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This week John questions what it means for Christianity to “work” and focuses the discussion using a quotation from Os Guiness’ Time for Truth: “Christianity is not true because it works, but it works because it’s true.”  So John questions the role of personal experience in arbitrating truth.

Gregg makes the distinction between absolute and relative truth.  So while many Christians focus on absolute truth (such as claiming the Bible and God’s existence are absolutely true), Gregg notes that humans understand the world in relative terms, and so can only evaluate absolute truth claims by their personal, relative experience of those claims.  Further, where Os Guiness indicates that Christians should avoid pragmatism, relativism, and subjectivism (which are ideologies), Gregg argues that being pragmatic, relative, and subjective are not only unavoidable but essential in evaluating the claims about God and Christianity.

This is particularly so when considering the Christian claim that God loves me and that God is good because (Gregg notes) love is not a concept to be understood but a experiential reality between people (or here, between people and God) that is to be live and embraced.  So where Christians lack the experience of God’s love this is a substantial problem, though testimony of others can “stand in,” to a certain extent, for personal experience.

Gregg concludes by noting that out of all the many and diverse religious perspectives, none have any greater claim to absolute truth than the others. Instead, it is the nature and experience of that truth–experiential reality, for example, of God’s love and truth–that is the most persuasive reason for embracing it,  And Gregg claims that God wants us to understand how deeply God loves us–God is not a miser with God’s love for us.

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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.

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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.