Saying No To God with Matthew J. Korpman - Episode 378

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Well, welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I'm your host, Rick Lee James, and I'm so thankful I'm grateful that you're here with us for what I know is going to be another great conversation this week. My guest today on the podcast is Matthew J. Korpman. Matthew is a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church who has served as both a student pastor and chaplain within the denomination, and he also served as a homilist for various parishes outside the denomination, including the Episcopal Church. He holds 3 Bachelor of Arts degrees in theology, archaeology, philosophy, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in screenwriting, all from La Sierra University. In his new book, Saying No to God: A Radical Approach to Reading the Bible Faithfully, Matthew makes the case that blessed are those who defy God. Although bumper stickers abound that propose otherwise, the Bible itself reveals that just because God says it does not in fact mean That settles it. On the contrary, Kortman contends that a close reading of Scripture reveals that God does not want us to blindly obey him but rather invites us to lock hands with him and fight. The purpose of this book is to show another way to understand the Bible, one in which readers are not asked to accept what God says but, on the contrary, to say no to it—not because they merely want to, but because the God of the Bible Actually requires it. I know we're going to have a great discussion on this today. Matthew J. Kortman, welcome to Voices in My Head.

Thank you so much, Rick Lee James, for bringing me on. I really appreciate it. This is a conversation I've been looking forward to. Well, thank you.

I have too, and I have really been enjoying reading the book. As I told you before, I haven't quite finished it yet. I think I'm about 83% according to what Kindle tells me, so who knows how many that is in real pages. But there's so much to think about, and I know that everyone listening, even just hearing the introduction of the book, some of them may already be scratching their heads and thinking, what in the world, as, as we have this great conversation today about saying no to God and even having conflict with God as a way to deepen our faith and broaden our faith. So I'm looking forward to this conversation. Before we get too far into it though, I'd love for you to just explain to our listeners a little bit about what it is to be a Seventh-day Adventist, uh, because I think you're actually the first one that I've had on the show, and, and I'd love for our listeners to hear maybe just a few of the things that makes it unique among the religious landscape. Sure.

Um, it's a very complex topic, but for time's sake, I'll try to condense it way shorter than I have. Um, So basically Seventh-day Adventism, uh, the name itself implies two major doctrines that define, um, what you'll find usually in all Adventists. Seventh-day refers to the Sabbatarian practices that Adventists have. They honor Saturday as the Sabbath, just like the Jews. They avoid Sunday because historically Sunday was kind of uplifted to its elevated status due to antisemitism during the 2nd, 3rd, 4th centuries of Christianity. So Adventists take a strong stance on trying to continue the Jewish tradition as opposed to the kind of political fallout that happened in Rome. And then on the other hand, along with that Sabbath-keeping uniqueness, there's also the issue of the Advent. And in this case, the Advent doesn't refer to, say, like, you know, like Christmas Advent, it refers to the Second Coming. Or as my theology professor at La Sierra, John Webster, would say, the three-part Advent: Creation, Jesus's birth, and the Second Coming. One event, three stages, as he would say. But the main idea is that Adventists very much are looking forward to the Second Coming of Jesus, the in-breaking of God's kingdom, which doesn't sound that distinct distinctive per se, but when the denomination was formed in the 1800s, that belief was actually really unpopular. Um, most Christians at that time believed, uh, that humans had to become perfect in order to, uh, allow the kingdom to come into existence, whereas Adventists were the first of many who eventually came to dominate now, uh, those who said that God was going to need to break into this world before perfection could happen. So there was a debate, and it's been often forgotten, about this perfectionism, this idea that you had to reform the world before Jesus could ever come back. And Adventists were part of a movement that tried to resist that mainstream idea and say, well, no, you know, honestly, human beings kind of suck at doing this. And, you know, the 20th century kind of proved right in some ways with all the wars and, and all the nuclear capabilities we discovered. Human beings don't have the best track record of of reaching perfection. Uh, but in regards to that, ideas and so forth that kind of define Adventists beyond those two, um, Adventists don't typically, as a denomination, believe in the idea of an immortal soul. So the idea is that the body is holistic and the soul needs the body in order to exist. So when the body dies, the soul ceases consciousness and returns to God. Until the resurrection. So what that means, practically speaking, is that, uh, in that theory, when you die, it's like a blink of your eyes, and then the next second you open up your eyes after death and you're suddenly at the second coming of Jesus and the resurrection is occurring. So, okay, this idea sometimes is called soul sleep, but it's like a dreamless sleep. So like, just think of it like when you go to sleep suddenly and you wake up the next second, you're like, oh man, no dreams. All right, next day. Then there's also the fact that Adventists reject hell as a doctrine, eternal hellfire. That is considered a satanic deception by traditional Adventism. It's a belief that from our founding was very strong against, and it's not— Adventists are like annihilationists in their viewpoint largely, so they think of hell as more of a specific event that occurs at the lake of fire at Judgment Day. Rather than something that goes on and on and on. More of like a final death penalty for those who choose at the end to still not want to repent. Then finally, um, well, not finally, there's also the fact that Adventists have had a long early history of like social justice initiatives and being interested in like anti-slavery, um, when during their founding, because they were founded around the time of the, um, the Civil War happening. But then beyond that, there's one other thing that kind of makes unique, and that is that Adventists are anti-inerrancy. Adventists have never held an inerrancy position officially. They've always balanced an idea of understanding the Bible writers as human and the Bible as such as a human product, but also balancing that with a belief that the Bible is authoritative and that scripture gives us insight directly to God. That's a really careful balance to try and hold. And, um, that gives you an overview of the foundations of Seventh-day Adventism. The reality, of course, is that every Adventist you find is going to be different. I would not say that I'm, I'm a good representation in my book of what most Adventists think. Um, on the other hand, the book has been very well received by a lot of Adventists, so that tells you something. Um, I think that, you know, evangelicals have really influenced the Seventh-day Adventist Church in many ways. So even though we're not, uh, inerrantists, a lot of Adventists you might find share inerrant language. Even if they don't use the term, they'll talk about the Bible sometimes in ways that are very familiar to evangelicals. So a lot of statistics will usually group Seventh-day Adventists with evangelicalism. Despite the distinct differences that would probably really put people at odds. Just the hell thing alone, Rob Bell got skewered for being an evangelical who questioned whether or not hell should be eternal. Just imagine Adventists actually think that it's a deception created by Satan, and yet we don't get any flak for it from evangelical community. So I assume that it's kind of like the Romans with the Jews and Christians in the second century. There's, you know, the Romans are sitting around going, "Well, you know, these Jews, they're crazy, but they've been doing it a long time. We're used to them already. These Christians, they're Romans! What the heck happened here? They're adopting these crazy ideas? Oh no!" I feel like that's kind of the situation with Rob Bell and Adventists. Evangelicals go, "Oh, they're our crazy neighbors." They look at Rob Bell and they're like, "No, it's the chosen one." Yeah, you know, I was— Adventism in a nutshell.

Well, thank you for sharing that. And I can tell that, you know, a lot of our listeners are probably listening and thinking, oh, that's different, you know. But, but you know what, it's, it's really your whole book, actually, even though it's a book that is called Saying No to God. And even we were talking just before we started today, you were asking if there's anything like I staunchly disagreed with in the book. And, and I wanted to let listeners know up front, like, I didn't find anything in the book that I like really disagreed with strongly. I found a lot that is stretching me to think, that I want to go back and look at more. And to be perfectly honest, I've, I've read what I've read quickly, so I need to digest more of it quickly when I talk about these things. But one goal of this show is to actually have conversations with people that maybe do have a different viewing of things than I do, to to help me grow, because I feel like that's one of the best ways that we can grow and learn together. And what I found in so much of your book has really created places for me to think about and things for me to dwell on. And there's parts that I've had to pause on. And even just before I went to church yesterday morning, I was reading a little bit of it on my, on my walk to church because I live close by. And there were some passages that I just kind of had to stop and think on as I was on my morning walk. So I want to thank you for for this challenging book that you've given to us. And I want to just go right into it and discuss some of the things in it today. So the book is called Saying No to God, and it really is offering a strong case against what is called bibliolatry. And we might define that— and I think even James McGrath defines it in the book just in the beginning in his endorsement, I think he was the one that said it— is the sin of treating the Bible as as though it were God. And, um, I'd love to know, is this something that you, uh, personally struggled with in the church itself, like growing up? Because did you grow up in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, or is that something you came to? And I'm just kind of wondering what your relationship was, because, because this is a really strong case against bibliolatry in many ways.

Yeah, no, thank you for asking. I think I never fell into the trap per se of bibliolatry myself, but I did get influenced by— and I was born into the Adventist Church and have remained in it, but like, I was— some very popular Adventist televangelist preachers are very heavily influenced by evangelicalism, and so even though none of them use the terms inerrancy and so forth, I did naturally by watching them so much kind of pick up on the basics of evangelical inerrancy without ever getting a lecture, just by watching and learning and kind of figuring out, well, that just seems like common sense. Sure, it says God said this, well then God said this, then blah blah blah. It makes sense. Um, you know, there's a certain logic that goes with it. And so I got into that, and the funny thing was I was so gung-ho in that philosophy that when I became a teenager, I kind of became spiritually dead to a certain extent. I'm not spiritually dead, I shouldn't say. Biblically dead. Um, spiritually fine. I talk with God as a teenager, walk around, you know, praise God, pray. When it comes to reading the Bible, I was just not, not excited about that. Um, I felt like if the Bible is basic instructions before leaving earth, I got the basic instructions. Anything else I'm missing in there is not basic, and so it's optional, and it's probably a little bit boring. Um, and so I just didn't have any motivation to want to read the Bible or, you know, explore it very deeply. If I could watch a televangelist explain it to me, that was fine. I didn't need to go any further. Uh, they already put the bullet points, you know. It's, it's like, it's like students in college or high school who want the Cliff Notes version of a book rather than to write the book, you know. I got the Cliff Notes. I got all the major positions. You know, if I'm missing some nuance, it's not gonna affect the grade. The grade's all I care about, not my own personal growth. So for me, kind of coming from that perspective and thinking about things that way, when I finally started to think about the Bible in a way in which, you know, I actually as a human being had some sort of participatory role in it. And I think part of that was kind of discovering about scholarship, which, you know, growing up, I think a lot of evangelicals in some places don't have any idea about scholarship. They don't really know about it. If you're near a seminary or something, maybe you do. But then you've got the John Pipers of the world and so forth who are like, "Oh, if you get a doctorate in theology, you're probably a terrible person," or somewhere. You have those communities in evangelicalism. And so I didn't know anything about scholarship. And then when I started realizing about textual criticism, how the Bible was copied, how it was put together, the history of how humans were very integral to creating the shape of Christianity and of the scriptures themselves, and how translation committees have to actually decide what verses are authentic and not authentic when they make each new translation, and which footnote should belong in the main text and what should just be opt— all that stuff fascinated me and opened my eyes to realize, wow, the Bible isn't a one-way letter. It's not God wrote and then I just accept and then I just talk back. No, actually, there's a mystery involved. There's a puzzle involved. I actually play a role, and that was exciting. That opened me up to realize how much more rich the Bible was. But in recognizing how rich the Bible was, you also start paying attention and recognizing kind of like the other perspectives around you and where maybe some shortcomings come in. And so, you know, when I started to realize that the way people were acting with scripture was so one-sided that in some sense the Bible would become a form of idolatry. And I mean, for people, this is the hard thing. I have these discussions with people all the time where they're like, I don't do that. And it's like, okay. I mean, it's kind of the same things we have with like every conversation, even race or something. It's like, but I don't do that. Okay. Maybe you're the exception, but just because you don't do it doesn't mean a whole bunch of other people don't do it. And I was in— when I was in Jerusalem studying Hebrew in undergrad, um, I— there was a woman— I tell the story in the book, but you know, there was a woman who stood up and said, you know, uh, this is the Bible, and you know, it is— it has the words of Jesus Christ, so it is Jesus Christ. It is Jesus Christ for us. And you know, there was a weird logic, and everyone in the room was so uncomfortable. You just see everyone's eyes like, okay, crazy lady. But nonetheless, it's like, well, that's problematic because it is somewhat logical in her mind. All right, this is the exact words of Jesus, so it's as if it's like a radio giving us Jesus. So then you might as well just treat it like it is Jesus, like it's his incarnation. Like in a sense, that's how she seemed to be perceiving it. Jesus came as a human, then Jesus' words were incarnated into a book. And right, you know, and that's very, that's a very kind of Islamic way of thinking about the Quran and, and their scriptures. And, and it, I can understand the logic, it's just that what it, it doesn't match the book that we have, right? And that's the more that I kind of went into the Bible now with an actual interest in really digging into it, not just like, well, what does it tell me, that's what I'll do, but actually, what does it tell me, why does it tell me that, and, and what do I need to do in discerning that? Going into it actively, suddenly I realized, wait a minute, more and more I discovered that the Bible does not support the sort of, what would you call it, the authoritarian view of of scripture, in which people assume that, you know, if God has said this thing and it's in the Bible, then it— there's discussion closed. You just absolutely have to go with it. And in that sense, it becomes idolatry, in the sense that, you know, right, um, the Bible becomes this absolute statue upon which you bow, and you can never question or never ask things. Or if you can question, you can never actually question. You can just politely question while accepting that whatever answer it gives you already that you're questioning is the answer. Um, but I realized that in the Bible it does not support that view. It doesn't give us that sort of narrow, authoritarian, what some people would call like a divine command model of ethics. God said it, that's what defines morality, you do it. The Bible's way more complex, and the more I discovered that, the more I started to realize there's really not enough books or literature written on that particular issue. There is lots of books written on like, does the Bible have contradictions? Does the Bible have historical problems? Does the Bible— there's lots of stuff like that. But you know the funny thing about those books? They don't get us anywhere. If you have issues and you want to doubt, they're helpful to you because they confirm a bunch of things you might not have discovered yet. You don't want to doubt and you're not convinced of those things and you don't see it as problematic, you're just going to look at those books and be like, well, this is hurting the good faith I already have, and you'll just ignore it. And even if, you know, it's a perfect, uh, even if you have like a slam dunk case and you say, all right, this is a real contradiction in the Bible, I'm going to prove it to you, human minds are so subjective we can literally convince ourselves that what's in front of us is a figment of our imagination. Yeah. So if that's the case psychologically, You're never going to win any kind of discussion about scripture by just trying to say, "Look, I've got an argument for you." In fact, even research shows that people tend to actually get less interested in understanding things the more that you try to explain it to them because all their defense mechanisms are enacted as if they're being attacked. So I really wanted to say, "Okay, how can you approach this topic?" in a way that has not been approached before, would be deeper in a way that's been, that's ever been done before, or at least currently being done in our modern time, and would help not only, um, I would say push back against the kind of conservative bibliology, but also kind of pull back towards the center, um, individuals who might, uh, be more to the left, more liberal, who have kind of just dismissed scripture as in any way relevant. For them, who would look at scripture and say, "Well, you know, it's all screwed up, so there's just no point. Why should I even bother with it?" So this book really came out of that unique background and desire to marry those two purposes so that potentially instead of having warring factions on either side, we might actually be able to come to some mutual understanding from scripture itself that would allow us to talk to each other and actually reason with each other.

Well, you know, this is, this is not a lie. This is actually true. Yesterday I got a text from a fellow pastor friend of mine who is a part of the denomination that I'm in, the Church of the Nazarene. And I don't think anybody listening to the show probably knows who it is, and I'm not going to name who he is anyway, but he sent me a text yesterday morning after church and he said, I got an earful from a member of the church today because I don't necessarily embrace inerrancy and infallibility. It was a lot of fun. And he said it's not the first time it happens, but he said I'm tired of taking it on the chin for things like this. And we went on in the discussion and he said, you know, said a friend of mine observed that evangelicalism is the new fundamentalism, the anti-intellectualism of Christianity in some ways. And It seems like as I was reading your book along with getting these text messages from him, I thought, yeah, that really kind of sums it up, you know, in a lot of ways and what we're talking about here today. So it's obviously something that a lot of us are dealing with and grappling with. We want to take the Bible seriously, and we want to take it for what it's worth. But that doesn't always mean taking it as literally as people would like us to sometimes, or maybe we need to take it more literally by diving deeper and understanding the context and where it's coming from and what it's trying to say. But you're right, there's a lot in there where even the Bible at times, as one of my Jewish rabbi friends reminds me quite often, the Bible is often having an argument with itself. You know, it's sort of in these places that, you know, we want the Bible to just say, okay, it says this and, and that's that on the topic. But the fact is different books have different ideas that they're kind of working out together, and I think that's something interesting and living about the Bible in many ways that, you know, we need to address when we come to it. I want to share a passage from your book that I've been thinking about for a couple of days now, and it's one of the things that I really loved. And it's actually you quoting passage from Marcus Borg, and, and this is what it says. You say biblical scholar Marcus Borg notes that our familiar English word carries a forgotten meaning. Prior to the 7th century, he wrote, the word believe did not mean believing in truth statements or propositions. In fact, grammatically, the object of believing was not statements but a person. So what did it mean in English to say that you believed something? Most simply, to believe meant to love. Indeed, the English words believe and beloved are related. What we believe is what we love. And I would love for you to maybe kind of flesh that out a bit more for us, and what Borg was saying. And when we're talking about our beliefs, and sometimes we hold so tightly to the fact that, like, I have to be certain about this, I have to have this belief. But I love the way that it's brought out in your book, and you flesh it out more, that believe and be love are so related. Talk to us a little bit about that.

Yeah, no, I think the point that Borg was going for, and certainly what I was trying to emphasize in the book, is that we get so locked up into trying to think of believe as sort of accepting propositions and ideas as true, rather than to recognize that to believe in somebody— okay, like if I was to say, um, you know, to somebody who's married and say, you know, do you— what does it mean for you to believe in your spouse, right? That's not going to be hopefully answered by, well, I accept as true the proposition that she's my wife the proposition that she does not typically lie. The proposition that she— I thought that doesn't make any sense. If someone starts talking that way, you're like, man, are you from like some comedy show? Are you like the third guy that we're all supposed to laugh at because he's so unhuman? Um, your typical human response would be, oh, to believe in somebody close to me is to go ahead and say that I am in fact somebody who is going to, um, you know to put my heart into that other person's and risk everything, you know. To believe in this person is to put my possibility of being wrong at full risk of coming true. But to believe full-heartedly that even though it's risky, I don't feel it's risky because I believe it's, it's, it's perfectly secure. Relationships are always built on this, this weird, um, balance of risk and total, total security and, and, and kind of internal trust. And so when you beloved somebody, you know, what are you doing? It's the same thing. You're beloveding them. You're putting all your emotions, all your things that could be at risk into their, into their hands, into their capability of hurting you. You know, it's, it's, it's, um, or It's kind of like, I guess, in some sense, like the hedgehog dilemma in philosophy, that humans are hedgehogs. You know, we want to get close, but as we get close, our pointy ends start hurting each other. In some sense, right, you know, you could either think, "Oh, that other hedgehog wants to hurt me. That's why they're pointing at me," or you recognize that this is somebody who the warmth of being close to is better than whatever potential pains come with it. And I recognize and believe that they're not intentionally trying to hurt me and that they love me and they want to draw close to me for the same reason. It's that growth process. So I think like when we think about that in Christian terms, about believing and beloved, when we believe in God, it's not about believing that God said certain things. That can be part of it, right? Like if you're, you know, if your spouse tells you something, you know, believing in her might include, you know, taking seriously what she has to say. But it's deeper. It goes to that love aspect. It goes to the very core of that person, right? No one loves a person because of some word they said. No one loves a person because of some speech they said. They might love the speech, not the person. Somebody loves a person because they dive into that person. They, they bury themselves in that person. They come to know that person. So relationship is, you know, impossible to cut away from, uh, you know, believing. It's one and the same. And so beloving for a Christian, you know, has to be linked in there. So when you have like, you know, a lot of evangelicals, um, and, and not just them, but we'll pick on them for the moment because they're the large predominant group in America at least, um, when you have that kind of, uh, tendency in that community to think of things so intellectually, to think of God purely in respect to a relation of accepting what beliefs are said, and that I do think that that's true. You miss the bigger issues, the heart of God, and that's certainly something that I wanted to focus deeply in the book. Yeah.

Well, and you do a great job of it. And the book, again, I want to get into the title of the book, Saying No to God. And, you know, it might surprise some of our listeners to know that talking back to God and arguing with God, it's not an unchristian or unbiblical thing, actually. And, you know, it's part of this idea of relationship that you've just been talking about, this, this beloving of God. We want to dive into this relationship. We want to know him more. And as we know him more, you talk about some in the book, the way that, that God stretches us, especially in stories that we see in scripture, to go beyond what he's telling us, to believe in the heart of who God really is. And I'd like to read this quote that you have in the beginning of chapter 4 of your book from the Irish philosopher and theologian Peter Rowlands. And he says, the scriptures seem to suggest that one must Wrestle with, disagree with, and even disobey God for the sake of retaining one's fidelity to God. Now, that might make some of us who don't like conflict a little uncomfortable whenever I read things like that. Um, but so, so tell us, uh, because you, you write so well about this, how does arguing with God make us more faithful believers? Sure.

Um, I'm sure that's like the, the question that everyone has when they read that title. It's like, how is this Christian and you're saying that? And why is this a good thing? In fact, funny enough, when I first pitched this book, I was at, I will just say, at one of the most progressive liberal Christian publishers in the United States. And I pitched the idea to one of their marketing individuals. And just after I said the title, She was flabbergasted and was just like, why would I ever want to say no to God? And I didn't expect that. I was expecting, you know, a publisher that had published so many outright far-left, you know, liberal positions in theology would be like, oh, okay, what's your— what's— what makes this one unique? No, instead it was just like complete shock, like What? You know, she suddenly became a conservative for the first time. It was suddenly like, wait a minute, not that sacred cow. Um, but yeah, the truth of the matter is, is that what my book is, is focusing on is so nuanced, it's very possible to misunderstand. So I want to draw attention to one of the many biblical stories I mentioned to illustrate just what the foundation of it is, because it's, it's such a hard thing to even wrap your head around given our assumptions about authority and the divine and how God works, that you really have to just have the Bible itself speak. So if someone was listening and they were like, "All right, tell me, where in the Bible am I gonna find this?" So a great example, one of many, many, is Exodus 32. You're gonna find, I think it's verses 7 to 14, and then Exodus 33 until 34. And what you find there is the Israelites are down below They're building the golden calf. They've just been freed from Egyptian, you know, turmoil. And Moses is on Mount Sinai. He's with Yahweh. And God turns to Moses, he says, look, your people, they just gone ahead and created this golden calf. I am so livid. You know, in our modern parlance, you know, the Hebrew is like, I'm so pissed. I'm so utterly angry, I can't even tell you. And he says, Moses, get away from me because I'm going to kill every last one of them right now. I'm going to murder every last woman and child. I'm going to end every last one of them. They have betrayed me and I don't give a darn about saving them anymore. Now, in terms of how— and I know for some people they're like, wait, what? That happened? Yeah, that happened. Yeah, yeah, it's in the Bible. Um, but for some people, right, if we were to think logistically about how evangelical logic usually thinks about God, what's traditional religion, you would kind of be faced— an evangelical pastor would kind of have to come to the point with their own logic of saying, well, God is God, God makes up the rules, God is completely perfect, God is completely holy, then that means I can only accept what he says. And so if God says he wants to kill all the women and the children, I'm gonna have to accept it. That sounds terrible, but it's true. I mean, think about it. You see the same situation play out every week, uh, every Sunday in some churches, where somebody says, well, what about the genocide of the Canaanites? Yes, yeah, God had every right to murder those women and children because they violated his rules. He is the author and creator. He can take anyone out if he wants to, right? They, they use this logic all the time in regards to looking back at past stories. Here we have an example of Moses being faced with that same situation but in real time through God himself. And so if Moses is a good evangelical, the response will be, thy will be done. That is not what he says. Instead, Moses comes back and says Absolutely no, you cannot do this. First, he tells him, if you do this, everyone will call you evil. He doesn't go so far as to tell him like, and that's because you are, but he doesn't need to because the author of the story in Exodus is actually going to end the story by stating as a fact that what God said was evil. So before we get there, I'm just letting you know, like, even though Moses is kind of like walking— he's both defiant but also like very carefully, skillfully talking to God as a superior. The, the author of the story himself is going to affirm it's not just the other nations, this is an evil thing which God has suggested. But stay with me because I know like all your antennas of orthodoxy are like, what in the world is going on here? So what you end up having is Moses says you can't do it, first of all, because everyone is going to call you evil because You basically led all the Israelites to freedom so that you could murder them. Like, do you really expect, God, that they were perfect? They weren't going to mess up? You went through all of this only to, like, discover that, you know, oops, I didn't have enough foresight to know that these people are kind of like unruly and problematic. Then two, he says, you can't do it because you made promises to Abraham and to Jacob. You made these promises at the very beginning to your people. If you destroy them all, you have broken your promises. And this is, this is really interesting because, right, Moses is part of those people. God has gone ahead and told Moses, I'm gonna start over with you. It's not like, it's not as if one person wouldn't make it through. It's not as if the whole promise would be destroyed. But Moses wants to make the argument that that no matter what, if you're wiping out a majority of your people, you're breaking the promises. It doesn't matter if there's a small remnant. If you can't get a good enough portion, then you've broken your promises. And what's fascinating is that after he says this, God goes ahead and says, yep, you're right. All right. I, you know, I'm not going to destroy them. And then the author of the story of Exodus says, and God changed, you know, God changed his mind about the evil that he sought to bring onto the Israelites. And so this is just shocking as a story because what happens usually is that the story gets focused on, oh my God, I can't believe that God would say those things. Okay, that's legitimate to focus on, but that's usually where it is, and that's usually a an excuse for people to reject the Bible. You know, oh, Dawkins would happily bring this up, Christopher Hitchens, look, this is nuts. On the other hand, Christians will usually only touch this if they're interested, say, in God's foreknowledge. Let's have an intellectual debate on open theism. Let's talk about, did God actually know the future? Can God change? And so they focus on God changed his mind, that language, and then that's where the story goes. For me in this book, I was more interested in where in the world did Moses get the idea that he could tell God no? Where, where did this anti-evangelical, anti-authoritarian logic of talking to God as if he were an equal come from? And why is it in the Bible? And why did God listen to it in the Bible? And why is it necessary or important? And when I looked into that story, The fascinating thing that you start to recognize, and obviously for time's sake here I'm going to have to condense things a little bit more than, you know, you in the book I do, but like the short of it is that what, what Moses is doing here is described earlier by John Calvin and Martin Luther, um, two great reformers in Protestantism. They go ahead and see the story and they make the following argument that Moses is only rejecting what God is doing in the present explicitly because of what God has done already. They're using God as the very reason for objecting to God. God has said this in the past, now God suggests something that would contradict that, thus I contradict God in the present to affirm God in the past. In some sense, right, in scripture, God is often remembered as saying, like, I think in Malachi 3, you have God saying, you know, I do not change, my promises are eternal, what I say, you know, I mean it, you know, I am who I am. God always is swearing by himself. I affirm that I will do this for you, I will be there for you. If Moses accepts what God is saying, that throws all that other stuff away Moses might be obeying the god in front of him, but he would be declaring God a liar. He'd be accepting God as having broken his promises. He would have accepted that God was not the non-evil God that he believed he was. He would have just forsaken morality to affirm authority. And what this kind of gets presented as by Martin Luther and by Calvin, and that's what I presented as, it's a test. It's a divine test in which God, according to Luther, takes the devil's mask, puts it on his face, and begins speaking. And it's a test of whether or not the human faith partner is able to recognize that this is not the God they serve, that this is not the God that has trained them up to this point. This is unlike God. And in some sense, this can be related to like the idea of, you know, in movies, that famous trope where, you know, you need to get rid of this, you need to get rid of your partner, your spouse. They're going to be in danger because of what you've gotten mixed up with, the bad characters. And so you've got to get them away from you. So you want them to just, you want them to hate you or something. You want to provoke them to be upset at you so that they, they will go away and not care about you and they'll avoid the danger. Because if they care too much, like, you know, they will, then they're going to go ahead and get involved and potentially get hurt. So, you know, you'd go ahead and make up crazy stuff. I hate you. I always have. I lied about everything. You know, I don't like you at all. I don't want you. I don't want anything to do with you. Right? You're trying to make them cry. You're trying to make them just hate you so that they'll run away and you won't have to worry about them ever getting involved with what you're about to go through. But this is the famous part of the trope, right? The famous part of the movie trope is that the other spouse knows their spouse so well that after he leaves or she leaves, that spouse knows this is not like him or her. This is not who they are. Something is wrong. Something is up. I've got to save them. Something is happening. And this comes up all the time. But the basic point is, you know your spouse so well that no matter what they're telling you, you know when you can disbelieve it or you have reason to disbelieve it. And then you go against their wishes because you believe that you understand them well enough to know that there's something deeper at work. That's what I'm suggesting, and what Martin Luther and John Calvin suggested is happening in the story of Moses with God. And it seems to get confirmed because in the midst of that story, in Exodus 33, it actually tells us that Moses and God are speaking to each other as friends, that this is what friendship with the divine looks like. And then what really is the kicker is at the end of the story in Exodus 34, after they've been arguing back and forth constantly about different things, Moses says, "Show me your ways," as if, you know, he's fed up, as if he's like, "Look, I thought I knew your ways. That's why I've been rejecting all these things. But you know what? Put up or shut up. I am not going to take it anymore. You show me what God you are." You prove to me once and for all who I am worshiping. And so God says, sure, go stand by the cliff in the rock, and I'm going to pass by you, and I'm going to declare to you who I am. So he does. And obviously people remember the part of the story usually about God showing only his backside, because that's the only thing Moses could see. But there's a speech that God gives, and he says, I'm ever merciful. Always forgiving, always loving, always slow to anger. And you're sitting there going, wait a minute, none of those details match how you were acting in Exodus 32:7-14. None of them. But this is the point: all those attributes that God is declaring at the end are the very things that Moses was defending against God in that story. And so what you find out is that God is basically declaring to Moses You were right. I am exactly who you thought I was. This is the God you worship, not that God that I was testing you with. And you see this theme again and again through scripture. We don't probably have time to go through it, but like you see it in the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel, where the angel declares Jacob the one who was resisting the divine and says, you are now to be called Israel. Because you have fought God and you have won, right? The same idea of resisting God and being given a blessing as a result of it. Israel's name means those who fight God. Exactly. But the question is, in what sense are you fighting God, right? It's in this sense of like Jacob wrestling with God, saying, I'm not going to let you leave with the idea that you came to curse me. You're only going to leave if you affirm what I believe is true, that you always seek to bless me. And the same thing with Moses. I'm not going to let you become a liar. I'm going to, you know, declare what I believe to be true and hold you to that fire. And so that's really the idea of saying no to God, is this idea of faithful resistance to something that is out of God's character. In faith, drawing on God for that resistance. Not autonomous, not like, oh, I have some morality that's distinct and equally good, but that the very gift that God has built within you is the very thing that allows you to successfully engage with God. And so what the book does is then asks, what, what does this mean for people who are reading the story? Not just Moses in that story, living it, What about people who read Scripture and find the same problems? What about people who read Joshua and have the same reaction as Moses to the description of what God is doing with the Canaanites? What then? How does this disposition towards God as a hermeneutic, or a way of reading God's character, how does that inform us as a hermeneutic of reading Scripture? Sure.

Well, you've already brought so many great thoughts to this, and honestly, we're getting close to the end end of the time I have allotted today because, uh, there's just so much in your book. So what I want to do right now, if you could— and I'm so glad you brought up Israel because I was going to bring it up if you didn't— about Jacob wrestling with God and him giving him the name that does literally mean the one who wrestles with God, Israel. And, and this idea of, of faithfully wrestling with God through these things. What I'd like to do real quick, just so our listeners will know, because we're just not going to have enough time to get into everything today, I want to read a few of the, the chapters titles in your book so they can know a bit more about what you get into. We had been talking about what it means to, to say no to God, but you also have a great chapter in the book about Job's lawsuit against God, and that's something that's fascinating that you bring up. And then there's a chapter on Did God Say It or Moses, which, which gets into a lot with Jesus actually in that chapter, and different people who sometimes put Scripture pushed back on Jesus at certain points, and, and sometimes Jesus is pushing back on Scripture and different things to try to bring us to the place where we have a true understanding of who God really is. There's a chapter on becoming like God, and, and then there's chapters also about orthodoxy, about dealing with prejudice, and, and places in Scripture that actually were used to actually advocate for slavery, you know, for a long time there. And we had to go against scripture in some certain sense, and you write about it very well, in order to become abolitionists. And there's a chapter on homophobia and what it means to examine that today. There's a chapter on divine violence. And then you've already talked some about hell. And it was fascinating to me to read the Seventh-day Adventist view of hell that you already talked about in the beginning of the show, and how it's thought of as a satanic concept, which is in a different way than most of us are used to thinking of it in that way. And one of the best titles of a chapter is "We Aren't Always Right," and you get into some with Adam and Eve. There's just so much in the book that is so well thought out, and I think it will be a stretch for many of our readers if they pick up a copy, and I hope they will, of Saying No to God, and allowing them to maybe stretch what they've understood about Scripture and the Bible. I never advocate for people that you have to believe everything specifically that a writer is writing about, but it is good to be stretched and to ask whether or not you believe it, you know, and whether or not you want to go deeper in that conversation. I want to ask you real quick, if you don't mind, in just the couple of minutes that we have left here, and this is something that just came up while you were talking, where God may be testing a person in Scripture. And it reminds me a little bit of when somebody says something like— this might be a terrible example, but I'm just going to lay it out— so many people who are advocates for, for like President Trump They'll always say, you know, he'll put on some terribly racist thing on his Twitter feed, or some, you know, he just, he calls people all kinds of names and just does some really nasty stuff. And then when somebody who supports the president comes to them, they'll say, well, you have to go by what he does and not by what he says, you know, on his Twitter feed. It's not what he says, you got to watch the president's actions. And then I think, okay, well Well, he acts like a real racist, nasty person. So, in that regard, that's pretty clear. But let's say if somebody's taking that view of God, you know, and saying sort of like you've been writing about, of him coming to Moses and saying one statement and then being tested. How does that follow if a person says, "Well, you have to look at what God means, not what he says"? How would you respond?

To someone like that if they're applying this to Donald Trump?

Well, no, if they're applying something similar to that with God, for instance. Like, if they come to it, can, can God be trusted if we can't trust what he says? That, I think that might be a legitimate question somebody might come to with this.

Because like, some of the difference I'd see, like, like, in the Bible, this test, so to speak, comes as a result of a long line of faith. Like, in all the stories that that I discuss, uh, in the book. Every time scripture presents this successfully occurring, it's only done by God when the individual in question knows God well enough already to notice the difference, to recognize, right? This isn't really quite the same as don't go by what they say, go by what they do, because, right, like, that wouldn't work necessarily very well in a relationship. You know, there's you have to build a foundation of trust. So in these stories, God builds a foundation of trust with an individual, whether it be Abraham, whether it be Job, whether it be Jacob, whether it be, you know, all these characters. He builds that foundation, and then the test comes, which is a shock. The test is intended to be like, wait a minute, that's not, that's not normal, that's not right. You know, Abraham uses the phrase, you know, far be it from you. In modern language, we might say, "Crazy person said what?" That just shocks us, stops us in our tracks. It's about walking the walk and talking the talk, and then suddenly you don't. Does all that walking and talking that you went through previously now mean nothing? Does all of that suddenly go out the window now because the individual did it? With your spouse and your spouse decides one day and says, you know, actually, you know, I hate this, I hate this, I hate this, I hate this. Do you just accept that or do you suddenly recognize that something else must be going on? There's something underlying this because this isn't like, you know, my spouse. This isn't what they normally do. Um, so there's something about consistency and then recognizing what to do when that suddenly breaks for scripture, right? And obviously we didn't get into all the specifics of how the book deals with how to apply this to scripture. But in regards to like how to make sense of scripture as Christians, we have to determine, well, what is our standard beginning point? What is our consistency? And for us as Christians, our consistency is Jesus Christ. So what Jesus, as the incarnation of God, reveals about God becomes that foundation. And thus, whatever we're thinking about in regards to an inconsistency is an inconsistency related to Jesus. And specifically, this comes down to very much the idea of just, you know, plain logic. If Jesus makes claims that God's character is a specific way, and we accept that Jesus's claims are authoritative and correct about God's character— so let's say God is love, very simple. We'll just take that. You don't have to take it from Jesus, you could take it from from the Epistle of John. But, uh, if we take this idea, God is love, well then that necessarily means he can't also be God is hate. You can't have— right, just whether or not you agree there's something in the Bible that does say that, let's just admit logically they're, they're mutually, you know, exclusive to each other. One goes right, one goes left. You can't both go at the same time. Can't be both black and white. You can't be both right and left. You can't be both up and down. That's impossible. You make a choice and then you cut out the other part. You might not go the whole way. So for instance, if I say I don't, I don't not, oh, how do I say that better? If I say I don't hate someone, it doesn't mean that I love them, but it does mean that I'm going the opposite direction of hate. And that is in the direction of love, whether or not I ever would say I am I am reached the point of love with that person. If I don't hate them, then I'm going the opposite direction. So there's always an implication there. So if Jesus is telling us that God's character is one way, then that becomes our standard upon which we have to evaluate that if something in scripture seems to be going the opposite way of that standard that we've determined we're supposed to go right, suddenly we find something in scripture and it's moving left. We're going to have to make a recognition that we can't accept the logical contradiction. We can't accept both. We have to make a decision, and to that degree, we have to prioritize what we have already prioritized— the character of God, in this case, love. So if somebody says, don't look at what they say, look at what they do, I'd say, well, that's kind of problematic because, like, say in scripture, God is said to do many things. He says as many potentially contradictory things in this way as he does, uh, as he does, you know, actions, speech, all together. They can all go in those left and right ways. The issue is, if a person's character is a specific way, then what you're looking for is what things are out of character for them. And whatever things are out of character, then you can then isolate those things and start to try and understand what to make sense of them in relationship to God's character. But you can't just equally accept it all. You can't just say illogically, I'm going to accept that God can perfect— like, I heard one evangelical tell me this: God can perfectly hate and perfectly love, aka God can be perfectly illogical. That's not how it works. You, you, if God's central character is love, it will move consistently in that direction. We should not expect otherwise.. And so I would say that if people are thinking of using that politically, um, again, the same thing with, uh, Donald Trump. If you want to use the president of the United States, if he speaks a certain way, uh, and he was always consistently another way, maybe you'd have some argument, except I wouldn't say it's necessarily defendable. It would just be more of a politics game. But this isn't politics. He says and does contradictory things left and right. But with Donald Trump, there is no— there's no other incarnation to look to. There's no other version of him that you have to look to to understand his true character. He is who he is. The problem with God that so many of us face, right, is how do we make sense of, of God when he seems so utterly different from us? Thus steps in Jesus. Thus enters in incarnation. Giving us the ability to know who God is in a way never before possible, uh, to such an extent. And that becomes a standard for us. So while Donald Trump has to answer for his, uh, actions in real time, which we can see, and it can't be explained away, God provides us with the ability to actually have a standard, his own proclamation, that allows us to look at what people have said about God and match that up with what God actually showed himself and declared himself to be. And that's so important that we remember we're not, we're not Biblians, we're not, you know, Biblians. We're not trying to, to say, you know, the only thing that matters to our faith is thus saith the Lord. It's thus saith the living God, as we saw in Jesus Christ. And if we can't keep that center focus, there is no hermeneutic to scripture. Yeah, good answer.

Thank you for, for doing my thought experiment with me. I appreciate that so much. And I was even thinking about, you know, you write some in the book about Jesus in the temple, and you know, your chapter on, on violence. And there are things like imprecatory psalms, you know, where we have these psalms that the psalmist is crying out for God to do terrible things, you know, to their enemies. You know, break the teeth in their mouth, Lord. And, you know, even worse, you know, how happy I'll be when we can dash their babies on the rocks. You know, things like that that you just think, wow, that sounds horrible. And we have to be prepared when we come to those passages to say, if we see them in light of Jesus, if we are truly Christians and not, as you say, Biblians, we have to make room for the fact that when we pray those things do this, Lord, that Jesus is gonna say no, it's not in my character to do those things. Even in like Matthew 21, when it says Jesus entered the temple and he drove out those who were— he drove out the money changers and those who were selling doves there in the temple. After he drives them out, the part people skip over so often is it says the next verses, and the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them, you know, which is, it's just a really like profound statement of Jesus driving out those that would, you know, those who are doing things that are incongruous so that he can bring healing about. So at times when maybe it even seems God is taking a violent route, he's actually taking the healing route, which is kind of an interesting thing. We look at it and learning to see all things in the light of Jesus. I just want to say one, one final closing thought today. Well, before I do that, I want to remind everybody, if they go to voicesinmyheadpodcast.com, I'm going to have all of Matthew's links there where you can find places to buy the book. You can go to Matthew's website at matthewjcourtman.com. You can also go to the book website at sayingnotogod.com, and I'm going to make sure to have all those links in one place, or you can just go straight to those links. I do encourage everyone to read it. This book is gonna make a lot of people uncomfortable, I think, and you may get some pushback on it because sometimes we don't want to talk about these things that make us uncomfortable. And it probably won't surprise my listeners to know that I'm gonna quote Fred Rogers right here, but he said a great thing that I think is very profound when he says, "Anything that's human is mentionable, and anything that's mentionable can be more manageable. And, uh, and he talked— he's talking in, in a context of feelings because he says we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming and they become less upsetting and less scary. Um, and you already mentioned Rob Bell and how he got in trouble not for even claiming certain things, but even just asking questions. And I, I applaud your book for helping us to ask some good questions. And whether everybody wants to take the full journey with you. I think you're doing a great job of helping us ask these questions, and I think it's a good thing that we can mention these things. And if we can mention them, they can be more manageable, and that's how we learn and how we grow as people. So I want to say thank you for, for the hard work that you put into this and, and for taking the time to have this conversation with me today. It's been really great talking to you, and I hope we can do this again sometime in the future. I want to ask you, is there anything else anything else today that's just really burning on your heart that we didn't get to talk to, just in maybe a closing minute or two that you wanted to touch on that we didn't get a chance to talk about today? Because there's a lot we didn't get to talk about. Oh, for sure.

There's definitely a lot. I think two things probably. First, just to say that I definitely, for those wondering, you know, what kind of writer is he? Is he an ideologue? Is he somebody who beats you over the head? And says, you know, you obviously have to believe this or you're stupid. I over and over again in the book mention, especially in the second half which deals with all those complicated contemporary topics, I constantly mention, or try to at least, that you don't have to accept my opinions on ideas. I don't expect you to. I'm presenting a possible way of conceptualizing these texts. What matters to me the most is that these stories in the Bible and the perspective that they bring uniquely can come into the fore. That inerrancy as an idea can be seen from the Bible itself as being a non-biblical concept, something at odds with Scripture's own testimony. Those concepts I'm really interested in, but what I really want to do is help readers to be able to think think through things in scripture in new ways. And along with that, you kind of mentioned it, you know, certainly during our time right now with the Black Lives Matter movement and, and everything going on with racial tensions that people have experienced and racial healing that's being called for, I feel like the chapter I have on saying no to prejudice, which looks at the history of how abolitionists had to basically fight against slavery, admitting that the Bible essentially did not matter in this regard. To admit that yes, scripture supported slavery, and no, we don't accept it. To make that stand was so important. And this is kind of a running theme in the book. We say no to God and scripture all the time, but we do so unconsciously. We almost do it regularly by trying to deny that we've actually done it. And I firmly believe, having written this book, that the way going forward for Christian— for Christianity is being able to be honest that yes, I am going to say no to this slavery text. I am going to say that that's evil and wrong, and I have a way from scripture itself to defend why I can do that, and to defend how I can be a faithful Christian, faithful believer in God, while doing that with the very text I consider authoritative. That balance, which right now for so many is impossible, you know, to give way to one is to suddenly lose the other, to find a way of balancing those two together to create a new foundation for people from scripture itself, I will help us to finally come to a place that's way less polarized than it currently is and could actually allow us to have the kinds of conversations about Scripture and about our contemporary issues we're facing in ways that just right now we're not capable of. So that's my hope, you know, this, this book can lead to much richer and better conversations.

Great. Well, again, my guest today has been Matthew J. Kortman. His new book book is called Saying No to God, and we're going to have all the links to him and his book at voicesinmyheadpodcast.com. And, uh, thank you so much, Matthew, for being one of the voices in my head this week.

Thank you so much for having me, Rick. It's been a pleasure and an honor.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com where you can find out more about me, get my music on vinyl and CD, follow my blog, and even schedule me for a concert or a speaking engagement. Better yet, even a book signing in your neighborhood. You can find all that and more at rickleejames.com. Also, it would mean a great deal to me if you could write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast will be online. And now for the benediction: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. God bless you, and thank you for listening to Voices in My Head.