used 2,000 years ago, there is little chance that definitive meanings from their day could be imported into exact understandings of our day. Insisting otherwise would be like using bronze-age tools to work out digital-age problems.
Words are fluid. They must be, for their definitions are filtered through the relationship of language and culture, neither of which are static. However, the Word, filtered through truth and spirit, is also fluid. Sometimes, the Word gets lost in the words, but if we’re aware, discerning, vulnerable, and courageous, we might gain the wisdom to see the Word transcending and including the words.
In case I’m being too poetic, let me be clear: the hope of scripture (words) is the way all of this plays out within the life of Jesus (the Word). Embodied love is the fulfillment of our text. The strength of what the bible offers is not definitive rigidity around rules; the strength is the way the words and stories get inside and influence you to live in better relationship with people. This is love.
A Working Definition of Love
I don’t have the final word, but my working definition of love is that it is an uncontrolling, nonbinary, nonviolent, non-scapegoating energy entangled with God and everyone that’s meant for the non-complete flourishing of everything.
Uncontrolling because if something controls, I find it difficult to call it love.
Nonbinary because love isn’t interested in pitting one thing against another.
Nonviolent because violence probably isn’t love.
Non-scapegoating because I’ve come to believe that much religion is built upon a mechanism of blame. I’d like to distance myself from the practice.
Energy because love isn’t exactly a person or a thing.
Entangled because where God ends, and creation begins is impossible to determine.
The flourishing of everything because love is so creative that it can lift one thing up without tearing another thing down.
Non-complete flourishing because I don’t think the point of love is to provide wholeness to the degree that you no longer have desire. Desire doesn’t work that way. Wanting is fueled by the not-having. It’s the lack that produces the energy. So, flourishing isn’t necessarily completeness or filling the lack with anything (including with God) so that you are whole. No, the depth of flourishing allows lack to be with you on the journey of love.
Your Agency
So, this is an approach that encourages you, the reader, the human being, the person privileged to be the steward of this lived experience to choose a lens of love. (Yes, an uncontrolling, nonbinary, nonviolent, non-scapegoating energy entangled with God and everyone that’s meant for the non-complete flourishing of everything.)
“Wait,” I hear you asking, “can I do that?”
Yes! Yes, you can and who else better to do it than you?
Look, you already have a context. But this doesn’t mean you can’t influence your context. I know such an idea might cause you anxiety, particularly if you’re coming from a religious system that’s told you you’re incapable of determining your own ideas; that’s conditioned you from day one to believe that your heart is “deceitful above all things.” But consider that this kind of message has come to you within a certain environment (again, context). Meanwhile, you are free to form your own opinions.
I want to tell you the same thing I told three young women recently at a coffee shop who were probably around the age of my daughter. I couldn’t help but notice, as they sat next to me praying, discussing, and drinking coffee, that next to their bibles, was a book by a well-known preacher, someone who has made a living off telling young women, just like them, that they cannot lead, teach, or preach, at least, not when men are present.
I cringed, turned the music in my headphones up, and did my best not to think about their limited context. My distraction strategy didn’t work. I kept thinking about these young women, their future, everyone’s future. About an hour later, on my way out, I did my best to respectfully offer my opinion: “Despite what the author of the book you’re reading thinks,” I said, taking the time to look each of them in the eye, “I believe in you.”
And that’s what I want to say to you. You are capable and strong. You’re empowered and free. You have permission to co-partner with the divine to figure out how to grow and make your best judgment about everything, especially the way scripture will inform your theology. You can’t control the lens, but you can shapethe lens, and what better way to shape than with love? So, yes, bring love into the reading of the text. Watch how it influences your understanding.
Love with you in Joshua 6, as God commands Joshua to kill every man, woman, child, cow, sheep, and donkey. How do you think love wants you to interpret such a command?
Love with you in John 8, when the religious leaders, preaching holiness, rules, and consequences, drag the woman caught in adultery to Jesus. What is love asking you when Jesus says, “Let him without sin throw the first stone?”
Love with you throughout the Book of Revelation, as you read about a quasi-religious imperialistic government marking people in a particular way. Is love saying anything about the way quasi-christian, neo-imperialism has marked you?
Years of reading and studying, thinking and praying, talking with lay people and scholars, writing books and getting degrees have led me to believe the following: One can utilize the bible to get to messages about love, or one can utilize love to get to messages in the bible. I choose the latter.
Whoever has an ear to hear, let them hear.
My Context
Speaking of contexts, mine has been indelibly marked by two theological concepts in the midst of my lived experience. Each of these has played and continues to play a significant role in the shaping and influencing of my story.
1-Open and Relational Theology
Open and relational theology, a phrase coined by Thomas Jay Oord, (c4ort.org), rallies around two ideas:
That God experiences time moment by moment, the result of which is an undetermined future (i.e., open). The future has not yet happened; therefore, it follows that the future is unknowable. It would only be knowable if it were set in stone, fixed, or complete. An open view rejects the notion of a God with exhaustive divine foreknowledge of all future events. Fixed outcomes make little sense if God is love.
That God is deeply interconnected with creation (i.e., relational). The fundamental building block of all creation, from the micro to the macro, is not independent and substance-based; rather, it is interdependent and relationship-based. This is true of the cosmos and, again, of God. Therefore, a relational view rejects the notion of a God that’s separate, unable to suffer, and impervious to change. Whatever God is, S(H)e is dynamic, interactive, experiential, and intimately related to all creation moment by moment. Separateness makes little sense if God is love.
2-Mimetic Theory
Since this is a “micro” approach, I hope you'll recognize that laying René Girard’s mimetic theory out in the following way is merely a starting point. I sometimes reference the theory as a five-fold movement that plays out against the backdrop of two ideas. Here are the two ideas:
That everyone and everything is interconnected.
What all humans share, at some level, is the common denominator of existential anxiety.
Here’s the five-fold movement:
Desire births in the awareness of the other.
This desire leads to imitation of the other (and imitation leads to desire).
In this environment, rivalry and conflict are generated, along with the remedy of such rivalry and conflict: scapegoating.
Scapegoating is an “offloading” of one’s problems onto the back of the other, which justifies the elimination of the other (i.e., pushed into a volcano, lynched on a tree, excommunicated, hung on a cross, etc.). It can bring peace, though, of course, it’s a peace that never lasts. When conflict reemerges, the community finds new people to scapegoat.
Religion grows out of the way the scapegoating mechanism is repeated and ritualized. Religion, then, for Girard, is what humanity uses to “process” our violence. And culture itself grows out of this ritualization.
In reverse summary, culture is formed by religion, religion by sacrifice, and sacrifice by rivalrous envy, all shaped by the inability to be at peace with our own existential anxiety.
3- My Lived Experience
Finally, I'd like to share some "inciting incidents” that have impacted my lived experience. Inciting incident is a literary phrase. It’s a way to characterize how tension provides “traction” in a story, propelling it forward toward resolution. Three inciting incidents that have shaped my story:
First, I kept meeting people who were not only different from me; they were different from what the church system normally produced. Of course, any system that wishes to exist must produce and reproduce people who fit well within their system. This isn't all that surprising or concerning. What's concerning is how the church system tends to do this in the name of God. Therefore, if a church system isn't careful, or refuses to listen to outside voices, or lacks awareness of the powerless, it will send the message that Godly people tend to vote the same, express themselves sexually in similar ways, occupy the same social-economic standing, and generally believe all the same kinds of things.
But I kept meeting real, live human beings that didn't fit the mold. Even more, I discovered that many of these outside-the-mold people were genuine, intelligent, and really thoughtful. Each interaction made it increasingly clear that what we held in common was greater than what we didn't. People would leave my office, and in so many words, I would think, “Oh, gosh, I think that person who doesn’t fit my system is more put together than most of the people I know who do fit the system!” Meanwhile, irrespective of differences, what I intuited time and time again was that unconditional and uncontrolling love was for these people just as much as it was for me.
A second category of inciting incident had to do with the inconsistencies I kept encountering within the sacred text. After a while, I could no longer live in denial about the following four ways these inconsistencies played out:
Sometimes, these issues were something like a science problem. (Wait, archeologists haven’t found evidence to support all the details of Israel’s journey into the Promised Land? Wait, evolution doesn’t rule out the possibility of love and, therefore, the possibility of the divine? God and evolution can co-exist?)
Sometimes, the issues were anachronistic in that they had to do with how events were presented one way, only to be presented another way in a later passage. (Wait, so in Chronicles, it’s Satan that tempts David, but when the same story is told in Samuel, it’s Yahweh? Hold on, in Mark’s account of the resurrection, it was a young man in white appearing to three women, but in Matthew’s account, it was an angel appearing to only one woman?)
Some of my issues had to do with the difficulty of translation itself. I began recognizing that even within my lifetime, the meaning of certain words had changed or were changing. As I considered translating texts over 2,500 years, in some cases from languages that were no longer even used, and I considered changing customs, traditions, and cultural shifts, I knew it was no longer reasonable to expect any modern-day bible to be 100% error-free. (Wait, metanoia means change your way of thinking rather than repent? El Shaddai means “I am the breasted God” and not The Almighty?)
And finally, some of my problems had to do with the reality of incompatible messaging. (Wait, in the very same passage that people were told to stone gay people, they were also told to love their neighbor. How does that work? What do you do if your neighbor is gay? How do you stay biblical and love your neighbor but stay biblical and stone your neighbor?)
Some inconsistencies were more acute than others, but the point is, all of these and many, many others served to catalyze questions.
The well-intentioned bible-loving christian will often respond to these realities in the only way they know how, which is to flatly quote 2Timothy 3:16 and assert that "All scripture is inspired." But, even if we ignored the circular logic employed by using the text to say that the text is inspired, you should still be aware that at the time Timothy was reading that line, the only existing scriptures were the first five books of the Old Testament and writing from the prophets.
The entirety of what the Protestant-West now calls the bible, wasn't ratified for another 300+ years. During that time, the fight over which books would and would not be thought of as “inspired” was intense, full of disagreement, banishments, and excommunications. And since that time? Good grief, look at history. Debates about how to think of scripture have launched a thousand book burnings, excommunications, and wars.
Whatever else is going on with “inspired scripture,” the text itself doesn’t need to be thought of as infallible, inerrant, or without error. Such thinking only opens the door to all the previously mentioned insanity.
There are healthier moves to make with the concept of "inspired." Here are three:
It's inspired to help the reader see the stupidity of trying to establish power by way of words, particularly when the words talk so much about love.
It's inspired to help the reader see that using certain passages about grace to decode other passages about violence is an intelligent move.
It's inspired to help the reader be introduced to an inspired messiah.
My third category of inciting incident can be summed up with one word: loss. There are too many to list here, and I write about grief more in my book indigo: the color of grief, but sicknesses, fires, the loss of denominational estimation (in official and unofficial ways), tragedies, car wrecks, and the deaths of multiple family members—sometimes under violent and absurd situations—all impacted the way I engaged with theology and scripture. Loss changed me in many ways, not least in that it put me in a position of being out of power.
Being out of power not only destabilized the way I related to God and the way I read scripture, it also altered the way I related to others who had experience with loss. I don’t mean to suggest that a straight, white, American, relatively affluent and educated, christian male—someone who obviously checks all the power boxes—can completely relate to the Native American, the trafficked, the queer, the families forever changed by slavery, the women, the divorced, the migrant, the abused, or any number of other individuals and people groups who have suffered. I’m uninterested in appropriating their pain; however, if my loss has done anything for me, it’s helped me see how grief, death, powerlessness, and being marginalized, in general, can inform one’s theology in a powerful way.
Now You Know
So, now you know a bit about what I’ve been through. It's important, particularly as I'm trying to help you begin to work through theological issues, that I'm honest about what I've been through and how it motivated me in my theological studies. All of this (and more) has contributed to why I've shaped the lens through which I interpret life, as best I can, into a lens of love.
I've tried other approaches, but none have provided much life, at least not for long. Take your pick of the other approaches: a doubling down on holiness living, zeal for the law, deference to denomination, confession of creeds, submitting to ecclesiastic hierarchy, bible memorization, church attendance, giving large percentages of my income away, going on missions trips, not to mention rooting out all immorality by going through long seasons of “taking every thought captive.” (Ha, that last one can sure take some time.) None of that has really helped me all that much, and much of it left me feeling a bit helpless. The thing that has brought hope, really, genuinely, is love.
If you're uninterested in love, fair enough. In such an instance, the micro-theology series, influenced as it is by open and relational thinking, probably isn't for you. However, if you're sensing an invitation to cultivate a new approach—one that's creative, open-ended, and inclusive, which both requires and increases intellectual honesty, then maybe this will be the start of something new for you. I hope so.
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Yes! You take the time to briefly define your concepts. I’m looking forward to reading this series! I would have devoured this series in my college years as I began to grapple with the various texts that caused me pause.
Really well constructed and articulated! Looking forward to reading the series.