And since we were having so much fun, we thought we\u2019d make this even funner (and more confusing) by posting the exact same post on each other\u2019s blogs simultaneously. So, if you\u2019d rather (hurt my feelings and) go over to Brian\u2019s blog and read this, click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n As I\u2019m sure many of you know, Brian\u2019s latest book is We Make the Road by Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation, and Activation<\/a> ******<\/p>\n Brian\u2019s 1st question :<\/strong><\/p>\n Peter, I loved your book. \u00a0I don\u2019t know many if any theologians who can make serious points with as much humor as you. You theologize like a stand-up comic, which, in light of the seriousness of your subject matter, is a good thing. Much humor, I think arises from pain and anger. I\u2019m reminded that Soren Kierkegaard said, \u201cThe essence of all true preaching is malice,\u201d by which he meant that unless the preacher is mad about something, he has no passion. So \u2026 is that true for you with this book? If so, what pain or anger is behind it?<\/strong><\/p>\n Thanks, Brian. I loved my book, too.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve actually thought a lot about your question, but I\u2019m not sure I can come up with a final answer. All I know is that I\u2019ve loved to joke and laugh ever since I can remember (and it landed me in trouble now and then as a kid in school). Of course, this begs the question why<\/em> it is part of my personality. I don\u2019t think, though, that anger or pain are necessarily behind it. I know that many comedians have suffered emotionally, and I would venture to guess that their comedy was a form of pain-management.<\/p>\n But for me, I just like seeing the absurd in things. Humor can disarm and put people in a position of seeing the same old thing in a different light. I\u2019m reminded of something George Carlin said (paraphrasing), that comedy is what happens everyday, you just need someone to point it out to you. For me, humor is a very natural-feeling mode of catching people off guard to see something deeper or from a different angle than they might be accustomed to. Maybe that\u2019s my schtick.<\/p>\n I like how you refer to preaching in your question. I used to tell my seminary students that preaching is like Carlin\u2019s definition of comedy: God-moments are all around us, we just need to be reminded of them.<\/p>\n In The Bible Tells Me So, <\/em>I describe some people\u2019s perceptions of God as a drunken father you don\u2019t want to disturb from his nap lest he become angry. I\u2019m not describing God but trying to get at the absurdity of how some perceive God\u2014as one who will lash out ate you with only the slightest provocation. Some say I\u2019m \u201cmocking\u201d God but that is to miss the point entirely.<\/p>\n I hope, though, that preachers don\u2019t have to be \u201cmad\u201d to be passionate, as Kierkegaard puts it (though I get his rhetorical overstatement in the context of the complacent church he was critiquing). Anger is fine when it is well placed, directed at things worthy of anger. But I\u2019ve seen too many preachers who are angry about everything, as if the only way they know how to speak of God is to be majorly hacked off about something. That\u2019s not good preaching or good pastoring.<\/p>\n Pete\u2019s 1st question:<\/strong><\/p>\n Brian, on my blog I\u2019ve been running a series I call \u201caha moments\u201d\u2013that point where you began to see how the model of Scripture you had no longer makes sense to you and you know you have to move on. What is your \u201caha\u201d moment with the Bible? What happened that started you on your journey, that made you realize \u201cI need to find another way of thinking about how the Bible informs my faith\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n For me, there have been so many aha\u2019s. One came when I was in elementary school. I\u2019m just old enough to remember the days of segregation. We attended a white church that was proud to call itself fundamentalist because it stood for the fundamentals of the faith.<\/p>\n One Sunday, my Sunday School teachers (it was a husband and wife co-teaching) told us that we should never date a person of another race because we might fall in love, and if we fell in love, we might get married, and if we got married, it would be a terrible sin because God \u201ccreated them according to their kind\u201d and there was this thing called \u201cthe curse of Ham\u201d (which was about race, not pork products, I realized).<\/p>\n I remember thinking this was bonkers and evil, even though I was only maybe in fifth grade at the time. My parents weren\u2019t racists at all \u2026 but I realized that the Bible could easily be \u201can accessory to the crime\u201d \u2013 if not wisely interpreted.<\/p>\n I encountered the same kind of racist attitudes, sad to say, in some missionaries I heard speak.<\/p>\n A couple years later, in middle school. I was super interested in science. One Sunday, my Sunday School teacher, a good-hearted and simple man, said, \u201cYou have to choose. You can either believe in God or evolution.\u201d I remember thinking, \u201cOK. I\u2019m 13 years old. Five years from now and I\u2019m outta here.\u201d<\/p>\n To me, evolution was one of the most beautiful and elegant things I\u2019d ever come across, and to put it in opposition to God made no sense. I probably would have been \u201coutta here\u201d if I hadn\u2019t had a very powerful spiritual experience a couple years later, accompanied by some spiritual mentors who didn\u2019t have such closed-minded approaches to Scripture and faith.<\/p>\n Those early conflicts were like a wound that kept getting opened again \u2026 when I realized that my church considered women as subordinate to men (in church, anyway), or when I found myself caught in the cross-fire between charismatics and non-charismatics, or caught in the cross-fire between traditional and contemporary worship, or caught in the cross-fire between Calvinists and Arminians \u2013 or \u2013 here was a huge theological debate in my setting: between jeans, beards, and long hair in church versus anti-jeans, beards, and long hair.<\/p>\n More aha moments came when I went to college and then graduate school, where I studied English. Studying literature involves studying the ways we read literature \u2013 which means studying theories of interpretation.<\/p>\n What was almost always implicit and unacknowledged in church because explicit and open to critique in lit classes \u2013 that we all have theories and assumptions and perspectives and biases we bring to the text. That\u2019s one of the reasons I wish that your book had been available to me back when I was in high school and college. I would have eaten it up.<\/p>\n ALSO:<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n A reminder to join me in a Reddit AMA this Wednesday, September 17th at 3pm EST in the\u00a0Christianity subreddit<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"McLaren\"](\"https:\/\/thebiblefornormalpeople.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/McLaren-1.jpeg\")
<\/a>Today is the first of three installments of my interview with Brian McLaren. He asked me three questions about my book The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It<\/a>