It is common for a reader of yours to come way from your writing and wonder what you believe. Most of us detect a provocative ambiguity. What is your strategy? Why not tell people what you believe?
- When you say people read my books and don’t know what I believe, it’s relevant to this issue of heretic.
- When I read a book by Anne Lamont or music by Sheryl Crow, I’m not asking what they believe, I’m asking what they have to say to me.
- There is a peculiar problem in a lot of religious readers where they don’t care what people say, but fixate on whether they are right.
- They go into reading with the assumption that they are right and go into reading with a checklist to see if they are right.
- When you are in the presence of those types of people it’s like being in an inquisition.
- Those who live by the sword die by the sword…
- Some people spend all of their looking for what they believe about this, this or this.
- There is some dimension of provocative ambiguity.
- Soren Kierkegaard “its very hard to use indirect communication when you are communicating to someone held in the grip of an illusion.”
- You have to use indirection.
- Flannery O’Connor “you have to use large and strange caricatures for people who can’t see well.
- I’m not trying to pass someone’s test, I’m trying to help them think.
In Generous Orthodoxy charted a course you wanted to embrace, the breadth of orthodoxy. You said the faith we’ve known needs to be put behind us to embrace something new. How do you square what you are rejecting in A New Kind of Christianity with what you said in Generous Orthodoxy?
- I would never ever, ever say that the faith of the historic church should be put behind us.
- The faith of the historic church is exactly what we should keep.
- Faith is dependence on God and an openness to the Spirit.
- There are dimensions to our faith that we need to look at and identify the problems.
- The Greco Roman narrative deserves a second look.
- The essence of that narrative gives the idea that we are the insiders, they are the outsiders.
- That dualism of “us vs them” to the world may be avoidable but it has historically resulted in oppression, and violence… things opposed to the ways of Jesus Christ.
- Everyone sees it but us.
- That narrative is the ungenerous thing that’s been wrapped up with orthodoxy.
- We need find a faith apart from that narrative.
- In the Christian tradition you either can read the Christian tradition and find the one rhyme you think is legitimate; or you can look at Christian tradition and see the whole range of seeing things differently and that range gives us freedom.
- I’m not interested in condemning people, but some of us need to explore other alternatives.
- It was a mistake to fit the Good News of Jesus Christ within the categories of Greek philosophy and Roman society.
- When people do inquisitions the irony is they want to know your opinion on hell, atonement, etc but no one talks about racism.
- The people on the right were on the wrong side of social issues.
In the Last Word and the Word After That, you seem to be coming out as a universalist, that in the end all will be saved. Is this true?
- It would be simpler for me to say that I’m universalist, but I’m not.
- I’m not an exclusivist either.
- I’m so far off the path of being a universalist or exclusivist.
- I don’t think the primary question being asked by the Bible is the question of “who is going to heaven and who is going to hell?”
- The real question being asked is how can we bring Heaven to earth?
- How can we participate with God to bring restoration to the world?
- We are judged by our works.
- The mercy and judgment of God comes to all.
- Does everybody learn to see the image of God in other human beings or do they continue to divide the world by “us” and “them”?
- For so many people the word salvation has multiple definitions.
- Salvation means liberation.
