This summer I taught two different DMin courses in spiritual formation. As part of those classes, I shared what I have called in my online writing “the five mistakes of spiritual formation.” Naming these mistakes helps us see why so many of our efforts, sincere as they are, struggle to produce the fruit of the Spirit in our lives.

Here are the five mistakes of spiritual formation.

1. The Educational Mistake

The first mistake is treating spiritual formation as an educational problem.

This is the mistake highlighted by James K. A. Smith in Desiring the Kingdom and You Are What You Love. Smith’s work has been widely read, so many will know the basic point. We tend to assume that we are formed into the image of Jesus through knowledge acquisition. If we can just learn enough, understand enough, get our theology right, then transformation will follow.

We see evidence of this everywhere: Sunday school, Bible classes, Bible studies, sermons, Christian books. Beyond that, we see entire systems like Christian homeschooling, private schools, and Christian universities. The defining feature across all of this is making the study of the Bible central.

Now, to be clear, I don’t want to throw any of this under the bus. I work at a Christian university. I write Christian books. I teach a Bible class at my church. There is a lot of good here. And yet, we have to confront the pressing question: Does mastery of biblical and theological knowledge reliably produce the fruit of the Spirit?

Take, for example, the emphasis in some homeschooling circles on instilling a “biblical worldview,” often focused on debates like creation versus evolution. Set the content of that debate aside for now and let’s grant the goal total success. That is to say, imagine students perfectly trained to defend a literal reading of Genesis and able to win every argument when they get to college.

Here’s my question: How does rebutting Charles Darwin make anyone more loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, generous, faithful, gentle, or self-controlled? It doesn’t. Being able to prove Darwin wrong does not make you a more loving human being. And yet, consider how much time and energy gets poured into exactly this kind of effort. There is a deep confusion here about the nature of spiritual formation.

I’ll sometimes press this point with my students in a more provocative way: “Can you be a psychopath and get an A in your Bible classes?” The answer is, of course you can. The issue here is not cognitive. It is affective. A person can know all the right answers and still have a profoundly disordered heart.

Consider the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Everyone knows the story. And no one needs help with the interpretation. Everybody knows the point Jesus is making. And yet, how many of us still struggle to be good neighbors?

The point is obvious. Our struggles with the Parable of the Good Samaritan are not educational or informational. We already know the answers. We can all get an A on the Good Samaritan test. And if that is so, we have to face the obvious conclusion: We cannot teach our way into being more like Jesus.

2. The “WWJD” Mistake

Closely related to the educational mistake is the second mistake. If the first mistake is treating formation as an educational problem, the second is treating it as a decision-making problem.

Call this the “WWJD” mistake, as in “What Would Jesus Do?” Or, as I tell my students, “Being like Jesus isn’t a Trolley Problem.” The Trolley Problem, I expect many of you know, is a classic ethics puzzle that asks you to weigh options and decide upon the right thing to do. The spiritual formation mistake is imagining that following Jesus consists of solving a series of ethical puzzles, or of adopting certain moral or political principles to guide each decision.

To be sure, solid values and good moral reasoning are important. But the mistake is thinking that life is simply a series of moral crossroads, where at each one we pause, ask “What would Jesus do?” and then choose accordingly. In this view, discipleship becomes solving one ethical puzzle after another.

Now, of course, there are moments in life where we face real moral decisions. I’m not denying that. But there are two problems with this way of looking at spiritual formation.

First, life doesn’t slow down to give us time to deliberate. Life comes at us fast. So fast that our responses are often automatic, emotional, and unconscious. When I lose my temper, I’m not standing at a moral crossroads weighing my options and making a bad choice. I am, rather, just reacting. Before I even realize what’s happening, it’s already happened. The horse is out of the barn.

As I tell my students, “The challenge of being like Jesus isn’t about solving a series of ethical puzzles. It’s about being ambushed by a series of emotional triggers.”

Second, when we do arrive at decisive and critical moments, what we do in that moment depends on the kind of person we have already become. You can arrive at that crossroads selfish, scared, and reactive. Or you can arrive at that crossroads loving, steady, and courageous. But that outcome was formed long before you arrived at the consequential moment of choice. In short, the WWJD framework, treating life as a series of ethical puzzles, wholly misses the question of virtue and character.

Virtue is a kind of holy habit, what I call holy automaticity. When life comes at you fast, your first response has to be the right one. Kindness, patience, gentleness, and self-control need to be reflexes. And reflexes are formed through practice.

You want to play guitar? You practice. You want to drive a golf ball straight? You practice. If you want to respond like Jesus instinctively, you have to practice that response over and over again.

Which raises the question: Where are we putting in that kind of practice?

3. The Trickle-Down Mistake

At this point, with the issue of practice, the conversation in my classes usually turns to spiritual disciplines: prayer, fasting, Bible study, worship, Sabbath. All the usual suspects.

Which brings us to the third mistake.

Most of these practices focus on our relationship with God. They are vertical practices. The assumption is that as I grow closer to God, that intimacy will shape how I treat others. I call this the “Trickle-Down Theory” of spiritual formation.

To be clear, once again, I am not denying the importance of these practices. My day is structured around them. These practices matter deeply to me. And they do have an effect on how I live.

But there is a problem here, and that problem is indirectness.

If you want to become kind, you can pray about being more kind. And that, of course, will help. You can also study what the Bible says about kindness. That will help. And yet, these spiritual disciplines are also indirect.

Simply put, if you want to be more kind, why not practice being kind? Directly and interpersonally.

This is where much of our spiritual formation effort goes wrong. We keep directing our energy upward, toward God, and never get around to the horizontal dimension—actually doing the thing we are trying to become. This indirectness assumes that growth in our relationship with God will automatically “trickle down” into how we treat others. We focus on prayer, Bible study, and other spiritual disciplines but rarely turn to directly practice interpersonal virtues like kindness, patience, gentleness, and self-control.

The point here is obvious. If you want kindness to become an automatic response, a holy habit, it has to be practiced. Over and over again. The same is true for patience, gentleness, and self-control. To form the fruit of the Spirit, you have to practice the fruit of the Spirit. And yet, by and large, we don’t.

4. The Liturgy Mistake

A mistake closely related to the Trickle-Down Theory is what I call the “Liturgy Mistake.”

Referring back to the work of James K. A. Smith on desire, liturgies, and spiritual formation, many point to liturgy as the key to spiritual formation. As Smith describes in his books, Christian worship functions as a counter-liturgy to the rival liturgies of consumerism, nationalism, and culture, reorienting our loves toward God and the kingdom.

I love these ideas. I love liturgy. I love the rhythm of the liturgical calendar, structured prayer, silence, Sabbath, Lectio Divina. I geek out on all of it. And I agree that we need practices that shape and direct our loves.

But here is the problem, and it is closely tied to the issue with the Trickle-Down Theory. Liturgy, as Smith envisions it, is mostly tied to church. Liturgy tends to be vertical, aimed at God rather than at human neighbors. And most crucially, liturgy is occasional: a Sunday service, a monthly rhythm, a liturgical season, or a daily practice. Because of this, liturgy alone cannot solve the problem the Trickle-Down Theory describes. Liturgy is too indirect, too intermittent, and too vertical to form the reflexive, relational habits of Christlike love in ordinary, daily life.

5. The Service Mistake

Now, at this point, someone will object. Don’t we have interpersonal practices? What about service?

That brings us to the fifth mistake: assuming that service is practice.

In the spiritual disciplines literature, service is often offered as the “outward” counterpart to the inward disciplines. And again, service is good. Service is vital. Service forms us. But service does not solve the problems we’ve been describing.

For example, many acts of service lack direct, face-to-face interaction. You can rake someone’s yard, organize donations, or work behind the scenes at a soup kitchen. All good things. But in these activities, you can be alone a lot. And even group service projects can lack sustained engagement with the people being served.

Also, service, like liturgy, is occasional. A few hours here and there. Once a month. And while important and meaningful, these service activities do not have enough repetition to form interpersonal habits.

Lastly, service tends to happen within spiritualized contexts. When serving our neighbors, we are on our best behavior. There is a social expectation—this is a service project, after all—to be kind. And for most of us, it’s not hard to be nice for a few hours in a structured volunteer setting.

So, while it’s important to do good work in the world, service itself doesn’t provide us with the regular, situational, and daily practice we need to form interpersonal virtues. The challenges we face in being kind, patient, and gentle tend not to occur when we are engaged in a service project. Rather, we face these challenges at work, at home, and as we go about our daily lives. We face these challenges when we are tired, when we are frustrated, and when we are triggered. These moments are the crucible of spiritual formation.

Service, for all its value, does not typically train our reflexive responses. Consequently, service does not give us the hours of practice needed to form holy automaticity. Service is good. But service is not practice in the ordinary, unremarkable moments of daily life where spiritual formation actually happens.

In 2018 our Bible class at church was studying the Holy Spirit using Jack Levison's book Fresh Air: The Holy Spirit for an Inspired Life. At the time I shared online some reflections that I want to pull together here.

In Numbers 11 Moses is struggling under the load of leadership. So God tells him to gather seventy elders to help bear the burden. The Spirit that rests upon Moses is shared with them, and they begin to prophesy. But then something strange happens. Two of the appointed elders, Eldad and Medad, do not go out to the tent of meeting. They remain in the camp. Still, the Spirit falls upon them, and they begin to prophesy there.

This prophesying in the camp bothers Joshua. It appears to him to be a crisis of authority, prophecy occurring in an unauthorized zone, outside the command structure and chains of authority. So he cries out: “Moses, my lord, stop them!”

Joshua seems concerned about renegade, unsupervised prophecy. Moses, by contrast, is unconcerned. His view is wider, more generous, more liberal: “Are you jealous for my sake? I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them!”

Take note of this pattern. From the very start, the Holy Spirit has this odd habit of showing up in unauthorized zones, creating crises of authority.

This pattern expands in the vision of Joel 2. Moses prayed for a day when the Spirit would be poured out upon “all the Lord’s people.” But Joel takes this in an unexpected and expansive. The Spirit will be poured out not just upon Israel, but upon “all flesh.”

And this outpouring, like in Numbers 11, falls in unauthorized zones, upon groups excluded from power and authority: the young, women, and slaves. The Spirit destroys traditional lines of power—age, gender, wealth—bringing all flesh into the company of the prophets.

As Levison observes, Joel’s vision stretches the story horizontally and vertically. Not just all Israel, but all flesh. Not just the privileged, but anyone at all—sons and daughters, old and young, even male and female slaves. The Spirit is not parceled out to the pious or privileged. It is outpoured indiscriminately. There is not a single boundary—social, economic, or gendered—that can prevent the Spirit from creating a world populated by prophets. It is, as Levison describes, a devastation of privilege, an obliteration of barriers, a kind of inspired anarchy.

This universal, transgressive vision becomes the rallying cry of the church in Acts 2. Peter declares that Joel’s prophecy is being fulfilled. But Acts quickly shows that this is a work in progress. The church continues to struggle with its inherited boundaries.

So once again, the Spirit acts.

In Acts 10, the Jewish followers of Jesus remain constrained by moral, religious, and ethnic prejudices against Gentiles. The vision of Joel 2 has stalled. So the Spirit intervenes, giving visions to both Peter and Cornelius and bringing them together.

And then, while Peter is still speaking, a second and unexpected Pentecost occurs. The Holy Spirit falls upon the Gentiles.

Once again, the Spirit shows up in an unauthorized location. As Peter says, “Surely no one can stand in the way.” But without the Spirit falling in this unauthorized zone, people most surely would have stood in the way. In fact, they do. Acts 15 makes clear that this event creates a massive crisis of authority within the early church, threatening to divide it.

By claiming Joel 2 as the mission statement for the kingdom of God, and by witnessing the Spirit fall in an unauthorized location, Peter and the early church cross a boundary previously unimaginable.

And here is where Levison makes a fascinating observation. The Greek word diakrinó appears twice in this story. In Acts 10, the Spirit tells Peter to go with Cornelius’s men “without hesitation.” But when Peter recounts the event in Acts 11, he interprets the command differently: the Spirit told him “not to make a distinction between them and us.”

The meaning shifts. At first, Peter hears the command as urgency: Don’t hesitate. But after witnessing the Spirit fall upon the Gentiles, he comes to understand it as something deeper: Do not discriminate.

That is the transgressive Spirit at work. The Spirit that falls in unauthorized zones. The Spirit that creates crises of authority. The Spirit that pushes beyond the boundaries we try to maintain.

Go, and do not discriminate.

I've been reading the letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. 

Today I was delighted by Letter 54, written to Christopher Tolkien in January of 1944. Christopher was in the air force at that time, fighting in World War II. 

What I enjoyed about the letter was a little digression Tolkien takes into a theology of guardian angels. Tolkien encourages his son to "remember your guardian angel," and goes on to explain why:

Remember your guardian angel. Not a plump lady with swan-wings! But – at least this is my notion and feeling – as souls with free-will we are, as it were, so placed as to face (or to be able to face) God. But God is (so to speak) also behind us, supporting, nourishing us (as being creatures). The bright point of power where that life-line, that spiritual umbilical cord touches: there is our Angel, facing two ways to God behind us in the direction we cannot see, and to us...

It's a lovely image. God is behind us and before us, supporting and nourishing us. And in each of those directions, "facing two ways," there is a "bright point of power," a "life-line," and a "spiritual umbilical cord" touching us. And at that bright point of power, that nourishing umbilical cord, both before and behind us, "there is our Angel."

What do we think about when we think about Jesus?

Progressive Christians tend to see a social justice warrior and a kind, compassionate human being. Being like Jesus means being non-judgmental, tolerant, welcoming, and inclusive.

I agree. But Jesus was also a moralist. Consider Matthew 5, right out of the Sermon on the Mount:

If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.

That's a pretty uncompromising vision of how we are to deal with sin.

A related issue here concerns the debate about what Jesus meant when he said "the kingdom of God is within you." Historically and exegetically, "within you" was taken to be the best translation. But in modern times, such an interiorization and spiritualization of the kingdom has been deemed problematic, as not material, systemic, or structural enough. Not concrete or real enough. And yet, Jesus' teachings about the "reign of God" were very much concerned with the status of the human heart. The reign of God within us.

For example, from Mark 7:

For from within, out of people’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immoralities, thefts, murders, adulteries, greed, evil actions, deceit, self-indulgence, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a person.

Notice that what defiles a person comes from within. What makes a person unclean is an unclean heart.

Jesus certainly cared about justice, mercy, and the inclusion of the marginalized. But he also relentlessly pressed inward, toward repentance, holiness, and moral transformation. The kingdom of God was not only social and external. As I describe in The Book of Love, the reign of God was also personal and interior. A matter of the heart.

"there was no payne that might be suffrid leke to that sorow that I had to se Him in payne"

In Chapter 17, Julian continues her prolonged meditation upon the dying and dead body of Jesus. It gets pretty intense as she describes Christ's hanging body, the widening of the wounds, the discoloration, and the drying out of the body she described in Chapter 16. It's a grim read.

The showing overwhelms Julian. In Chapter 2, she had asked to experience, sympathetically, Christ's pains upon the cross. And as she does so in this showing, she comes to regret that choice:

Than thowte me, I knew but litil what payne it was that I askyd, and as a wretch repentid me, thynkand if I had wiste what it had be, lothe me had be to have praydd it.

Translation:

Then I thought to myself, "I knew but little about what pain it was that I had asked for, and like a wretch I repented, thinking if I had known what it would be, I would have been loath to have prayed for it."

But the deeper pain that Julian comes to feel isn't the sympathetic pain of Christ's sufferings. Rather, it's the pain of watching someone you love die. She cries out:

I thowte, Is any payne like this? And I was answered in my reason: Helle is another payne, for there is despeyr. But of al paynes that leden to salvation, this is the most payne: to se thy love suffir. How might any payne be more to me than to se Him that is al my life, al my blisse, and al my joy suffren? Here felt I sothfastly that I lovyd Criste so mech above myselfe that there was no payne that might be suffrid leke to that sorow that I had to se Him in payne.

Translation:

I thought, “Is there any pain like this?” And I was answered in my reason: “Hell is another pain, for there is despair. But of all pains that lead to salvation, this is the most painful: to see your beloved suffer. How could any pain be more to me than to see Him who is all my life, all my bliss, and all my joy suffering?” Here I truly felt that I loved Christ so much above myself that there was no pain that might be suffered like that sorrow that I had in seeing Him in pain.

A question we'll consider going forward, a perennial one about Julian, is whether Julian was a universalist. There is material in her Revelations for both sides of that debate. And in this passage we see a bit of the evidence for "no" in her description of hell as another kind of pain because despair is added to that pain. Julian's pain, by contrast, is a pain that "leads to salvation." But it's also the most painful pain because it's the pain of witnessing the pain of one you love.

Again, all this is very distant, and even alien, from modern Christian sensibilities. But in medieval spirituality, vicarious suffering with Christ on the cross was a path of mystical union. And there is biblical precedent. Paul speaks of knowing Christ by "sharing of his sufferings" (Phil. 3:10). 

What is striking in Julian, though, is where this identification brings her by the end of the chapter. Julian's deepest pain is seeing the one she loves suffering. And that pain becomes an expression of love. Julian discovers that the more she loves Christ, the more deeply his pain becomes her pain. Which might provide a bridge to our modern sensibilities. Love makes another's suffering matter to us to the point that it becomes our own. To love so deeply that the greatest pain we might experience is the pain of those we love.

The simplest reason of The Book of Love is for everyone, for both conservative and progressive readers of Scripture, is that love is hard. And it's hard for everyone, no matter who you are.

Each of us has what Peter Singer calls our "moral circle." Within that circle we feel concern and care. For many within our moral circle, our love flows easily and freely. But that love can also be costly, sacrificial, and difficult. And within our moral circle there are those whom it is harder to love.

Outside and beyond our moral circle, in the territory of the stranger and the enemy, love becomes even more difficult. As I describe in Stranger God, people outside my moral circle are met with indifference, fear, superiority, revulsion, or hostility.

The point is easily made. Progressive or conservative, love is difficult. Love is a challenge. Love is hard. Survey your heart and you'll quickly find places where your love is absent, hesitant, cold, or begrudging.

I wrote The Book of Love to bring the high calling of love into view. The demands of love show up most clearly in the chapters "Diamonds, Dignity, and the Imago Dei," "Mercy, Not Sacrifice," "This Is the Way," "The Shape of Love," and the epilogue "God Is Love."

Let me conclude by putting it this way. How do you write about a book of love for everyone?

I’m put in mind—once again!—of the Elder Zosima’s final sermon in The Brothers Karamazov. Zosima concludes his sermon with this exhortation: “It would be easier for the birds, and for a child, and for any animal near you, if you yourself were more gracious than you are now, if only by a drop.”

I don’t care who you are. Atheist or Christian. MAGA or woke. Catholic or Protestant. Republican or Democrat. Trans or cis. Conservative or liberal. Evangelical or progressive. Or anything else you can think of. The world would be a better place if all of us were a drop more gracious than we are right now. The world would be easier, for all of us, if we were a drop more kind and gentle today than we were yesterday.

You and I can be a drop more loving.

That’s how you write about a book of love for everyone.

In Part 2 of this series I described how, for conservative readers of the Bible, reading Scripture as a book of love was mainly a hermeneutical journey. Progressive readers, by contrast, tend to endorse many of the hermeneutical moves and approaches I describe in The Book of Love. They embrace liberationist hermeneutics (see the chapter "Tell Old Pharaoh, Let My People Go"), progressive revelation (see the chapter "Mercy, Not Sacrifice"), take Jesus' moral teachings with absolute seriousness (see the chapter "This Is the Way"), and lean more heavily into human experience when interpreting Scripture (see the chapter "The Stories Won"). These are just a few examples of where conservatives hesitate, hermeneutically speaking, and where progressives go all in.

If all this is so, if progressives already have in place many of the hermeneutical assumptions necessary to read the Bible as a book of love, what else do they need? That is to say, what is The Book of Love offering that progressives cannot get from other books about how to read the Bible?

The answer is: ontology.

Progressives view themselves as already reading the Bible as a book of love, but by and large they struggle with belief in the ontological realities that justify and sustain that vision. Regular readers know that I've been writing about this for years: the relationship between ontology and the Christian commitment to radical and sacrificial love. Simply put, the Christian vision of love isn't possible without a metaphysics of hope. Love requires what John Haught has called an ontology of life. So, right at the start of The Book of Love, in the chapter "In the Beginning," I jump on this ontological issue using the life and witness of Maximilian Kolbe to make the point plain:

[W]hat makes love worth the cost? Especially, as we see in the story of Maximilian Kolbe, when the costs of love accumulate and the price tag becomes substantial. What makes sacrificial love sustainable?

This is where ontology matters, how you imagine the world you are living in. Love demands an ontology of life. Knowing that life is there to catch us empowers us to give ourselves away in love. For example, the pacifist theologian Stanley Hauerwas has long noted that nonviolent resistance demands a belief in the resurrection. His point is obvious. If there is no hope of life after death, throwing your one precious life away, like Maximilian Kolbe, in an act of nonviolent resistance is a waste. Given an ontology of death, a world where life is accidental and rare, preserving your life at all costs has to be your primary moral imperative. Self-interest and self-preservation must rule, as any sacrifice we make won’t ultimately matter or make a difference. The cosmos will end in death no matter what we do or don’t do. Ultimately, a billion years from now, no act of either love or hate will change the course of history. The atheist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described the ontology of death this way: “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.” In such a world, self-preservation is privileged over sacrificial love.

The Book of Love imagines a different, better world. To repeat, what is at stake in Genesis isn’t science. What is at stake is whether your view of the universe creates a greater or lesser capacity for love. An ontology of life creates capacities for love through the hope that our small, daily sacrifices ultimately matter and make an eternal difference. No life given away in love is lost. No act of love, large or small, is ever wasted. We can love fearlessly and sacrificially because death is not our destiny.

Other chapters in the book continue to underline the vital necessity of ontology. In "The Great Pear Theft" I describe how soteriology (our beliefs about salvation) concerns our dire need for help. That is to say, salvation isn't reducible to moral performance but involves real rescue from real powers that hold us captive. In the last chapter of the book, "The War of the Lamb," I describe the role of eschatological hope in sustaining our moral efforts when objective signs of victory and success are absent, perhaps for the whole of our lives.

In short, for many progressive readers of the Bible, reading Scripture as a book of love is less a hermeneutical issue than an ontological one. And so in The Book of Love I give those ontological issues the attention they need.

In the last post I described locations in The Book of Love where I tried to surprise progressive readers of the Bible. In this post let me point out places where I tried to nudge the hermeneutics of conservative readers.

Big chapters where I had conservative readers in mind were:

"The Vow of Love": A chapter were I nudge readers away from eschatological fatalism. 

"Tell Old Pharaoh, Let My People Go": A chapter where I nudge readers toward the prophetic imagination and a liberationist hermeneutic.

"Saved By Difference": A chapter where I describe how the gospel calls us away from ethno-nationalism.

"Mercy, Not Sacrifice": A chapter where I nudge readers away from a "flat" reading of Scripture to show how the Bible is having an unfolding conversation with itself.

"This Is the Way": Calling readers of the Bible to take the "red letters" of Jesus seriously.

"The Stories Won": Nudging readers to see how, in Acts 10 and Acts 15, the early church allowed the work of the Holy Spirit to change how they read the Bible.

"The Revolution of Grace": Pointing out to readers the social implications of grace, that grace isn't just about the forgiveness of sins and going to heaven.

"When the Man Comes Around": Suggesting to readers that love, rather than "faith alone," is the standard by which we'll be judged ("if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing").

"The War of the Lamb": Nudging readers away from end times conspiratorial readings of Revelation.

In the last post you saw how the Book of Love had a lot of surprises for progressive readers of the Bible. As you can see above, there are also a lot of nudges for conservative readers as well. Again, I tried to write a book about the Bible that was for everyone.

As I said in the last post, Part 1 of The Book of Love is mainly speaking to readers who, for anxious reasons, resist stepping into hermeneutical self-awareness. But as I've shared, I wrote The Book of Love for both progressives and conservatives. I want the Bible to be a book of love for everyone.

Progressives see themselves as already reading Scripture as a book of love. So what could I possibly say to them? Lots, it turns out.

As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, progressives have their own "Ostrich Option," which I called "Everything But Jesus Is Problematic." So one of the things I tried to do in The Book of Love is rehabilitate those parts of Scripture that progressives tend to avoid. Some of those topics and texts include (and I highlight the chapters in which I talk about these):

Science and Genesis ("In the Beginning")

The Fall and, downstream, the problem of evil and suffering ("The Catastrophe")

The violence in the Old Testament ("Mercy, Not Sacrifice")

Exclusionary texts in Leviticus ("Mercy, Not Sacrifice")

The atonement ("Loved from the Foundation of the World")

Judgment Day and hell ("When the Man Comes Around")

End-times beliefs and the violence in Revelation ("The War of the Lamb")

Reading the Old Testament over against the New Testament ("The Vow" and "Saved by Difference")

As you can see, there's a whole lot in the book for progressives. And here's the biggest thing:

The Apostle Paul

As I expect you know, progressives tend to be hard on Paul. They love Jesus. Paul, not so much. But in The Book of Love I devote three whole chapters to Paul: "The Revolution of Grace," "How to Be a Human Being," and "The Shape of Love." Three chapters might seem like a lot, but if you add up the words devoted to Paul in Acts and the words Paul himself wrote, he accounts for about 70% of the New Testament. So my chapter allocation seems appropriate.

To be clear, my three Paul chapters are good medicine for conservative readers of the Bible as well, perhaps even more so. Still, I think showing how Paul has proven so epochal in how progressives, theists and atheists alike, define the word "love" will be a surprise for many.

"Blodeleshede and peyne dryden within and blowyng of wynde and cold"

In Chapter 16 Julian reaches her eighth showing, her vision of the death of Jesus on the cross. Julian will dwell upon this showing through Chapter 21. So buckle up!

In Chapter 16 Julian describes Jesus' body bleeding out, thereby discoloring the body. The almost total loss of blood causes the body of Christ to dry up and shrivel. Externally, this process of drying out is also caused by a chill and blowing wind:

Blodeleshede and peyne dryden within and blowyng of wynde and cold commyng fro withouten metten togeder in the swete body of Criste. And these four, tweyn withouten and tweyn within, dryden the fleshe of Criste be process of tyme. And thow this peyne was bitter and sharpe, it was full longe lestyng as to my sighte and peynfully dreyden up all the lively spirits of Crists fleshe. Thus I saw the swete fleshe dey, in semyng be party after party, dryande with mervelous peynys. 

Translation: 

Bloodlessness and pain drying from within, and the blowing of wind and cold coming from without, met together in the sweet body of Christ. And these four, two from without and two from within, dried the flesh of Christ by the process of time. And though this pain was bitter and sharp, it lasted very long, as it seemed to me, and painfully dried up all the living spirits of Christ's flesh. Thus I saw the sweet flesh die, as it seemed, piece by piece, drying up with marvelous pains.

So, dear friends, what to think of this?

I ask because we are thrown, here with the eighth showing, back again into Julian's medieval preoccupation with a close and devout meditation upon the sufferings of Jesus, in this showing his very dying and succumbing to death. I've made this point repeatedly in this series, how modern and progressive readers of Julian tend to ignore or skip over the more macabre aspects of her Revelations. But this is the very side of Julian I'd like for us to be interrupted by. 

Why? Why the necessity of the bloody spectacle of Calvary?

Here's how I put it in The Book of Love: 

Beyond a demonstration of God’s love for us, the agony of Golgotha also brings the severity of grace into view, a price that draws sorrowful attention to all the pain we have caused. This was the logic behind the sacrificial system in Leviticus in anticipation of Golgotha: the necessity to make sin visible. The visible horror of Jesus’s death brings the damage we have caused into clear, undeniable focus, prompting confession, repentance, and making amends. Without this costly display, grace would be reduced, as it often is, to a get-out-of-jail-free card. Evil would be trivialized. Our pardon would become a ready and easy excuse to move past everything we break in the world.

How you treat others, and yourself, is a grave and serious business. The severity of grace, its visible cost, makes this truth unavoidable. The bloody spectacle of Calvary is supposed to shock, disturb, and interrupt you. The tortured body of Jesus exposes our sin. The harm we have caused comes into view. In this bloody mirror we behold the horror of human evil and depravity. And standing at the foot of the cross, we confess how we have contributed our share. We recognize that we are complicit. We arrive at the moral pivot of our lives. Our stories turning at this precise moment.

In yesterday's post I described how, in The Book of Love, I wanted to bring some readers into "hermeneutical self-awareness." That everyone has a hermeneutical posture toward Scripture should be obvious (few of us agree about how to read the Bible), but it's scary to admit this. If you recognize that you are interpreting the Bible, you're hit with the very next question: How do you know if your interpretation is correct?

Simply put, hermeneutical self-awareness creates anxiety. So after a chapter on hermeneutics, I turn to talk about attachment theory. Our relationship with God is experienced as an attachment bond, and in that bond we can be either securely or anxiously attached. We can trust that God is for us, even if we make a hermeneutical mistake. Or we can be fearful that God will damn us should we err. And if anxiety is affecting how you read the Bible, those fears have to be addressed. As I put it in The Book of Love, you can't read the Bible scared.

How do you deal with this attachment anxiety? That mainly involves how we view our attachment figure. Consequently, after the chapter on attachment I turn toward our views of God. When you make a mistake, is God for you or against you?

This sequence explains the three chapters of Part 1:

hermeneutics → anxiety → view of God

But the psychological flow is actually reversed:

view of God → anxiety → hermeneutics

That is to say, if you don't think God is for you, that creates anxiety, and that anxiety affects your willingness to step into a conversation about hermeneutics.

When we think about a "Book of Love for Everyone," Part 1 of The Book of Love is asymmetrical, focused upon psychological dynamics (e.g., God imagery, anxiety, self-awareness) mostly at work in conservative readers of Scripture. This is because progressive readers of Scripture tend to be more aware of their hermeneutical choices. For example, deconstruction is nothing if not a hermeneutical journey, searching for alternative ways of reading the Bible in light of science, shifting political values, and metaphysical doubts. That doesn't mean progressives read the Bible well. They don't. But they don't need much warming to admit that reading the Bible is a hermeneutical endeavor.

In the Introduction to The Book of Love I describe how I wanted to write a book that would surprise both conservative and progressive readers of the Bible. As you might expect, that was not an easy task! Here's how I described our situation:

Our problem is that we read the Bible from within our echo chambers. We are no longer surprised by Scripture. And books about how to read the Bible preach to their choir, sermons for the already converted. We go along with this. Since we already know what we believe, we read authors who confirm what we believe. The Bible becomes tribal, always voting on my side of the culture wars.

What most of us want when we pick up a book about how to read the Bible is cozy confirmation. We’re not interested in critical confrontation. We want authors on our shelves and podcasters in our ears who confirm our settled worldviews, political opinions, beliefs, and values. But when the Bible is always filtered through our beliefs and politics, it loses its holy capacity to surprise and startle us.

So, fair warning. The Bible you and I are going to talk about will unsettle and challenge you. Love refuses to be shoehorned into the box of our preferred politics. Neither progressive nor conservative Christians read the Bible very well. You and I will do something different.

If this is so, how do you describe the Bible as a book of love for everyone? In this series I want to share some of the background of The Book of Love. Specifically, I want to discuss issues I observe among both progressives and conservatives that interfere with reading the Bible through a hermeneutic of love, and how I chose to address those issues in the book. Basically, I'll share the choices I made and why I made them so as to make The Book of Love a surprise, or challenge, for everyone, both conservative and progressive readers.

Let's start with what I take to be the hermeneutical biases of conservative and progressive readers of Scripture, and why I think "neither progressive nor conservative Christians read the Bible very well."

On the conservative side, the main hermeneutical concern I tried to address was the widespread conviction that hermeneutics can be avoided. Many conservative readers of the Bible adopt what is called a "plain sense" hermeneutic. Sometimes this is also called "biblical literalism." The classic meme that captures this way of reading Scripture is: "The Bible Says It. I Believe It. That Settles It."

In The Book of Love I call this "the Ostrich Option," sticking your head in the hermeneutical sand to claim that you don't interpret Scripture but are, rather, reading the clear, obvious, plain, and literal meanings of the Bible straight from the page. So, for these readers of Scripture, I had to woo them into what I call "hermeneutical self-awareness."

What about progressive readers of Scripture? Well, these readers have a different sort of problem. In their self-assessment they already read the Bible as a book of love, mainly through a social justice lens. Trouble is, for many of these readers their hermeneutic isn't really a hermeneutic at all. It's more like a hatchet job. Sometimes this approach to Scripture is described as "picking and choosing" around the parts of the Bible progressive readers don't like. (Though conservative readers are accused of this as well.) Perhaps a better way to describe this progressive hermeneutical approach is: "Everything But Jesus Is Problematic." The Old Testament? Problematic. The atonement? Problematic. The book of Revelation? Problematic. The Apostle Paul? Most definitely problematic.

The only part of the Bible progressives find unproblematic is Jesus doing nice things for people. That part of the Bible is okay. Everything else is skipped over. This way of reading the Bible is the progressive version of "the Ostrich Option," ignoring and pretending that the Bible, outside of Jesus, doesn't exist.

In short, there are varieties of the Ostrich Option. I try to address the conservative Ostrich Option in Part 1 of The Book of Love, and my attempt to face the progressive version of this option is handled throughout the book as I try to rehabilitate parts of the Bible that progressives tend to avoid, often like the plague. I'll touch on how I do this throughout The Book of Love in the posts to come.

I recently shared how I attempted to use Blaise Pascal's strategy to "warm, not instruct" in writing The Book of Love. 

That idea of "warming" to a reading of Scripture is something I describe in The Book of Love in reference to a related idea described by William James:

The philosopher William James once described how ideas and beliefs can feel either hot or cold to us, as either alive or dead. For example, what do you think about ghosts? Depending upon how you see the world, the reality of ghosts will feel to you as hot and alive, as a real possibility, or cold and dead, as totally unbelievable and impossible. Why the reality of ghosts feels hot or cold to you, alive or dead, speaks to your deeply held assumptions about the nature of reality. Those background assumptions, often unconscious and unspoken, shape how you read and interpret the world.

The same goes for how you read the Bible. Some readings of the Bible feel hot or cold to you, either alive or dead. Some readings of Scripture you find obviously wrong and illegitimate. Totally un-biblical. For you, these are cold and dead readings. Other readings are hot and alive, readings you find compelling and plainly true. These readings you deem biblical.

And at the end of that chapter I return to the image:

When we get to the end of our journey together, what I will have shared with you will feel either hot or cold, as either a live or dead option for you. We may have to agree to disagree about some things. But my hope is that reading the Bible as a book of love will grow warm with possibility and promise. I pray something comes to life for you.

This is one of the reasons I didn't draw straight lines in the book from Biblical text to doctrinal conclusion or political belief. Draw those lines too quickly or directly and the reading comes across as cold and dead. You've jumped too far, hermeneutically speaking. You attempted instruction but neglected warming. 

Another way to think about this approach is by applying stages of change theory to hermeneutics. If you want to change how a person reads the Bible, you cannot begin with argument and instruction. In stages of change theory, people in the pre-contemplation stage are not yet open to change because the alternative does not feel viable, meaningful, or even imaginable. Again, the reading feels cold and dead. And this is often where many of us begin with respect to unfamiliar interpretations of Scripture. We dismiss them instinctively, before serious consideration, because they do not fit our background assumptions about God, truth, holiness, justice, or love. Consequently, the first task of hermeneutics is not persuasion but warming. Before a person can contemplate a new reading of Scripture, that reading must become emotionally and imaginatively possible. The reading must begin to feel warm and alive. Only then can the person  move out of the pre-contemplation stage of hermeneutics and into the contemplation stage, the stage where we begin to genuinely wrestle with the possibility that we have seen something partially, or perhaps even wrongly, and that the Spirit is inviting us into a deeper and truer vision of God. 

Were you not told?
"Do not run."
That care with these sharps was needful?
The Lord's name is a razor.
His Word, a blade.
Lethal, a twitch with this scalpel.
The margins too slight
for the clumsy well-meaning
or the ignorant zeal.
Do you not see the bleeding and the scarred?
Or behold the corpses
in the overflowing morgue?
O mortal, beware to cut.

Pray for the fevered, sickly souls.
That they might find virtuous, practiced hands.
Let the cancers be excised,
with incisions rightly made.
Where the luminous edge glides
between the nerves of the soul,
and the capillaries of the mind.

—inspired by The Book of Love