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In this episode John and Gregg discuss an article from Christianity Today titled Here Come the Radicals by Matthew Lee Anderson that examines several books on “radical Christianity” such as Kyle Idleman’s Not A Fan. John resonates with the author’s point that writers such as Idleman promote an intensity as key to whether one is really in right relationship with God. Yet due to what both he and Gregg have seen to be a rather amateur use of Scripture, John finds their credibility to be questionable.

John notes further that these authors focus a great deal on how ‘not to be’, but offer little on how to be rightly toward God (and instead seem to replace belief with commitment). Gregg broadly agrees and notes how this author has reached many of the same conclusions as he and John have. He further emphasizes the difference between belief and understanding (and ultimately trust).

Yet where the author sees an issue with vocabulary, Gregg sees a misunderstanding about the role of personal experience. So the issue is not that Christians have lost the grasp on the “simple language of Scripture,” but more likely that such Christians lack experiences of God / proper expectations of what experiencing God should be like. So for a love relationship to have real impact, we need real experiences of that love! So perhaps Christians are often trying to “fake it” through a relationship that just is not working for them.

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In this episode John and Gregg discuss Luke 9:23, “taking up your cross” and “following Jesus.”  From this John wonders generally about how we should be using the Bible.  He gives the example of sermons where biblical passages are taken to mean exactly what they meant when they were written (and have essentially the same implications for us as they did for the original audience).  This seems to lack intellectual integrity.

For Gregg, such questions are a question of biblical hermeneutics.  For example, Gregg mentions a “divine discourse” theory of interpretation whereby God, in a certain very real sense, speaks through the Bible.  Yet this perspective embraces the literary characteristics of the text and is aware that these literary standards (for historiography, etc.) are different from what we hold to today (and so we cannot hold them to our 21st century standards).

So the gospels are “rhetorical documents” in the ancient sense of the word–documents meant to convince the reader of certain things.  In this case, the gospels aim to convince the reader that Jesus truly is Messiah and is the son of God.  John sees a stark contrast between this intention of the text (i.e., convincing of who Jesus is) and the orientation of books like Kyle Idleman’s Not a Fan (which seek to convince us of how to act and how much it should be “hurting” when you do it, and that if you don’t act this way then you may not be following God).
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