Good Doubt / Better Theology (wk 1: Household Codes)

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There are multiple good strategies for cultivating life-giving faith in the face of confusion, injustice, and the demands of modern life. Hayley and Vince describe two strategies they tend to hear people in BLC share about.

SPEAKER NOTES

Good Doubt / Better Theology (wk 1: Household Codes)

Introducing the two strategies

So I want to start us with a BIG QUESTION this morning — one of those questions at the heart of why our church exists: ==visual==

• How does one cultivate life-giving faith in the face of confusion, injustice, and the demands of modern life?

As relevant as ever question, right? In the year 2025.

• Especially when faith (or professed people of faith) can often be responsible for those challenges!

I think people in our church demonstrate profound insight on how to answer this question.

I would say we, as pastors, hear two distinct (and awesome) strategies represented all the time when people share “what’s working for them” on this, or share “what keeps them coming to this church” where we talk about realities like this. ==visual==

1. Good doubt — that is leaning into experiencing freedom from a need for certainty.
   • Hayley: Yeah, so embracing the mystery. Or being okay with the answer “I don’t know. I’m not sure.” — when mystery feels comforting rather than bringing about anxiety or dissatisfaction
2. Better theology — that is leaning into the forming of better and better pictures of God (so God actually feels worthy of worship) — perhaps at the expense of previous pictures of God we have to leave behind
   • Hayley: Yeah, this is the process of unlearning and relearning that we often talk about. Trusting your best picture of God AND confidently knowing there is longstanding theology that backs that picture up

Both of these feel really natural to BLC — like in an obvious way. Whenever I’m around people from our church talking in a way that represents one of these two strategies, I always see people nodding along. Whether it’s on Sundays here, or in a small group meet-up setting, or people out to coffee, or grabbing drinks, or talking at a birthday party or whatever.

People will say something like…

• I need a community where I can ask questions and not get in trouble, and I think “yep, that’s good doubt”.
• We talk about a God of love at BLC, not a God who is disgusted with me, and I think “yep, that’s better theology”.
• Yes, and that this is a joint effort! We don’t, as pastors, have access to some secret, certain truth that we have to pass on. We are wondering and asking questions embracing mystery right along side you all. (Good doubt)
• And it’s also fun — or at least we think it’s nerdy and fun — to have joint efforts of coming across new theology that feels like a yes.
  • It’s like that feeling, maybe you’ve had it before, of listening to someone else say something and thinking “that’s the perfect language for what I’ve been wrestling with!” (Better theology)
  • I love when I read books and come across phrases that feel super helpful. And I’ve had that happen in coffee chats or your reflections on Sunday in discord and later follow up conversations.
  • We’ve got the passion and experience (and job descriptions) for doing more of the theological work, but often new ideas come together as a joint effort

Love that. And that joint effort can happen because these strategies are at home here. They are part of our cultural norms.

AND YET, interestingly, in some ways, these two strategies — Good doubt and better theology — can be considered opposites?

• one is about embracing mystery… the other is about exposing that “a mysterious God who works in mysterious ways” is not satisfying-enough as a picture of God (or even harmful!)
• Yeah, one almost has “I don’t know” as a landing place. And the other has “I don’t know” as a launching point, the inspiration behind doing more theological wrestling

Isn’t this interesting?

• It is. And sometimes I think it’s determined by the type of question we’re asking.
• Or other times, what feels satisfying or not might just depend on our background and experience and way of thinking
  • The same question can be answered in these different ways based on the question-asker
  • Maybe you’ve had experiences in other religious settings where certainty was really put on a pedestal. And good doubt feels like a little rebellion or a comforting counter point.
  • What inspires good doubt in one person may inspire pursuing better theology in another person.

Our personal experience

Q for both of us: Do you think you default more to one strategy or the other?

• Vince: Personally, I usually bend toward better theology. I sometimes feel uncomfortable with too much appeal to mystery.
  • This comes back to my first experiences of faith after losing my mom to cancer when I was 15.
  • I had to make sense of a life that includes cancer and pain and grief (and later on as I matured more, beyond just my own experience, I began thinking: I have to make sense of a life that includes injustice and natural disasters and other examples of meaningless suffering),
  • And as much as “mystery” is a better response than something like “all suffering is the result of punishment for sin from a calculating God”
  • It also doesn’t feel like a robust enough response to a person in pain, or a person being oppressed. It can feel a bit dismissive.
  • It feels dismissive to me as someone who has lost a mom to cancer, and a brother to a stroke.
  • So I’ve tried to pursue a better, more cohesive, more resilient picture of God, who is good and loving and worthy of worship, and who I don’t have to doubt the existence of every time something bad happens.
  • I try to paint a picture of God like this for us all the time here (and that will definitely come up again this next month)
  • Because in general my default strategy is better theology.
  • I’m like: if your picture of God or faith is not working, there are so many more beautiful, worthy, robust pictures out there!
    • But I recognize it’s probably because I don’t have a ton of religious baggage that I can say that.
    • It’s not so easy for the many of us in this community who experienced more fundamentalism in their youth to say “if it’s not working, just try something else!”
  • Anyway Hayley, what about you? Do you think you default more to either better theology or good doubt?
• Mine has really shifted throughout different seasons and in different settings. But I do think I probably default to good doubt more now
  • Some of this is kind of a counter or answer to the hyper-focus on certainty in the evangelical setting I grew up in
  • It wasn’t really a setting that discouraged question asking. But maybe just dictated the type of questions that could be asked. There were limits and parameters
    • And it promoted the idea that there was a set answer to the questions, a definitive truth we should arrive at
  • I think good doubt also feels helpful to me after spending a lot of time in school where this intellectual, theological pursuit was really elevated
    • For a long time, having to say “I don’t know” would stir up a lot of panic for me! Like oh shoot, why don’t I know? Am I just not smart enough? Is saying “I don’t know” a failure?
    • I love that not knowing has now become so comfortable for me, so comforting
  • I’m drawn to the mystics, the poets
  • Clarify: Feeling like good doubt comes naturally doesn’t mean that all certainty is absent.
    • I do believe there are truths we can be certain of, I am certain of
    • That there is a loving God that is expansively inclusive and is not the source of suffering.
    • I am very certain of believing that not everything happens for a reason, for example.
  • Good doubt and good beliefs go hand-in-hand. And I think wonder and curiosity hold both approaches together

Context

So neither is better. We just wanted to talk about how interesting it is that both of these, as different as they are, feel so natural to BLC. There’s something to this!

For each of these next four Sundays, this is our topic — the virtues and overlap and distinctions of these two strategies — Good Doubt and Better Theology — that feel so core to our church.

And, also, each Sunday we’re going to do a little Bible Study to show both of these strategies in action.

These work as strategies beyond just the matter of “how does one engage a Sacred Text like the Bible?”, so that’s not the only thing we have in mind here, but we thought doing some application to specific difficult scriptures would be a good way to help everyone grow in confidence employing these strategies on their own.

If we’re talking about these as strategies to cultivate life-giving faith in the face of confusion, injustice, and the demands of modern life, then let’s really put them to the test with some Biblical passages that poke at confusion or injustice or burn-out.

So… Hayley what’s our scripture for this week?

Bible Study

• Yes, so we are going to talk through the households codes from Paul this week
• When we look at scripture in the New Testament - we tend to spend a lot of time in the gospels, talking about the life and teachings of Jesus.
• Another big chunk of the New Testament is the writings of Paul or work that was attributed to Paul. These writings are a little trickier. I think because they are a lot easier to misuse
• And some of these more difficult passages from Paul show up in the form of household codes (Ephesians 5, Colossians 3, 1 Timothy 2, etc.)
• And they’re just as they sound - guidelines for Paul’s vision of how a household should operate.
• We’ll use Ephesians 5 as our example for today

v==isual==

EPHESIANS 5-6:

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her…

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right…

Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.

• So, yup. I joked with my husband Andy recently when I was tired of making decisions, “alright head of household. What are we doing”
• A helpful reminder here - really for each week we’re doing these Bible studies - that the Bible is a wisdom book, not a instructional text book
  • When we interact with difficult passages, like the household codes, it’s not a threat to the integrity of the Bible to build upon or critique what is written
  • And these lenses of better theology or good doubt can give us helpful ways of engaging with scripture. Ways that feel redemptive in our current contexts

Vince asks: okay, do you want to take a “good doubt” approach to this, or a “better theology” approach to this?

I’ll talk Good Doubt, you take better theology. Why don’t you go first

Better Theology approach

A “better theology” approach to handling the difficulty of the household codes is to compare Paul’s household codes to other contemporary household codes.

Household codes are not at all a thing today, so we’re totally justified feeling uncomfortable with them, but we have to imagine them as sort of the ancient equivalent of a self-help book, or a “how to parent” book. This was a thing in the Greco-Roman world of the New Testament, so there’s a lot to compare the Bible to.

Here’s Ephesians 5’s household code from the Bible next to a household code from contemporary Stoic Philosopher Arius Didymus ==visual==

ARIUS DIDYMUS:

“A man has the rule of his household by nature, for the deliberative faculty in a woman is inferior, in children it does not yet exist, and in the case of slaves, it was completely absent.”

Obviously comparing Ephesians 5 to our 21st century world leaves us like, “yikes!”

BUT when we compare Ephesians 5 to a contemporary text, we’re left with a very different feeling.

• These are clearly substantively different, right?
• Do you notice that Stoic Philosophy doesn’t even address women, children, or slaves; it just talks about them, but they're not worthy to be addressed.
• There is clearly more of an egalitarian bend in the Bible —
  • Submit to one another, it says.
  • Everyone is addressed personally, not just talked about
  • Powerful men have responsibilities to live up too. ==visual off==

Again, not at all avoiding the clear truth that Ephesians 5 is by no means egalitarian to a degree that should satisfy us today…

But rather than going down the dead-end road of trying to make ancient texts fit in a modern world…

We instead ask more useful questions like:

• What’s the trajectory that this household code is trying to set its culture on?
• How can we set our culture on a similar trajectory?

And, suddenly, Ephesians 5 is no longer an obstacle to feminism or abolition; it’s an important link in the long chain that has led to today’s feminism and abolition, as God has worked to continue that trajectory.

So, that’s an example of the “better theology” strategy

• there is better theology out there! (we try our hardest to find and expose folks to better theology here at BLC!)
• we don’t have to settle for less than satisfying interpretations of scriptures or pictures of God

Good Doubt approach

• I think a helpful starting point for taking the Good Doubt approach with this is asking: How influential or important are these household codes in our context for today?
• This is not blasphemous, to say is this really important? Do I need to do the work to work through it or can I set it aside.
  • Basically, does simply saying “no thanks” feel satisfactory?
• A while back, I heard a really helpful metaphor for understanding how to navigate scripture.
• I originally heard Nadia Bolz Weber walk thru this on an episode of the podcast Bible for Normal People
• Nadia is a Lutheran pastor and theologian. And she was pulling from David Lose’s book Making Sense of Scripture
  • Not everything in the Bible holds the same weight
  • Bulls-eye view of the Bible / concentric circles
  • Teachings of Jesus & anything about Jesus at the center, holds the most weight it’s the “central point of gravity”
  • Moving out to the next circle- you have anything written elsewhere in the Bible that has the same messaging as Jesus (Hebrew scriptures, psalms)
  • And then moving out beyond that, you have early church stuff, still supports main heart of scripture
  • And then outer ring is things like these household codes or levitical codes in the Old Testament
    • They’re in the Bible, but they simply do not hold as much weight
  • When talking about this approach, Nadia says, “when people say to me, “well then what do you do about this verse?” I’m like, “oh my god, I’m so sorry. I do not have a dog in that fight.”
• It’s not that it doesn’t matter, but I’m okay holding that both/and. That this is in the Bible, and I don’t view it as instructional for my life, or for others lives. So I’m okay with just setting it aside
• It’s like basic gut-check: do these words feel loving and helpful?
• I know that Jesus prioritized the voices and experiences and healing of women in his ministry. I know that gendered hierarchy or slavery is not God’s intention for creation
• Do these codes align with the overall message of inclusion and love Jesus taught and preached
  • No matter all the wrestling you do with the idea of mutual submission, I just don’t think so
• Brian McClaren talks about how we have a moral obligation to build upon our ancestors, which often means moving beyond them.
• Good doubt here says, I can confidently move beyond these household codes. I can, with integrity set them aside.
  • I can doubt their usefulness for our understanding of family and gender here and now. And I’m okay with not needing to wrestle with the text to find meaning

So Vince, any final thoughts?

Final words

So, again, as our hope for this church is to help you cultivate a life-giving faith, we wonder if one of these strategies grabs you when it comes to handling the apparent confusion and injustice of the household codes in the New Testament of the Bible?

• Again, to say it really clearly: we, the pastors of this church, do not recommend one over the other across the board here.
• Both strategies — Good Doubt and Better Theology — feel at home here in BLC for a reason. They both work!
• They work to help 21st century city people face the confusion, injustice, and burn-out of life
  • which aren’t going anywhere — those are unavoidable features of our world
  • but which can feel so much more manageable if we have resources like a longstanding wisdom tradition and a sacred text and community to navigate (rather than having to face them as an individual on their own)
• You may feel more drawn to one right now as we talk about how to handle the household codes of the Bible, AND you may feel drawn to the other if we’re talking about something else.
• Another chance to work these strategies coming next week!

Yes, and I think the idea of drawing upon longstanding tradition is SO helpful for both the work of Better theology and the acceptance of Good Doubt.

You’re in good company regardless of what feels more helpful in the moment - one is not a more “legitimate” or well-back up stance than the other.

Both involve trusting your instincts of the best picture of a Loving God. And together in community we find new ways to theologize and doubt and question and dream. We don’t sort through this all alone

Prayer