From the Altar Call to the Picket Line (with Heather Cronk) | Ep. 91

Amy Hawk spent 25 years inside the evangelical bubble before 2016 brought it down around her. She taught Bible, served as an elder, voted for John McCain and Mitt Romney, then left the church that was her entire life, lost her two best friends, and says she is closer to Jesus today than she was then. Her book, The Judas Effect, argues that a church chasing political power betrays the character of Christ. We talk about what speaking up costs, how she holds onto Jesus without a church building, and why she thinks conversations like this one may be closer to what church was meant to be all along. Listen in as I ask her whether this book is about saving the church or surviving it.

The word Trinity appears nowhere in your Bible, and the one verse that claims to state the doctrine in plain words is missing from every early Greek manuscript. So where did the doctrine come from? The path runs through an emperor who had a political problem to solve, two church councils more than fifty years apart, and a lineup of explanations the church eventually declared heresy. You may still be using a few of them. Along the way we find out what the first Christians were guarding for three centuries, and I share a bold new question about the Trinity that I just started asking.

You probably expect a certain type of person to talk to you about deconstruction and doubt. Perhaps someone young and with a lot of life yet to experience. But Jack Reese is 75, a former senior pastor and a professor for 28 years, and he just wrote Grace Sideways, a book about a lifetime of doubting. He has never fully understood certainty, and he argues that a hidden God is the God the Psalms and the prophets handed us. We get into summer Christians and winter Christians, why the church sings praise so quickly and lament so rarely, and what Jesus was doing when He quoted Psalm 22 from the cross. Jack also tells the story of walking away from a comfortable career to lead a nonprofit in the poorest zip code in Texas, where a Black congregation gave him the nickname "1%" and meant it as love. Along the way, he explains why the person who insists you must never doubt may be the most arrogant one in the room, and I admit that I want to sound like him when I'm 75.

I've been on the ash heap with the Book of Job for eight weeks, and this week the author of Job in Exile: A Guide for Spiritual Refugees, Dr. David Gushee, joins me to close it out. Gushee was once America's leading evangelical ethicist, and after he wrote Changing Our Minds, the community he helped build pushed him out. He reads Job as a story that works like a parable. We take on Job 42:6, the verse where the Hebrew is so tangled that scholars disagree on whether Job repents at all, and Gushee explains why he doesn't buy the version most translations give us. If you've ever been told your questions were the problem, Job may have been on your side all along.

For seven weeks, Job has been waiting for God to answer him. In part seven of the Job in Exile series, God finally shows up in the whirlwind and then wants to talk about lions, ravens, mountain goats, and two creatures that sound like they wandered off a monster movie set (yes, we get into whether Behemoth is a dinosaur, complete with a disturbingly catchy children's song). God never answers a single one of Job's questions about his suffering. If God actually blesses Job's questioning and protest at the end rather than his surrender, that reshapes how we bring our own hard questions to God. Pour a glass and sit with one of the strangest, most beautiful endings in the Bible.