Author Archives: Gregg Monteith

11: Vulnerability, Shame, Fear, Love, and Family

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In this episode John and Gregg riff on some ideas John found reading Brene Brown’s book Daring Greatly (highly recommended by John).  For more exposure to Brown’s work, listen to her interview with Krista Tippet.

John talks about experiencing shame as a major motivator in Christian circles and so wonders if books like Not A Fan trigger him because they have an undercurrent of shame. Gregg draws together understandings about dysfunctional families with Primo Levi’s view that evil exists in a network of accompanying factors. In the same way, Gregg wonders if the presence of shame in churches is often accompanied by fear, silence, and control?

Further, where John talks about churches being cultures of conformity, Gregg suggests that dialogue with outsiders is a skill and speculates that churches typically lack mentors to pass this skill on to other Christians.

Looking closer at Daring Greatly the conversation turns to vulnerability and its relationship to love, specifically to self-love.  Gregg argues that, for Christians, self-love comes out the experience of becoming my “best self” as I pursue / am pursued by God in a relationship where I am truly known and deeply loved.

Gregg closes by contrasting his experience of love at L’Abri with his experience of “love” in a context of childhood abuse.  He also expounds his belief that love and truth are co-central to who we are and how we are meant to relate to our world and God.

10: What is Enough to Believe?

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In this episode John and Gregg examine the notion that Jesus dying on the cross should prompt people to love God and embrace Christianity as a result. Specifically, is Christ’s death a motivation for loving God and is the matter presented this way in the Bible?

John tells how Christians in the past have speculated that his lack of satisfaction with Christianity is due to something that John is failing to do–that John needs to get the ball rolling. Gregg instead focuses on Jesus’ life and death as historically indicating how God loves us and has initiated a love relationship with us.  Yet he also considers how love, by its very nature, is experienced and “understood” relationally.

In essence, from Gregg’s perspective Jesus’ death must strike you as real (and so be believable) AND God’s love has to become real in our own existence (as something that you experience).  So Gregg summarizes relationship with God as primarily concerning an experience of love and a reality of truth.

We go on to discuss the nature of love and the nature of experience, commenting on the ideas of testimony, what “counts” as enough evidence of God’s love, and what might be ways or modes of knowing or experiencing God.  In the end, John considers that remaining open to God is perhaps the best stance he can adopt relative to experiencing God’s love.

7: Responding to God–Guilt, Experience, or Understanding?

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Today we talk about love and being loved by God.  Should we think that “Jesus died for me, so the least I can do for Jesus is love and obey him”?  Gregg suggests that we compare this view with someone what might be a realistic response if you believed that someone had saved your life or the life of your child: Would you respond by loving and obeying that person?  John proposes something different.

The discussion moves on to consider the goodness of God relative to the typical Christian understanding that those who reject God merit eternal punishment.  How can we see God as good if we embrace this view?

Next, with reference to Francis Chan’s Crazy Love,  Gregg focuses on the nature of love. What does it mean to ‘understand’ love?  Gregg suggests that love is foremost a relational reality to be experienced versus an idea to be grasped.

We end by considering why John does not experience God’s love.

6: Deciding or Commiting | Chap 2 of Not A Fan by Kyle Idleman

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This episode looks at Chapter Two of Not a Fan by Kyle Idleman. In light of Kyle Idleman’s view that Christianity must “cost us” and that authentic Christianity is marked by Jesus “interfering” with our lives, John opens the question of what constitutes Christian commitment.

So we explore Idleman’s view that Nicodemus, while being impressed by Jesus’ love, remained only a fan (which cost Nicodemus nothing).  Gregg disagrees: Can we remain untouched by love?  And how does the notion of “interference” fit within a love relationship—do my children mostly “interfere” with my life, or is there a better way of seeing the matter?

We go on to consider believing in God versus following God, and so discuss the implications for monotheistic Jews “believing” that Jesus was the son of God compared the implications for us believing the same thing today.

Bringing together the question of Christian belief or commitment and the idea that Christianity involves a love relationship with God, Gregg argues that Christianity is not about reward (going to heaven) or punishment (going to hell).  We examine this by contrasting love and the experience of love—as a law written upon the heart—with an orientation to God that stems from will and duty.

4: DTR With Jesus | Chap 1 of Not A Fan by Kyle Idleman

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In this episode we discuss Chapter One of Not a Fan by Kyle Idleman. Idleman asserts that Jesus pushes us to “define the relationship” (DTR) that we have with him.  Idleman argues that a core distinction of being either a fan or follower of Jesus, is the need properly to resolve this crucial question:

What if all of life comes down to this one question? What if there really is a heaven and there really is a hell, and where I spend eternity comes down to how you answer this question?” (Not a Fan, page 21).

In response, Gregg argues that rather than pushing us to ‘define the relationship’ God instead seeks and woos us, and that Christianity is not essentially about punishment (hell) or reward (heaven) but about whether God really loves us and how we would know this.

Also, Gregg argues that a binary distinction (where being a ‘fan’ is bad and a ‘follower’ is good) is neither relevant nor warranted, because where we stand in a relationship is a deeply complex matter based on our experiences and history as an individual.

John sees as an ongoing theme of drama, doubt and sowing seeds of “never enough.”  He also wonders how often we see examples in the bible of Jesus forcing people to define their relationship with him and if this cornerstone idea from Not A Fan squares with the Bible.

Idleman’s assertion in this chapter about making a decision about eternity comes up frequently in future discussions, hereafter known as “page twenty one.”