My guest on the podcast today is Bob Edwards, MSW. Bob holds degrees in Religious Education, Social Development Studies and Social Work. Bob has been a Social Worker since 1996, providing psychotherapy, and he was the Director of Counseling Studies at a multi-denominational Bible College, teaching courses in Psychology, Sociology and Counseling. Bob and his wife, Helga Edwards, MSW, have a ministry together called Awake Deborah, in which they use their gifts and training to help people experience freedom and wholeness in their lives and relationships. Helga Edwards has many helpful teachings posted on her YouTube channel, and they had a podcast together at awakedeborah.podbean.com
Bob is another friend I’ve made in my fifteen years long online search for beautiful examples of Christianity. I asked Bob to explain social conditioning for the podcast because it was revolutionary for me to learn from him how this process had contributed to my own patriarchal worldview, and has been impactful in my healing from that. I’m so excited to share this episode with you all today and hope you find it enlightening and beautiful.
Here is the YouTube video I referenced in our conversation: The Origins of Male Authority in the Church, in which Bob describes the process of social conditioning at greater length, and draws historical examples of theologians interpreting the Bible through patriarchal cognitive lenses.
Other works I’d like to recommend from Bob and Helga Edwards:
I read Bob’s excellent book, A God I’d Like to Meet:Separating the Love of God from Harmful Traditional Beliefs, in 2014, and reviewed it here. Edwards’ book explains how Christian theologians, specifically Calvinists, have been influenced by ancient Greek philosophy, which has warped the way they view God. You probably could not find a Christian who would disagree with the statement that “God is love” (1 John 4:8), but how many Christians live as though they are a bug under the thumb of God? This is a really helpful book especially for those who have experienced spiritual trauma or abuse and are looking to heal their image of God.
I also really enjoyed reading Bob’s work of historical fantasy, Keeper of Relics which imagined a harshly matriarchal ancient world in which a young woman challenged oppressive tradition.
Bob and Helga together wrote The Equality Workbook: Freedom in Christ from the Oppression of Patriarchy to help readers identify and remove patriarchal bias from Bible translations. They demonstrate that patriarchy is a human tradition rooted in prejudice and they help women recover from the harmful effects of patriarchy.
Bob is currently working on a series called God Decolonized, exploring historical examples of people in power using the Bible to justify oppression and exploitation. I’m currently reading Issue 3, in which he threads the link from Puritan theocracy to Christian nationalism today. Some of the Puritan quotes are distressingly hateful!
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TRANSCRIPT:
Ruth Perry (00:16) Today’s conversation is one that feels deeply personal to me because we’re talking about something most of us don’t even realize is happening inside us, socialization, and more specifically gender socialization and how it shapes the way we see the world, the church, and even scripture itself. My guest is Bob Edwards, a social worker and psychotherapist with degrees in Religious Education, Social Development Studies, and Social Work.
Bob has been practicing since 1996, and formerly served as Director of Counseling Studies at a multi-denominational Bible college where he taught psychology, sociology, and counseling. And he and his wife, Helga Edwards, also a social worker, lead a ministry called Awake Deborah, where they help people experience freedom and wholeness in their lives and relationships.
In this episode, Bob helps us understand how the norms of our culture get inside us, how they become automatic, invisible lenses through which we interpret everything. We talk about how patriarchal socialization can shape the way we read the Bible, the split-second judgments our brains make before even aware of them, and the real spiritual and emotional cost when people, especially women, are told their God-given gifts don’t belong.
I’m grateful especially that Bob was willing to have this conversation as he is dealing with long COVID since 2021. We kept our conversation brief to accommodate his health limitations. But if you want to learn more about this topic, there is a link to an older and much longer teaching from Bob on this topic in the show notes and on my blog, thebeautifulkingdombuilders.com. This is a conversation about unlearning, about healing, and about removing some of the stones that have stood in the way of people fully walking toward Jesus.
Ruth Perry (02:12) Thank you so much for being on the podcast today, Bob. Let’s just dive right in. My first question for you is what is socialization generally and gender socialization specifically?
Bob Edwards (02:15) Okay, well, socialization is really the process by which groups convey their norms to its members. You know, there’s lots of examples we could think of, everyday examples. One would be table manners, you know. When I was growing up, in our household we learned that when you cut your food you held your fork in your left hand.
But then you had to switch to the right hand before you ate the food. Apparently that was in etiquette books from the 1920s and the 1950s. yeah, Another everyday example of socialization is just like rules of the road. North America, you drive on the right. And Great Britain, drive on the left.
And maybe there was a reason for it at one point, but it’s just a custom and gender socialization relates to how different, you know, each gender functions in a social group, what the norms are, norms and customs for that gender.
Ruth Perry (03:20) How does that socialization process happen?
Bob Edwards (03:23) Yeah, well there’s essentially three processes that happen. One is overt instruction. So like I mentioned the etiquette books, you’ll be instructed how to function in a society. The other is role modeling, where people just act as if certain things are true, certain things are a given.
And the third process is really called reinforcement. So if you do what the group expects of you, there’s different ways you can be rewarded. And if you don’t do what the group expects of you, there’s different ways you can be punished is probably the best way to say it. You know, if I would eat with the wrong hand, for example, one of the adults at the table would give me the look, you know. And the look is a form of reinforcement. And if you drive on the wrong side of the road, you’re likely to get immediate feedback from your environment of a variety of kinds, from natural consequences to law enforcement. So, yeah, those are essentially the three processes that help us be socialized into a group’s set of norms.
Ruth Perry (04:28) So your group will socialize you and then how does that become internalized?
Bob Edwards (04:32) Yeah, that’s a good question. So at some point, these external messages, we take ownership of them ourselves. And really, you can tell when that has happened by how you feel when you see somebody eating with the wrong hand. If it’s like I see a person taking a bite and the fork is still in their left hand and it feels wrong to me, then I know that I’ve internalized that. What used to be an external message is now something that’s coming from within.
Ruth Perry (05:01) How does this create a cognitive lens which affects our automatic perception?
Bob Edwards (05:05) Yeah, so it’s interesting. Psychologists refer to it as automatic appraisal. So it’s like, again, the example of the fork in the wrong hand. My experience will be that I just see that as wrong. You know, I just I’m watching it and it’s wrong. And it feels to me that the wrongness is coming from outside. But in reality, the sense of wrongness is coming from inside. It’s coming from the norms that I’ve internalized through the socialization process. And so in a way it affects how we’re interpreting the world around us constantly. You know, it’s just like a mental lens is another way of saying it that interprets everything that we see. And we think we’re just seeing the world as it is, but in reality we’re seeing the world as we’ve been socialized to see it, if that makes sense.
Ruth Perry (05:55) It does well. So then how does that impact our view of the world around us more specifically?
Bob Edwards (06:00) Well that’s, yeah, so it’s interesting. You know, with this driving example, I was just watching a clip recently of, I’m like a motorsports enthusiast. My dad used to sponsor races and stock cars and things like that when I was growing up, so that’s always been a part of my life.
And I remember when I was quite young, was in the mid 70s, and we went to see a drag race because he sponsored a drag racer back then. And there was a big deal about one of the drivers named Shirley Maldowney. So don’t know if you’ve heard of her, but she won the Top Fuel Drag Racing Championship which is sort of the highest level of competition three times and drove this beautiful pink dragster and at the time I didn’t realize why that was such a big deal but she was the first woman that was allowed to compete like women were banned from the sport they weren’t legally licensed and she really broke through that and so she’s kind of a hero of mine for doing that. It’s interesting that whole subculture, that drag racing motorsport subculture, they would look at men and see drag racers, people who can drive well and they would just look at women and think, nope, that’s not for you. You can’t do that.
And it becomes a little bit more serious in other cultures, although in a similar way. For example, Saudi Arabia didn’t allow women to period, until I think it was 2018. And there’s a province in Afghanistan currently where women are banned legally from driving, can’t get licenses. you know, the reasoning given for that is that they’re taught religiously that women are incapable of learning the skill of driving a vehicle. And in Saudi Arabia, they thought it was mixing genders for women to drive in a way that would lead to moral corruption.
So, you know, and, unfortunately we have things like that in our culture as well. We have, you know, women can drive, thankfully, but there’s lots of things in some churches that women can’t do. And most of those things are related to teaching, preaching, and leadership. And people have these lenses. And I don’t think they understand that they have these lenses many times. And I don’t think they know where they came from either. But they just look at women and think, you know, things come to mind like servant, helper, right? We’ve heard that term help meet, which is sort of bad English translation of something in Genesis. That language in Hebrew and even later in Greek just isn’t there. It’s an English invention. And these things really impact men and women every day in the Church and in the world.
Sometimes people look at the Bible and they think they see this gender hierarchy. But if you look very carefully at the text, especially in its original languages and context, the hierarchy isn’t coming from the text. It’s coming from the person who’s reading it. It’s coming from their cognitive lenses. It’s coming from their gender socialization.
Ruth Perry (09:18) I relate to all of that because I was raised in a patriarchal culture. I’m assuming that most people are. And so for the first 30 years of my life, I read the Bible through a patriarchal lens. And it just made sense. It made so much sense that that was how the world worked and that that’s what God meant. And so, yeah, I can totally get how that happens.
You’ve talked about these automatic responses with our cognitive lens, how quickly it happens. Can you explain how quickly we draw these conclusions?
Bob Edwards (09:49) Sure, yeah, for us it feels instant. So we don’t recognize that the meaning is coming from our lenses at all. We think we’re just seeing the world as it is. But we’re really not. We’re seeing the world as we’ve been socialized to see the world.
And I remember I was reading one neuropsychology text many years ago and the time was measured in millionths of seconds. So actually I think it was a fraction of a millionth of a second that our brain assigns those meanings. In fact it’s called stimulus coding. And one of the reasons we don’t realize it’s coming from inside is because it happens so quickly.
But also because it’s subconscious. We don’t do it on purpose. Our brains do it automatically, subconsciously, and almost instantly. So, it’s tricky.
Ruth Perry (10:39) So that an example of that then would be seeing a woman behind the pulpit and just immediately saying no.
Bob Edwards (10:45) Yeah, I’ve seen that, unfortunately, where I was at a Bible college teaching for many years. And there was an occasion at a chapel where a woman was speaking and teaching and preaching and to men and women. And one of the male students from a denomination that is very patriarchal just stood up and walked out and you know spoke to him afterwards and that was his reaction to seeing a woman teaching men. And that was very eye opening to me. And of course then there are so many other denominations represented who didn’t have that reaction because that wasn’t part of their training, it wasn’t part of their socialization.
Yeah, and when I was teaching there, you know, I saw and heard a lot of things that really broke my heart, to be honest with you. Women who felt called to express their spiritual gifts, which come from God, right? Like our spiritual gifts come from God, they don’t depend on anything from us. At least of all our gender, you know, that’s not where the power of God, the love of God, the grace of God comes from. We’re just the vessel, We’re clay vessels and all that grace and love and spiritual power comes from God. yeah, women were being told by some of their male classmates that their call to ministry must come from the devil.
That was one of the worst things I think I heard. And they got reinforcement, like negative reinforcement sometimes from their peer group anytime they would try to express their gifts. And I remember praying about that because it was so disturbing to me. And you know, God, what do we do with this?
And I had this really powerful vision while I was praying. It was so vivid, know, it kind of like I was dreaming, but I was awake. And I saw Jesus with his arms open, inviting all these women to come to him, you know, and on the path to Jesus were all these sharp stones and the women were cutting their feet on these sharp stones and some were still limping towards him. Sorry.
But others left the path altogether and were just sitting down bleeding in tears. And so in that experience I just ask God, what can I do?
I haven’t thought about this in a while, sorry. It’s like when I think about it I relive it.
He just said, Bob, you can remove some of the stones. Just start picking up stones. Right? And so, you know, I said, okay, yeah, I will do my best. I don’t do it perfectly. But God helping me, that’s what I feel like He’s asked me to do, you know, is to remove the stones. So, know, Helga and I have done that together. That’s my wife and I try to do that, again by example and through teaching, you know, and through encouragement. yeah, I felt like God really met me there, gave me some direction.
Ruth Perry (13:53) What a powerful vision and what a powerful calling. That was a calling from God and you’ve certainly been fulfilling it. And you’ve moved some stones for me, Bob, that I’m really grateful for because it’s quite the process trying to unlearn that conditioning. And I didn’t realize just how powerful my background was in my life until I encountered
Bob Edwards (14:05) Thank God. Yeah, for sure.
Ruth Perry (14:16) your work about conditioning and I’m really grateful. I’m going to share a YouTube video in the show notes where you talk about this in length and you go into different theologians who and translating scripture through a patriarchal cognitive lens. And that’s just really important for us to know how does awareness of our socialization and our cognitive lenses weaken or strength and our faith, do you think Bob?
Bob Edwards (14:40) Well, So I do want to touch on one of those theologians, you know, because it’s been so prolific in his writing and his influences, Saint Augustine. And he’s very open in Confessions, he writes something called Confessions, about the influence of Neoplatonism on his theology. And he had a mentor named Ambrose who introduced him to this.
So he had a role model that embraced it and then he had instruction, you know, and he got all kinds of positive reinforcement for choosing this path. And he says that he made sense of the Bible and God through the lens of this ancient Greek philosophy. And unfortunately, that particular ancient Greek philosophy is extremely patriarchal.
And just to give you, for instance, when he read Genesis, where Adam says of Eve, this is bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh, you know, meaning, at last somebody like me, right? Somebody comparable to me. Augustine didn’t see it that way. And he writes about this in one of his letters and says, so here we see woman stands for flesh.
Therefore the man must stand for the spirit. Therefore, just as the flesh must be subordinate to the spirit, women must be subordinate to men.” So that’s what he saw when he read that passage. But that’s not what the passage says. That’s not what’s there. But he evidently didn’t recognize his lens, which is so often the case.
And so you ask like, can it does this strengthen or weaken our faith when we explore these things? And I mean, for me, it was a tremendous encouragement to my faith because some like our culture is is fallen. Like humanity has fallen into sin and it is our cultures are are filled with injustices and biases and prejudice and fear and a felt need for control. And we can project that onto the Bible, start calling things like that God’s will. Sometimes we’re even seeing that today, even at a national level, things we’ve seen in the church and been speaking out against, now seeing in government.
But when we do this kind of work, right, with humility and prayer and study, we can begin to peel away these layers of bias, prejudice and injustice that are those sharp stones that stand between us and God. So I do believe it can strengthen our faith and I think it’s God’s work.
Ruth Perry (17:03) Amen. Thank you so much for being faithful to that calling, you and your wife.
Bob Edwards (17:07) I’m so thankful
I could be and I’m glad I could do this today. Thanks so much for having me.
Ruth Perry (17:13) God bless.
Bob Edwards (17:14) God bless you too.
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My guest this week is my former Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary professor, Dr. Roy Ciampa, whose transformative class, Ephesians in Depth, has stayed with me over the years as my faith has grown and changed. In this conversation, we discuss the theological implications of Paul’s writings, the cultural context of the Greco-Roman world, and the significance of mutual submission in relationships. Dr. Ciampa shares insights from his academic background and teaching experiences, emphasizing the importance of understanding scripture in its historical context. The dialogue highlights the beauty of God’s love and grace, encouraging listeners to reflect on their own faith journeys and the role of women in ministry.
I think my favorite thing Dr. Ciampa said to me, was that Ephesians was “written in the key of worship.”
Dr. Ciampa mentions a document he compiled to help students understand first century Greco-Roman views of women and marriage, beginning with Old Testament and Classical Greek texts up through the time of the New Testament, so that NT texts might be better understood in light of the developing contexts. You can read that insightful document here. And find more of Dr. Ciampa’s scholarly writings on his website, viceregency.com.
You can watch our conversation on YouTube, or stream it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and more–find all those links on Podlink! Please like, subscribe, rate and share with a friend if you found this interview helpful!
Transcript:
Ruth Perry (00:16) This is a new thing for me and I appreciate you being one of my very first guests, Dr. Ciampa.
Roy Ciampa (00:22) Well, I’m honored to be invited and hope this will be helpful to people.
Ruth Perry (00:26) What I’m hoping to share on my podcast for my first season is I’m going to go back and have conversations with people who helped me as my faith has shifted and changed over the last 20 years. Because my background is very conservative, complementarian, traditional, But it’s changed a lot over the years through crises of faith and through cognitive dissonance that’s happened and different things that have gone on. And I’m just really grateful that my faith has remained strong because I’ve encountered people like you who’ve helped me to reimagine my faith and think about things differently.
Roy Ciampa (01:04) That’s nice to hear.
Ruth Perry (01:04) And so at the time that I had you as a professor, I was a complementarian student, pretty committed to that perspective. And I was an educational ministries student at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. And I think that I took Ephesians as one of my core theology classes. And it’s the only class that I encountered you as a professor. But looking back on my seminary experience, I really loved that class so much and the book of Ephesians has just remained my favorite book of the Bible.
And I’m really grateful that I had that experience because I didn’t have to learn Greek or Hebrew in seminary as an education student. And this was the only class where we really went through word by word and you taught how to parse Paul’s Greek into English and how to make sense of his run on sentences and you taught the importance of understanding the context of the passage. And I just learned so much from you. And so I’m really excited to talk about that with you today. But I thought before we get into that, I would like to know more about you. I don’t really know what your faith formation was like, your background, where you’re coming from. If you’d like to just go back and tell us a little bit about your own spiritual journey.
Roy Ciampa (02:15) Sure, I’d be happy to. I grew up in an nominal Christian family. We went to church about once a year because my grandmother wanted us to. I was confirmed in a Congregational church when I was, I suppose, a young teenager. But it didn’t really mean much. I never really understood anything about the Bible.
I came to faith when I was in my first year of college, I owe it, a large part of it, I owe, I think, to next door neighbors who moved in when I was in middle school. Wonderful, dedicated Christians, the Monk family, and they had two sons, one a year older than me and one a year younger, Robert and Stuart. And the whole family just modeled for me, a wonderful Christian faith and love. And so they took me to evangelistic events.
But I didn’t think that I thought I was a Christian. I remember sitting during one, in a roller skating rink while somebody was speaking and we had our heads down and I’m saying that this isn’t for me. I’m already Christian. They’re not talking about me. I’m a Christian. Anyway, it was my first year of college. Some guys shared the gospel with me and I realized that this was the message that had transformed their lives and their family and I realized it was true and I was in need of it and so I trusted in the Lord and I was baptized, came to faith, I was discipled.
But I was in a very conservative context. I was listening to the guys that discipled me had me listening to some fundamentalist preachers. John R. Rice wrote a book I Am a Fundamentalist and after a year I felt like God was calling me into ministry and I went to Jerry Falwell’s school at the time was called Liberty Baptist College for a year. And then after a year there I transferred to Gordon College where I did my undergraduate degree.
By the time I graduated from Gordon College, well certainly I was no longer a fundamentalist, was I would say mainstream evangelical and probably still conservative on women’s issues but very open to other ways of understanding that issue.
I don’t really remember at what point, if it was near the end of my college experience or beginning of my seminary experience, I went to Denver Seminary, had some great mentors there. And I know while I was at Denver Seminary, I became a convinced egalitarian.
And that came out of various kinds of experiences. Part of it was coming to have a much better understanding of the world in which the New Testament was written, and especially Paul, in the context of his letters and the things that he says about women, among other things. And part of it was just understanding more broadly what theology would say about how I should relate to my own wife and other women as well.
But maybe we’ll get around to that later. After seminary, my wife and I were appointed to go overseas and we had two kids by then and we took our kids and we went to Portugal where I trained pastors. And overall, our time in Portugal span about 12 years, and in the middle of that, I spent a couple of years in Scotland doing my PhD.
I had wonderful time training pastors and Christian leaders in Portugal, worked with the Bible Society there to help with their contemporary Portuguese translation of the Bible. And then I was invited to go teach at Gordon-Conwell in 2001. So I taught the New Testament studies at Gordon-Conwell from 2001 to 2014. At a certain point became the Chair of the Division of Biblical Studies there.
And then after or 13 years there, I went and worked for four years for American Bible Society, training Bible translators and Bible translation consultants around the world. I still taught for Gordon Conwell on weekends while I was doing that, but my main gig was training Bible translators and Bible translation consultants. So that was a great experience, but I missed the full-time academic community.
So in 2018 I accepted the invitation to take on the role of Chair of the Religion Department which soon became the Department of Biblical and Religious Studies at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. But.
In 2024, I retired and moved back to New Hampshire, which is where my wife and I had had a place for a while, and it’s our happy place. And so I’m now a professor emeritus at Stanford University, and I teach a course a semester for Gordon Conwell. I’m teaching Interpreting the New Testament for Gordon Conwell on Thursdays right now. So I mean, that’s that’s more than you wanted, probably, but that’s kind of the overview.
Ruth Perry (06:38) No, that’s great. Congratulations on retiring and then continuing your work.
Roy Ciampa (06:44) Thank you. Well, there’s lots of what I’ve done that I love. I’m still writing books and articles and teaching one day a week scratches that itch. so it’s fun.
Ruth Perry (06:53) I’m a Gordon College graduate myself. I was a music major there and the reason why I decided to study music was because I loved the church and I wanted to be in ministry and that’s where I saw women serving in the church. So I studied music and then I decided to go to Gordon Conwell in 2003 when I graduated from Gordon College because I still loved learning so much and I wanted to continue learning and in my conception of my ministry life, I always conceived myself as just being in volunteer ministry in the church. And that I would be a pastor’s wife, likely, or a missionary’s wife. I really wanted to live overseas. I went backpacking through Europe while I was in college, and Portugal was my favorite. I loved Portugal.
Roy Ciampa (07:41) It’s a great country.
Ruth Perry (07:41) And so I would have liked to have been a missionary or a musician, but those were really the only two ideas that I had in my brain that a woman could do in the church. I knew that I loved the church more than anything and I really wanted to serve the church. So that’s what brought me to Gordon-Conwell and brought me to your classroom. And it sounds like it was early on in your teaching there.
Roy Ciampa (08:00) Yeah, it was early on at Gordon-Conwell. I taught for a number of years in Portugal, but that was in my early years at Gordon-Conwell, yes. And I remember that course called Ephesians in Depth, as I recall.
Ruth Perry (08:09) It was in depth for sure. Yes. I remember we went word by word and we would, I can’t even remember how to explain what you did with us in the class. I was trying to find my class notes because I know that they’re in my basement somewhere. But I remember we parsed every sentence and figured out what the structure was. And you really brought it.
Roy Ciampa (08:29) Ha
Ruth Perry (08:37) It was hard work and it brought the book to life for me.
Roy Ciampa (08:41) That’s so kind of you to say. I’m grateful to hear that.
Ruth Perry (08:43) And it’s such a beautiful book. Ephesians, it just, the words that come to mind when I think about Ephesians is, Paul keeps talking about peace and love and unity and the power of the Holy Spirit and all the blessings that we’ve received from God. And it’s just such a beautiful theological grounding of then why we should follow Christ and live in a way worthy of the calling we’ve received.
And so I don’t know how much you want to talk about Ephesians itself before we get to the household codes in Ephesians 5. But what I really want to talk with you too for my Beautiful Kingdom Builders audience is the context of the book of Ephesians and what was going on in the cultural world at that time that would have helped the people who are hearing Paul’s message in that day understand it maybe differently than we understand it today.
Roy Ciampa (09:35) Well, yeah, there’s a lot to talk about. So many different aspects of it. And I think one of the things, actually in our church, we’re in a small group right now that’s going through Ephesians. And so it’s been kind of fun to do that in a church Bible study again. But one of the things I think that’s key to Ephesians, you just have this joyful, kind of, I would say worshipful kind of tone to the whole thing.
Many people have pointed out that the letter has a different style than most of Paul’s letters. It has these kind of run-on sentences and these kind of complicated sentences. There’s lots of what we call pleonasms where you could say something simply, but in a pleonasm you could put up two or three different ways of saying it within the same sentence. So over and over again Paul will say we have kind of this blessing of redemption, the forgiveness of our sins. And it’s like, well, those are two different ways of talking about the same thing, or he’ll talk about within one line, he does this a couple of times in the opening part of Ephesians, that everything’s happened according to God’s purpose and his will and his choice. It’s like, well, those are just three different ways of saying God did what he wanted to do.
And I’m reminded that, We find examples of this in various contexts. We find it in poetry and we find it in worship music. An example I typically use is the song Majesty, Worship His Majesty. And if you go through that song over and over again, it finds different ways to say the same thing in new words. Kingdom authority, majesty, kingdom authority, so exalt, lift up on high. Those are two different things, they’re not. Exalt, lift up on high, the name of Jesus. Magnify, come glorify. What’s the difference between magnifying, it’s all the same thing.
Singing this is just a worshipful, excited, rich, different way of expressing yourself. And Paul begins the letter with what’s called a Jewish Baruchah, which in Hebrew would be blessed, be like Baruch HaTah, Adonai Eloheinu, blessed as the Lord our God. he starts out, blessed is the…
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every blessing in Christ. And so I think the style is different and I think it’s different for a purpose because Paul’s wanting to express his theology in a very worshipful almost liturgical kind of way.
And it’s remarkable that he’s doing that while he’s under arrest. He says he’s in chains, which reminds us of Acts of course, when they’re imprisoned in Philippi and they end up singing songs and praising God in prison. And here Paul is, he’s in prison and he writes a letter and he writes it in the key of worship. And partly that’s because just who Paul is and partly because he’s writing to readers who are Gentiles, who are so far away from where Christianity began in Jerusalem and Judea. And they’ve got to be thinking as Gentiles, like their spiritual leader is now in prison and could lose his life.
What does this mean? Have they gotten themselves messed up with something they shouldn’t have? Has a train gone off the rails and they’ve got to be concerned about Paul. They’ve got to be concerned about what all this means. And here’s Paul, he writes from prison, he’s like, God’s plan is working itself out in this wonderful way and it’s such a blessing to me to be a part of this. let’s praise God for all the blessings that we have. And let me just list off some of these blessings for you.
And it really is, I think, meant to reassure the readers that… the train hasn’t gone off the rails, that God is in charge, that everything that they’ve experienced is part of God’s plan of redemption and of reconciling Jews and Gentiles together and to God, and that Paul is not at all, know, fretting or depressed or himself concerned that something’s gone wrong because he’s in prison, but he sees God’s hand in all of this. So I think that’s a, for me, that’s a very important part of the background.
And then you have to be careful because I’m tempted to try and lecture my way through a whole semester’s worth of stuff on Ephesians in one little conversation. But I do think, you know, that most people recognize that two halves of the letter have different tones and sometimes they describe the first half as doctrine and the second as practical teaching.
But an important key is that it’s not just that Paul decided to talk and discuss theology for a while and then look at his watch and said, well, that’s maybe enough theology for them. Maybe I should give them some practical stuff. And so let me talk practical stuff for a while. But the theology underwrites the practical part. That is, the theology, the first part is there to support everything he’s going to tell the church that they ought to be doing.
And the second part, they are organized organically related to each other. And the whole first part is about God’s grace, his mercy, his love, how he hasn’t treated us the way we deserve when we were, you know, children of wrath by nature. He hasn’t treated us that way, but he’s shown us love and mercy and grace and blessing upon blessing upon blessing. And then we get in the second half of the letter. And in my understanding, the second half of letter is primarily all about imitating God.
And so we get that theme early on how we should be imitators of God. We shouldn’t live like the Gentiles live. That’s one of the themes. But we should be imitators of God. And then he talks about how God has shown his love to us in Jesus Christ who gave himself for us and his love for us. And so we have sections that talk about how we should be one, united together as one body.
And then we have material talking about how we should and love and we should walk in the light and then later how we should walk in wisdom and then finally the last part is where we should put on the full armor of God and we look at those things they come what do these things have in common being one walking in love and light and wisdom well love and light are two main attributes of God God is love God is light
And then wisdom is another very well-known attribute of God, the all-wise one. And there’s large sections of scripture dedicated to wisdom and Proverbs 8 and elsewhere. And that’s understood to be an attribute of God. And then you think,
When we walk in love, we’re imitating God. When we walk in light, we’re imitating God. When we walk in wisdom, we’re imitating God and His wisdom. And then you realize that the full armor of God we’re supposed to put on is not just armor that God gives us, but the Old Testament background tells us this is the armor that God puts on. He puts on a helmet of salvation. He puts on a breastplate of righteousness. When he goes and he fights spiritual battles for his people. So even when we put on our spiritual armor, we’re still imitating God.
That earlier part about being one, it’s like, that’s right, God is one. So when we’re one, you there’s one God, one Lord, one baptism, and when we act as one, we’re also imitating God. So one of the greatest ways we imitate God then, when you understand the relationship between the first half of the letter and the second half, is by treating other people the way he’s treated us.
He hasn’t treated us as he could have, but he treated us with love, with mercy, with grace, over and over again. And this ends up becoming very important for, as you referred to, the household codes, because they’re a main theme is about how people in charge with authority treat people that in that culture were under them, wives were under their husbands and children under the parents and slaves under their masters. And so one of the main themes that comes out there is, again, the emphasis tends to be on the person with power, treating the one with less power with grace and mercy and not being harsh with them. But I mean, that raises all kinds of other questions about why do we have household codes and what’s this about?
We’re talking about household codes, we’re talking about slaves and masters. And we don’t have slaves and masters in our household. We think of those as something outside the family. You get your family, and then you get your employees or other people. But of course, that was part of the family. But hey, I’ve been going on for a while now, Ruth, so maybe feel free.
Ruth Perry (18:02) No, you’re cooking. I’m enjoying it immensely. I was thinking about back to your class, I remember that before we got into the household codes, you started that passage in Ephesians 5.18, be filled with the Holy Spirit, singing songs and hymns and spiritual songs to each other, making music in your heart to the Lord and always giving thanks to God the Father for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and submitting to each other out of reverence for Christ. That all of those things were under that same heading of be filled with the Holy Spirit.
Roy Ciampa (18:42) Yes, it is. And being filled with the Holy Spirit is under the heading of walking in wisdom. So, because it’s one of the things is if you look for the term walking, which is often translated as live, like live in love or live according to light. The metaphor is walking in the light and walking in love and walking in children of light or walk wisely. And then the wisdom part underneath that is all the stuff about being filled with the spirit and submitting to one another.
And then so all that stuff about husbands and wives and parents and children and masters and slaves comes under the submitting to one another part, which comes under the being filled with the Holy Spirit part, which comes under the walking in wisdom part.
And it’s Paul providing his readers with wisdom about how to live in family in the first century Ephesian or, you know, Greco-Roman context. And of course, it’s important that context is radically different from ours.
Ruth Perry (19:44) Can you describe that context for us.
Roy Ciampa (19:47) Sure. Well, in a few different ways. Maybe one way to start is by, just as we were already kind of hinting at…
that when we talk about a household code, we do talk about husbands and wives and parents and children and masters and slaves because the household was very differently structured than we think of it today. That many households, they had slaves within the household and they’d have also freed men and free women in some cases in the household as well. And so we think of a household typically as, you know, parents and their children and nuclear family.
And sometimes we think of the extended family as well. Maybe there are grandparents around or something. But we don’t think of parents and children and slaves and freed men and women as part of a household. But that is a part of what a fairly well-to-do or a somewhat well-to-do household would have all those components. And then, you know, we realize
When people preach through Ephesians, when they get to the stuff about slaves and masters, they realize what we don’t approve of masters and slaves today. And so if they’re to preach on that, they kind of adapt it and say, well, this might apply to like employees and employers and that sort of thing. And so here we can get some wisdom for how we can relate to each other as employees and employers. And maybe there’s it’s OK. But it’s really important to point out that employees are not slaves and employers are not masters. And so you have to make adaptations.
You can’t just say all the employers shouldn’t treat the employees the way Paul thought, you know, masters should treat slaves. And we have to be reminded that Paul’s not endorsing slavery, but early Christians were living in a world where this is just part of the social fabric. They weren’t put in charge. They weren’t asked to take over the social fabric and restructure it. They had to learn how can they live as Christians within that social fabric and within these institutions. And so Paul provides wisdom for those who are in these situations.
But as I was saying, when we get to that stuff about masters and slaves, people say, we have to make adjustments. We can’t just apply that to employees and employers because that’s not the same thing. But when we preach about husbands and wives, people look around and say, I know husbands and wives, and many of us will say, well, I’m a husband or I’m a wife and I have a wife or a husband. And so they’re all around us. So when he starts talking about husbands and wives, we’re like, okay, we know what he’s talking about.
This is something very familiar to all of us, except that it isn’t because marriage has evolved in many ways. And so to go back and realize that in the Greco-Roman world, Men didn’t typically marry until they were 28 to 30 years old. And partly because there was no expectation with the double standard that’s typical in all of history, the double standard with regard to sex is that men weren’t expected to remain pure or virgins until marriage. They had access to prostitutes and household slaves and other sexual outlets and that wasn’t considered a problem by most people in the Greco-Roman world. Whereas women were expected to be married shortly after going through puberty.
When I was in class, I have like a 40 page document, you may or may not recall of this kind of material from the Old Testament and quotes from the Greco-Roman world and different sources where people are talking about husbands and wives and it talks about age at marriage and it talks about, you know, the understanding that it’s good if a woman or girl can know how to carry on a conversation and maybe do a little bit of sewing, a little bit of cooking, but that’s about it because she’s supposed to learn everything she learns from her husband that she’s supposed to be like a tabla rasa, she’s supposed to be like a blank slate on whom the husband can leave his impressions.
I was just reading, reviewing again because something came up on social media. I don’t remember what it was anymore, but it was about, that’s what it was, this woman’s book recently. A woman wrote a book on misogyny in America and the publisher accidentally put out an ad or an email inviting people to submit for exam copies. whoever prepared the text for that forgot to replace the name of the author from a previous book they must have worked on. And so they had the title of the book in the book cover, but the author’s name was a man who hadn’t written anything like this, who writes in very different subjects.
So here’s a book on misogyny in the church, and the publisher puts out something that attributes it to a man instead of the woman who wrote it, and reminded me of this ancient… thing about somebody who’s talking about some man’s wife who’s a man who’s great at poetry and he’s presented some poetry from his wife and he claims that his wife wrote this wonderful poetry and this person’s saying it’s great poetry but you know I’m not sure if his wife really wrote it but either way the husband deserves the credit because either he’s the one who really wrote it or He’s the one that taught her.
So whatever the woman produces, it’s always back to the man. Because again, she’s expected to have learned whatever she knows through her husband, a woman getting married right after puberty and a man not marrying until he’s 28 or 30 years old. There’s a huge difference, not only in age, but maturity, knowledge of the world and in the Greco-Roman world, the extent to which women were expected to be more or less confined to the home, whereas men could go anywhere and could have a greater education so their knowledge of the world is different. Their human development at marriage and then throughout marriage. You might say, 10 years later it’ll be different. Well, 10 years later they still, they would have already formed a kind of relationship where he’s practically like a parent.
The husband’s practically a parent or Ben Witherington describes it as almost an uncle-niece relationship between a husband and wife at that time. And that changes a lot. I mean, that helps you understand all kinds of things in the New Testament when people are talking about how husbands and wives should relate to each other. It’s a significant thing in terms of submission if the wife has always only been kind of tutored by her husband and taught by him and mentored by him.
You know, three stages of human development behind him, then it’s natural that the man’s going to be treated as though he’s more knowledgeable, wiser, more experienced, better able to provide any kind of leadership needed, and that that’s the role that he should have. Which brings us back to that whole thing about love and mercy.
One of things that I realized when I started looking through these texts and thinking about it more was if one of the main themes of the letter is that we should treat each other as Christ and God has treated us, if my wife is my peer, which is something that just was not normally ever the case in the Greco-Roman world, right? We were just talking about that. But my wife is more or less my age. She has the same experience of the world. She hasn’t been cooped up at home. She’s got college education. She has, a master’s degree. She’s wiser than I am on many things and just as intelligent as I am. If she’s my peer in every way, does Jesus, does God really want us to pretend as though I’m much wiser and more knowledgeable than she is and better able to lead in every situation than she is?
Because that was the traditional slot of a wife in first century Ephesus and the slot of a husband in first century Ephesus or should I actually treat her for who she really is? And to recognize her strengths and her knowledge and her wisdom and her abilities. And this relates to something I’ve sometimes referred to as the mapping of identities. That is, we look at women today and we map onto them the identity we find of a wife in the first century Ephesus. We look at a husband today and we map onto them the identity of a husband in first century Ephesus. And we do that in other ways as well. I have an whole article about ways in which this mapping of identities can create real problems.
But I don’t think I should ask my wife to try and fill a slot from a different culture and time, asks her to treat me and asks me to treat her as though we are so different, as though we are as different as the first century Greco-Roman husband and wife, when in fact we’re actually peers. And then I’d go back and realize that if this whole second part is about learning how to treat other people…as God has treated us, and I realize, well, even if you look at the household code, the instructions to husbands and wives aren’t exactly the same as the husbands to parents and children, and neither of those are the same as the instructions to slaves and masters. So Paul recognized that although we’re all supposed to be Christ-like and treat others in Christ-like ways, the nature of the relationship is going to impact what that looks like.
And so the first century Greco-Roman husband-wife relationship is different from the parent-child relationship is different from the slave-master relationship. So Paul provides different instructions. So then I begin to think and realize, well, then we can treat this as a case study.
We have at least three case studies and what it means to apply Christ-like, God-like love and mercy and grace to other people. And it’s one thing in the marriage, one thing with the children, another thing with masters and slaves. Maybe it would be something else if it was with a spouse who is my peer and who is as intelligent and wise and able to lead and do other things as I am, as my same age, same experience of the world, what would it then mean for me to treat her in a Christ-like way and for her to treat me in a Christ-like way and not try to fit them into some…
You know, I’m reminded we have a two and a half year old granddaughter, you know, those cubes you get that have the different shapes, there’s the triangle and there’s the square and the rectangle and the star and you have the blocks, you’re trying to fit them through the right shapes, you know, and I feel like lots of times they’re taking, you know, modern men and women who are very different shapes and we’re trying to fit them into the shapes of the first century husband and wife, male and female.
And those pieces just don’t fit. And the key question still comes back to, if I’m looking at the second half of Ephesians, I’m learning how to walk wisely in acting in Christ-like ways towards people around me.
And so there lots of different relationships. There’s the student athlete relationship. There’s the police officer citizen relationship. There’s the teacher student relationship. There’s the husband wife relationship. There’s the employee employee employee relationship. And all of these we learn how to treat each other in loving ways. But we don’t have to find some first century Greco-Roman slot to fit people into to make that relationship match the one we have.
Ruth Perry (31:02) I feel like the way my brain works is that I have a sieve inside my brain and when I go to class I learn the information and it all goes away. But for some reason I really latched on to all of that that you taught 20 years ago and then I went off and I got married the next year and it just fell completely into traditional rules because that’s what I grown up with and that’s what had been modeled to me and same for my husband. And so it was just natural to not even think about how we’re going to relate to each other. We just fell into the traditional rules that we had been taught through example and direct teaching. And almost immediately for me as the woman, I could recognize that my voice was diminished, my importance was diminished, and it created some cognitive dissonance for me. But I didn’t, I just tolerated it. I didn’t really rock the boat any.
And then we had another experience early on in our marriage. I’m thinking maybe three or four years after we got married, our church had a really terrible conflict and split. My dad was a pastor and so it was deeply personal. And you’re teaching again on the book of Ephesians. I looked at that experience and it was a traditional church structure with men in leadership. And it was clear as day to me that if the women had a voice and a place at the table in that conflict, things wouldn’t have been as ugly as they were and as destructive and terrible. And so those two things, like my early marriage years and walking through that church conflict,
The importance of your teaching on the book of Ephesians really snapped into place for me crystal clear that if we are walking in a manner worthy of the calling we’ve received, we’re going to submit to one another, male, female, slave, free, Gentile. Like there’s no distinctions that if we’re truly living in the way that God has called us to live, that we’re going to love each other. And that means we’re going to listen to each other’s voices, that every voice has a place and has value.
And we’re going to submit the mutual submission piece that we often gloss straight over and go into, OK, but wives, you’re submitting, and then the husband is the head.
Roy Ciampa (33:12) Mm-hmm. Right, yes. No, it really, it ends up being, and I hate to say it, but in many cases, not a loving sort of thing, but a very obedience, command-centered sort of thing, which kind of is pushing them back against the grain of the letter as a whole, and the way I understand the theology of the letter as a whole.
By the way, one of the key texts that I think is helpful for thinking about this is in 1 Corinthians chapter 14, where Paul has that part that says, and some people think that this doesn’t belong in the Bible, and I don’t know what you think, but I think verses 34 and 35 are supposed to be there. But it’s the part that says women should remain silent in the churches, they’re not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.
They want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home, for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church. Now Paul had already taught that both men and women could pray and prophesy, right, back in chapter 11. And that’s remarkable in itself because a lot of people look at 1 Corinthians 11, they think, because it starts off about who’s the head of who, who’s the head you know, God is the head of Christ, who’s the head of the man, who’s head of the woman. it sounds like, okay, yeah, very much what sort of subordination here and all this sort of thing.
But when he actually gets into it, he talks about ministry in just two terms, prayer and prophecy. Gordon Fee has suggested, and I think he’s probably right, that those are like big terms for discourse directed to God. That’s prayer and discourse directed at the congregation, which is prophecy. But in any case, those are the only two things he talks about. And he says both men and women can do it. They just have to dress appropriately when they’re doing it. So there’s nothing in there about any kinds of ministries that men can do that women can’t.
But anyway, so he’s already said that they can pray and prophesy. So what’s this all about? They should remain silent. And so obviously he’s not speaking about speaking in general. He has certain kinds of speaking. And in that very passage, he says, if they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home. Well, that may be the hint that what he’s talking about is women who don’t understand something that’s going on.
Again, remember the women would have less education, less experience of the world, less knowledge of what’s going on around them. And if they don’t know what’s going on and they’re asking questions that are interrupting them in the church, and in that culture, for a woman to ask another man, somebody else’s husband their question, would be really offensive and would raise all kinds of concerns. Anyway, so.
If that’s what’s going on, Paul says if they have things they should inquire of their own husbands at home. Now, you know, I may have said this when I taught you in class, but I mean, I’ve been teaching since, you know, a full-time teacher since I suppose I started in 1991. And I don’t know how many times I could have said, having both a husband and a wife in my class, I could have said to the husband, if you’re not getting all this, you might ask your wife to explain it to you when you get home.
I’ve very often had husbands and wives in the class and it’s not unusual for the wife to understand things better than to be more academically strong than the husband is. I could never say, you know, if any of the women here don’t understand what I’m talking about, why don’t you ask your own husband at home? not that I couldn’t just say it because it wouldn’t be politically correct, but it would just be stupid.
And I’m not saying Paul’s stupid, The expression assumes a culture and a context where the husband can be virtually guaranteed to know more and understand things better than their wife, which is perfectly reasonable for the Greco-Roman context of Corinth that Paul’s speaking to, not Corinth and Ephesus and the whole world in which Paul’s speaking because of this age and education and experience gap that we talked about at the beginning of our conversation. So a verse like that makes perfectly good sense in that context, but would make absolutely no sense in a world where men and women can both be educated and experienced And so again, I think it really is a problem of, I think, very harmful biblical interpretation when
We end up trying to act as though we are living in roles that were filled by first century people. And we’re gonna figure out how to treat each other in those roles as opposed to treating people for who they actually are. And that’s at the core of love, isn’t it? To know someone, to respect them for who they are, for what they bring to the table, and to learn from each other and to submit to each other.
And that’s really a large part of what effusions is about.
Ruth Perry (38:10) I think from my background being very conservative, there was a lot of warning against listening to people who didn’t share traditional values because they were being influenced by the culture around them or they were playing fast and loose with scripture and they weren’t taking the word of God seriously or this or that. Like there were so many warnings against listening to someone who might suggest mutual submission or sharing authority between men and women in ministry and in the home.
And in my experience, just with my encounter of you, Dr. Ciampa and since you, many other egalitarian scholars and pastors, they’ve all taken the word of God seriously, and their life has shown the fruit of the Spirit in ways that isn’t always readily witnessed in other people’s lives who are really clinging to the authority structures and having power over others. And so I’m really grateful that I took this Ephesians class with you 20 something years ago and that I remembered all the information even though I compartmentalized it at the time and filed it away and went on with my traditional ways. I’m grateful that it was accessible when I needed it and when things started falling apart. And so then I didn’t just say Well, if this is what Christianity is, I don’t want it. But I could imagine a more beautiful Christianity because of what you had taught me.
Roy Ciampa (39:42) That’s very kind, but I think that it is very sad to see people turning away from Christianity because the presentation they’ve received is not wholesome, it’s not healthy, it’s not edifying. And too often it is, as you said, very much about power and who can have power. And so it’s very sad to see large parts of a whole generation are more that are turning away from the church because of the way the church in Christianity has been presented, which is sad. And we do think it’s such a beautiful thing. The truth of God’s grace and the grace that he teaches us to live by ought to be something that ought to attract people from all over the globe to this great God of love and grace and mercy who’s worthy of all our praise.
Ruth Perry (40:30) the message of Ephesians is speaking to us today. And I pray we all have ears to hear.
Where can we find your papers and your writing? Dr. Ciampa, do you have a website or do you have the online presence?
Roy Ciampa (40:43) I have a website. Yeah, actually, but it’s not it’s just a purely pedagogical sort of thing. And I, and I’ve spent hundreds of hours, if not thousands, thousands in the heyday of my career. So I have a I have a website called viceregency.com And the.com is a joke, because I’ve never done any commercial stuff with it. should be a.org. But I have vice regency.com. And then it’s it’s all links to different things you can learn from and
Maybe I’ll go there and add a link to this paper. I’ll tell you what, I’ll send it to you in case there’s some place you want to post it on, on anything you’re doing.
Ruth Perry (41:20) I have a Facebook page called the Beautiful Kingdom Builders. I will put it there and I want to give you the last word before we sign off.
Roy Ciampa (41:31) Well, thank you for having me. It’s been a blessing to be with you and it is anything I can do to help people see how great and marvelous, as Paul was trying to say in Ephesians, how beyond anything we can imagine is the love of God, how deep and high and wide, and in every dimension you can imagine this love of God that we find in Jesus Christ and the mercy and love that it teaches us to express towards others.
May God advance that through the knowledge of Jesus Christ. So thanks for having me.
Ruth Perry (42:02) Thank you so much. Amen. Have a great time in your retirement and as you continue to teach. Thank you so much. Bye.
Roy Ciampa (42:08) Thank you very much. Bye bye.
Thanks for visiting The Beautiful Kingdom Builders and listening to this podcast episode. You can subscribe by email here up on the far right of this blog, and find TBKB on all your favorite podcasting and social media platforms. God bless!
In this conversation, my friend Scott Harris shares his journey of faith, discussing his upbringing in a mainline Protestant church, his college experiences, and his perspective on the challenges faced by the church today after 42 years in parachurch ministry. He emphasizes the importance of following Jesus and articulating the gospel in a way that resonates with contemporary issues. The discussion also touches on the need for the church to adapt and address the concerns of those leaving it, while promoting a message of love for God and neighbor.
Scott mentions reading C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity as he was making his faith his own as a young man, we talk about our Clifton StrengthsFinder results and Enneagram numbers. and Scott recommends the book Kingdom Come: How Jesus Wants to Change the World by Allen M. Wakabayashi (available here). I’ve purchased a copy and look forward to reading it in the new year!
Ruth Perry (00:15) I would love to just know more about my friend Scott that I’ve been in Bible studies with online and I’ve met online, but we’ve never met in person. And I know little things about your life, but I don’t know the Scott Harris story and what your testimony is.
Scott Harris (00:23) I’ve been around a long time. I guess you had mentioned, knowing a little bit about my background, I think I’ll summarize and say that I grew up in Northern Illinois in a family attending a mainline Protestant church, a believing mother, a non-believing father, both of whom were from Texas. So I have heritage in more than one part of the country.
To go further ahead, when I was in high school, my family moved to Indiana where the state that I currently live in, and we began attending a mainline Presbyterian church, but not just any mainline Presbyterian church, a church where there was a desire to help people, younger and older to make personal decisions to belong to Jesus. That wasn’t the terminology they used, but it was a call for me and all kinds of others. So high school age, it was a call for me and lots of others to make specific decisions. I found that very difficult. of the difficulties I had was understanding evangelical jargon because I was told, all you have to, in fact I think I’m quoting my brother, all you have to do is accept Jesus into your heart. For people with some kinds of church backgrounds that make sense, for others it doesn’t mean very much, it’s just an odd collection of words together. I struggled for some time to figure out what that meant.
A pastor recommended, since I was asking questions, to read C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. I kind of read through that during my senior year in high school. That wasn’t the only factor, but a number of factors came together that I found myself coming to some kind of faith about the time I entered high school. I entered college as a heartfelt Christian and sought to grow as a Christian from there. Am I telling you information you want to know, Ruth?
Ruth Perry (02:38) Yes, this is, I personally want to know. Now I’m thinking, I grew up more conservative and I’m kind of curious to know the way that mainline Protestants were spoken of or thought of in my experience is that you don’t even believe in Jesus Christ as a supernatural God being. And so in your experience, was your mainline faith orthodox? I think there’s so many biases among the more conservative minded that I’ve had to undo myself, but that’s like an initial question that I have.
Scott Harris (03:14) First of all, to be fair, I’m not a master of mainline Protestantism, but of course we need to recognize that it is very diverse. in any individual mainline Protestant church of any size, you have a diverse congregation of people with differing levels, maybe of orthodoxy, if we want to use that word. It’s nonetheless unfair to just…
gather a little bit of data together to judge people’s orthodoxy. You can’t judge orthodoxy by litmus tests. I think also leadership of mainline Protestant churches come from variety of backgrounds and they study at a variety of seminaries and so you can’t put all of them in one category. And then there are the different denominations.
Okay, the church I grew up in childhood, which I’m calling a mainline Protestant church in northern Illinois, I was of an age that I don’t remember many things by which I can determine just how orthodox they were or not. I’m sure it was a variety of people from a variety of backgrounds. It was when my family moved to Indiana that I would say the mainline Presbyterian Church staff was quite orthodox. They believed in God. They believed in Jesus. If you wanted to use the jargon as Lord and Savior. And it was clear over and over again and it was a priority of their youth program not to give altar calls, not to put pressure on, but to make it clear again and again that it was a personal decision that we needed to make. So it was evangelistic in that sense. So I can neither confirm nor deny conservative churches’ of mainline Protestantism. There is a diversity in it.
Ruth Perry (04:59) I think that’s very true because I’ve just been working in the United Methodist Church now for a couple years. And I think it’s been a little surprising for me just to see how conservative the people, like they’re so evangelical. And so that’s been surprising. It’s also been surprising to me how many people have moved to the United Methodist Church from other denominations that are serving in ministry, as you said. And so culturally it’s interesting to me how strong evangelicalism’s influence has been in the mainline church.
Scott Harris (05:23) Yeah. Yeah, and for moving to Indiana and beginning to do full-time ministry in Indiana, it became very clear, at least in my part of the state, that the United Methodist Church was highly evangelical in its leadership and in its membership. I worked at a university that had a lot of people coming from rural areas, and those rural Methodist churches were rather conservative in a number of ways. Other places in the state it might be different and other parts of Methodism of course are different.
Ruth Perry (06:04) That sounds really wonderful that you were encouraged to make your faith your own and that you went to college as a strong believer because I know in your work I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of students haven’t had that kind of formation. So that’s wonderful.
Scott Harris (06:19) Yes. So I entered a small liberal arts college. lived in a fraternity only because it was an all-male college and listeners of this podcast will be able to figure out what college it was. I’m very glad to have attended it. I found myself really valuing what I would call Christian fellowship at the time. Interdenominational connections with people from a variety of church backgrounds that wanted to encourage each other in knowing God, knowing the Bible, and following the ways that God directs us through the Bible.
I don’t think I would have used those terms at the time, but that was a very rich experience for me, and because I desired it so much, I created a lot of it, or I catalyzed a lot of it. I was somebody who found Christians around campus in my fraternity and other fraternities that were interested in meeting together. And I was not the first person to do this, but under some of my leadership, we got an actual campus organization functioning that functioned as an ongoing organization my third and fourth years in college.
Ruth Perry (07:33) Fantastic. What would you call that gift? I know you have it. I mean, is it hospitality?
Scott Harris (07:38) I would not say I’m gifted in hospitality. I would call it networking. Some people who are like me who have done the Clifton Strengths Finder test rate high in Connectedness, if anybody is aware of that. So you and I are similar in that sense. That has driven me in a lot of ways before I had a label on it, but I’ve always called myself a networker.
Ruth Perry (07:52) I rated high on Connectedness. What are your other Clifton strengths?
Scott Harris (08:05) My goodness, what an excellent question. I don’t remember the specifics of the top five or whatever. I took the test twice and Connectedness rated first both times. That’s why I labeled as number one. Four out of the five were exactly the same in each one. And the other three of the top four, even though I don’t remember their names, if you put them all together, it means I have a very easy tendency to be a smart aleck. I have a very easy tendency to want to learn things and tell other people things that I learned. It’s, I guess Communication is one of them, which is basically oral communication in the StrengthsFinder. Another one has to do with Learning. So I like to learn and I like to communicate what I learn and I’m talkative and I’m long-winded and I’m an external processor. It all measures up in my top strengths of the StrengthsFinder.
Ruth Perry (09:04) Did you ever look into the Enneagram and what your number is there?
Scott Harris (09:08) Yes, my wife has been helped a lot by the Enneagram. Lots of colleagues of mine are. I don’t know many things about it, but I do recognize that I align as a nine. I don’t know whether I’m a eight wing or a one wing, but I recognize nine-ness.
Ruth Perry (09:28) Cool. Well that’s beautiful. Now I’m thinking about what are the other things? There’s the DISC. Have you done that? What else?
Scott Harris (09:34) I don’t remember DISC and Myers-Briggs, if you want to go back in time, my Myers-Briggs has changed over time. I think it’s changed in part because I’ve done the same kind of work for 42 years and my personality has adapted to it. I don’t think Myers-Briggs is supposed to be like that, but when I first took it, I was kind of close to the border between introvert and extrovert, but now I’m a massive extrovert in various ways because it’s been, it’s useful for my work to function as an extrovert. Has that rewired my brain? I don’t know, but unfortunately for this conversation, I don’t remember where I rate them the three other categories.
Ruth Perry (10:19) Does your social battery ever dry up?
Scott Harris (10:22) I’m of a certain age and I admit that the older I get, less capacity my social battery has. And maybe that’s just physical fatigue. I get energized by people, but I also get tired out by people things and I do have a desire to retreat. Maybe that’s made me a more healthy, balanced person. I don’t know.
Ruth Perry (10:33) Yeah. So as a college person, you had made your faith your own. You were already exercising your gifts and bringing others into a community with you to have fellowship and grow and learn together. That’s all very cool. How would you describe your faith at that time, like with theological terms, like were you Arminian or Calvinist or?
Scott Harris (11:05) Okay, these are very good questions and I can kind of say none of the above to that kind of thing. Let me give a more satisfying answer by saying the non-denominationality or the inter-denominationality of the organization I was with and still am and the influences I came under and the reading, the little bit of reading I did did not focus me or cornering me into very many specific categories. So I was neither trained to be Calvinist nor Armenian. If you want to talk about categories, you know, decades into the work, you can throw the category of Anabaptism as something that kind of slowly has grown and it’s influence over me.
In the evangelical world that I was in, dispensationalism is something that is kind of a default setting for lots of people in some areas of theology. I have grown, I never was particularly dispensationalist and now I’m very non-dispensationalist with time. And I think in my work I have chosen to not align myself in very many specific ways with doctrinal movements.
I do have a little master’s degree in biblical and theological studies and a master of arts degree, but it was at an institution that did not try to train me in any doctrinal settings. So I still am quite non-denominational.
Ruth Perry (12:39) That’s great.
Scott Harris (12:39) Although that’s in my thinking and in my theology, I do value belonging to denominations, but working with Christians from a variety of backgrounds, I love working in a non-denominational organization.
Ruth Perry (12:54) How would you describe…Do you feel like, I think a lot of people are drawn out of denominations right now because of our, like we’re distrustful of institutions. We recognize that one institution hasn’t figured it all out. And so we want to be more open. How do you feel about denominations that kind of plant seemingly non-denominational churches, but they’re rooted in a deep, point of view.
Scott Harris (13:20) Yeah, I don’t have a lot of opinions on this, but it is a very good question. I will briefly say that I value not getting too specific in what you require of members of an organization. I also value very specific theological education and thought and study for leaders. Those might be kind of paradoxical, but
It’s what I think. One of the things I value most about denominations is what I guess I would call accountability. In a denominator, even though there are different structures of polity in denominations, ultimately you are responsible to some kind of leadership within your denomination and you can be held accountable. And I guess a few years ago, I may not have recognized that value of denominations, but because of so much harm, and I guess I would say leadership abuse coming from the non-denominational world, it gives me a rising value of denominational accountability, even though I’ve never been a part of it. I’ve thought about getting licensed, I’ve never really thought about getting ordained, different denominations do it in different ways. It might be something I would do in the future, but I’ve never been a regular preacher or teacher or overseer of theological discourse. So at this point in time I haven’t sought to align myself with a denomination. I do go to a denominational church.
Ruth Perry (14:52) So how did you and your wife meet?
Scott Harris (14:53) What a good question. I was a few years into my doing college ministry and she was actually one of the students who became a leader student in the student group. And as is really good conventional wisdom, staff members working with college ministry should not date or fraternize or whatever you want to call it with members of the group, age difference.
Power Differential, I actually went to work overseas and after a few years of overseas work with her being one of the people I kept in contact with, I found, I guess you’d call it romantic feelings growing. And so after I was overseas for a while and after she had finished college for a while, we brought up the topic of maybe starting today.
It was interesting because this took place overseas. This conversation took place in the suburbs of Paris, France. And we began, she was just visiting there and we got together because she knew me. She was visiting with a friend. And we began a long distance relationship kind of knowing the advantages and disadvantages of them to some degree and this is so far back in time That long distance phone calls were quite expensive We did write some letters, but the most satisfying communication we had as a long distance dating couple was to record and send audio cassette tapes in the mail to each other
Ruth Perry (16:23) Yeah. How cute is that?
Scott Harris (16:36) We, very cute, I confirm. We actually have some of the cassettes recorded over. We have a handful of those cassettes in a Ziploc bag and some stuff we’ve stored away. And our adult daughter, young adult daughter, has actually listened to some of them and takes great joy in listening to us. We don’t just say gooey romantic things to each other. We’re giving updates on what’s going on in our lives.
Ruth Perry (16:46) Yeah. Yeah!
Scott Harris (17:03) And so she gets a glimpse into the past of her parents.
Ruth Perry (17:07) That’s beautiful. So you’ve been in ministry for 42 years.
Scott Harris (17:11) Correct.
Ruth Perry (17:12) And I, one of my, I think one of the driving forces behind me wanting to podcast is just the sheer number of people who’ve left the church in the last several decades. And so this is what I want to address with my podcast is how can we address the issues that are driving people out of the church.
And what can we do to build a more beautiful kingdom in the United States, particularly as my location, but in the world, obviously. I feel like it’s not just the issues that we’re having here in America are in some ways very unique to our situation, but they’re also leaking out into the world in harmful ways. And that…
Scott Harris (17:52) Hmm.
Ruth Perry (17:53) I think that’s something that I really appreciated about our friendship. I’m not sure exactly how we got connected, but I’ve made all these little connections on the internet. And with someone with your giftings, I could see how I know that you invited me into a book study that you were doing with some of your Facebook friends. But I’m assuming that we became Facebook friends because of the Beautiful Kingdom Builders page, that maybe that’s our initial connection was.
Scott Harris (18:20) a networker, as a networker, undoubtedly a friend of mine had posted something from it I wouldn’t be able to say and I began to follow and like what I found there. That’s undoubtedly the beginning of
Ruth Perry (18:20) I comment, what’s that? As a networker.
Well now I have really appreciated your friendship Scott because what is the thing that you say when you post things? You always share things and you say, this challenges me to follow Jesus Christ. ⁓ Let me see, do you know it off the top of your head what you say?
Scott Harris (18:49) Yes. I have lengthened it recently, but the older version is this challenges me to follow Jesus and his ways fully above all else, including many things many Christians consider important.
Ruth Perry (19:09) And then you’ll share a quote or an article or something newsworthy that’s happening. ⁓
Scott Harris (19:17) or something from
the beautiful Kingdom Builders.
Ruth Perry (19:20) Well, actually half of the things that I post on my page now come from your posts because I’m just I’m very by the things that challenge you Scott
Scott Harris (19:25) I have noticed that. Gives me great joy.
Ruth Perry (19:30) So I’m very grateful for your friendship and for your work that you share online and that you connect and serve and fellowship online as well as in person. And I feel like you’re someone, your heart is seeking after the Lord in beautiful ways and impactful ways. And that’s the kind of person that I want to learn from and I want to be in relationship with and grow with.
And so thank you for all you’ve done. You’ve connected me in Bible studies and book studies too that have helped me get off the internet but stay on the internet in relationship with others and hear from others. And I’m really grateful for you, Scott.
What do you think it is that the church, how has the church gotten off track in a way that is distancing young people from the church?
Scott Harris (20:19) of course, so many things to say about that. First of all, thank you for your very kind words. likewise for so much that I learned from you as well. Let me answer your question. Let me answer it first by how I feel like I’ve gotten off track a little bit. You were interested in my story and it’s just the story that serious Christian faith during my time in high school became attractive to me because I felt like it was a true understanding of the world.
The word worldview is used by variety of groups to mean a variety of things, but at that time I felt like a properly understood whole Bible worldview helped explain things and help explain what God calls people to. Although I’m using that term whole Bible at this point because at that time I think it was basically Paul’s writings and the logic and the priorities and the emphases and it was kind of the traditional evangelical gospel outline of we are sinners, Jesus died for us, we must respond to Jesus dying for us, etc. that… For much of my Christian life, I have thought that the main thing that a Christian is, is somebody who believes in what…
has done for them. And that is definitely part of it. I wasn’t particularly off track to think that way. I was following the movement I was in. I affirm all of that. However, I think the basic thing that it means to be a Christian at this point in time is to follow Jesus and his ways fully above all else.
Following Jesus includes believing in who Jesus is. Following Jesus includes believing in what Jesus has done. But believing becomes a much bigger whole life kind of thing that it involves. Following Jesus as my example, following Jesus as my master, becoming an apprentice of Jesus. I haven’t…
been regularly using these terms for too many years and when I use these terms I realize just what a high calling it is and how much further I have to go and how it is a challenging life of constantly calling oneself into question and revising and asking for God’s help and the help of the Holy Spirit to step forward in ways that more more followed Jesus.
To answer the question you asked. I think a number of people are leaving the church in part, I’m not speaking for all people or all churches, in part because they have been taught to add a whole lot of baggage to following Jesus. The baggage is different in different situations. In recent years in the United States, a lot of the baggage is political baggage or culture wars baggage. Of course, there’s a big overlap between politics and culture wars or the baggage of narrow approaches to how children are raised or how people should be educated or how people should think.
When so much of the New Testament emphasis of following Jesus in the Gospels and in the New Testament writers is really about freedom, is about joy, is about following a person who announces and enacts and acts out the Kingdom of God. And so more and more in the future I’m gonna want to emphasize following Jesus as a living in the Kingdom of God kind of thing. I am not saying that if people just say things and think things the way I do that they would remain in churches.
But whatever going into and out of churches are, whatever the patterns are, whatever individuals or groups or demographic categories are going in and out of churches, I think part of the turmoil that’s going on should be a call to those of us who are leaders and those of us who are regular Christians to call people to Jesus, not to a tradition.
Not to a certain political ideology, not to a framework structure of how to raise children, but call people to Jesus above all else. And that’s a dynamic, ever-changing, challenging life that nonetheless is a life of joy.
Ruth Perry (25:03) Absolutely. Well said, Scott.
Scott Harris (25:05) Yeah, that just hopefully I’ve just fixed everybody who’s listening. So they can just think like me.
Ruth Perry (25:09) Yeah. You fixed me.
Scott Harris (25:11) I think a lot of people leaving the church are rejecting baggage that is accompanied being followers of Jesus. They may be back, they may be in the future, they may change churches, but what do we do with such people? Winsomely invite them to follow Jesus and encourage them to take thoughtful steps that they decide on with their lives, living up to the expectations of Jesus, not trying to live up to the expectations of other people.
Ruth Perry (25:39) How do you articulate the gospel, Scott?
Scott Harris (25:42) Such a good question. At this point, let me say my thinking about how I articulate the Gospel is changing and I’ll give a book plug. There’s a book written over 20 years ago. You’ve probably seen me post about it, Ruth. It is the book Kingdom Come by Alan Wakabayashi.
I had heard about it years ago, I was living overseas, I wasn’t necessarily reading what everybody was reading. I had repeatedly decided that I need to read that book someday. And what happened is I noticed that it was for sale for cheap on Kindle. And so even though some people avoid Kindle, Kindle gets me reading stuff because it keeps my place and it’s right there.
I have read it on Kindle and Alan Wakabayashi does, in the middle of the book, give kind of a gospel outline in terms of kingdom thinking. I have copied and pasted. I intend to work on it. I wonder if any friends of mine who do graphics might want to put some graphics to it. So here is an unpolished summary of some of it. It is more detailed than a lot of gospel outlines are. But Jesus came to inaugurate the Kingdom of God. He calls people to walk with Him in it. He brings them deliverance from evil and from the powers that keep people from walking in it. He brings them deliverance from their own sin and condemnation.
And he calls them to be partners of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, himself and the Father and the Holy Spirit, in living according to the values of the Kingdom, anticipating the full coming of the Kingdom, and inviting others to do the same.
Ruth Perry (27:39) Amen.
Scott Harris (27:40) That’s just off the top of my head.
Ruth Perry (27:42) Wow, that’s beautiful. I did add that book to my wish list when you posted about it, and I got some birthday money this week, so I’ll be sure to order that and read that. That’s beautiful.
Scott Harris (27:52) And in case it’s worth it for your listeners, it’s been out for a while and at least on that one really main merchant that sells things online that you can get almost anything from, it’s at a really low price. I think they must have had a stock build up in the lowest price. The price is low. You can also get it really inexpensively as a used book. And Ruth, let me give you some advice. If you ever want to go public with communicating with others, I invite you to use the word kingdom in what, you know, if you blog or do some Facebooking or if you do a podcast, I recommend the word kingdom to you because God’s kingdom is beautiful. You know, free of charge. I’ll give that to you.
Ruth Perry (28:40) Thank you, Scott. Thank you. I love that. Yeah, I wonder about the people who are opposed to the word kingdom.
Scott Harris (28:47) There’s more than one reason, yeah.
Ruth Perry (28:49) Yeah, I mean I recognize the reason, but I think personally I am okay using it.
Scott Harris (28:55) Yeah. and we could just… Yes. Yes. And if you want, can use an actually much somewhat more provocative term. In Scott McKnight’s really literal New Testament translation called the Second Testament, he calls it Empire. So if you don’t like Kingdom of God, you can talk about God’s Empire if you want.
Ruth Perry (28:55) It’s straight from the mouth of Jesus, so…
Scott Harris (29:22) The idea is it’s a big deal and it is the one true empire, it’s the one true kingdom. There are plenty of other things. I understand if people have issues and I understand that this part of the world doesn’t have much value for kings and queens, but it’s a useful term if it points to the king. If the king is the lamb who was slain, the lamb of revelation, that’s…the kind of kingdom I want to be in.
Ruth Perry (29:51) Praise God. That was my next question for you, Scott. What do you feel like your dream for the church would be? How would the church be like the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven if we were really following the way of Jesus?
Scott Harris (30:06) What an excellent question. I don’t have a recipe, I just have bits and pieces. One, to say more briefly what I said at length earlier, the church needs to be about helping individuals and communities together to follow Jesus.
I want to qualify that in so many ways and use terms like inappropriate ways in their particular context, but may the church and may the churches be about the business of helping people in communities to follow Jesus. Second, my dream for the church or the churches is that they would be global churches. They would have an ongoing, interacting relationship.
and conversation and knowledge of other Christians, other churches around the world and other traditions of Christianity in their own context or around the world. I think my dream for the church is that the church or the churches would keep the top priorities the top priorities and by the top priorities I just go straight to this guy who said the first commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. And in the Gospel of Matthew, the second commandment is very similar to the first commandment, Jesus says, and it is to love your neighbor as yourself. So here is an abbreviation that I might throw out there. It’s an intentionally provocative abbreviation.
Maybe I’ll use it more, maybe I’ll never use it again, but I want to promote, and I want churches to promote, LBGAN Christianity. LBGAN Christianity is Christianity that emphasizes loving both God and neighbor. Some Christian traditions emphasize the love of neighbor to in a way that kind of keeps God eclipsed a little bit. Some church traditions emphasize the love of God and the love of neighbor is this optional add-on that you can choose to do or not choose to do. My dream for the church is to emphasize both loving God and loving neighbor.
Ruth Perry (32:20) I love that Scott, that’s perfect. And thank you for your example of loving your neighbors. You’re not someone who just gives thoughts and prayers, you’re someone who always follows up with action and care and intentionality. And you’ve just been a really inspiring ⁓ example to me and countless others, I’m sure. And so I appreciate that about you and keep on keeping on because you are making a difference. And you’re really wonderful at articulating good news about Jesus Christ, Scott.
Scott Harris (32:44) You’re so kind. Same Ruth, same. Thank you for your partnership in articulating the good news about Jesus. I am challenged and encouraged by you even though I can’t keep up with all of the content you put out. Now that you’re doing podcasting, it’ll make it even harder for me to keep up with the content you put out, but I really appreciate it.
Ruth Perry (33:11) I appreciate, anytime you have any advice or correction or you think I’ve gone too far and I’m not loving my neighbors well, I trust your voice and I would welcome you as a friend to please let me know because I know, I mean, it’s, get, what I find my weakness is that I get caught up in the reaction, like the need to react.
And what I want to do is I want to continue to grow and be challenged to follow the ways of Jesus Christ fully. And I know he was not reactionary person. And then that’s a temptation of social media and being online. think for me, this podcast endeavor is kind of, I feel a lot of imposter syndrome and inadequacy about doing it, but that’s one of the things I’m trying to overcome as a Christian woman is the need to be perfect.
Like I know I’m going to mess up and over speak and I’m going to over share at times and I’m going to react. And so what I want to have is a willingness to learn and receive correction and be humble and apologize when that happens, but to continue to just learn in public. Cause that’s what I can’t remember when I started my page, but that’s the best thing that’s happened is that I’ve continued to learn and grow and change my mind about things. And it’s overall, I’d say it’s been a neat experience for me because I’ve met people like you.
Scott Harris (34:29) It is a total joy to see you doing what you do and now doing a podcast. May God give you wisdom and energy.
Ruth Perry (34:38) Thank you.
Scott Harris (34:39) in the days, weeks, months and years ahead.
Ruth Perry (34:43) Thank you, Scott. God bless you. All right. Thank you. Bye.
Scott Harris (34:45) Talk to you soon, Ruth. Keep up the good work. Bye.
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