Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears and software, and may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.

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Diana Butler Bass 0:08

How we think of sin has a huge impact on how we think about Jesus as Savior. So if you think that you're wretched from your birth, and that there's no good in you, and that you're a terrible miserable worm, who doesn't even deserve a shred of love, the idea of Jesus as a savior who comes into the world to overcome your nothingness and make you something in the image of God; so that you can then be saved is theologically make sense it's very compelling. But if you keep that view of sin, you're never going to do anything about that view of Jesus. That is that Jesus is just you know, the sacrificial Son of God are this you know, sort of glorious being who is so different than us who deigns to love us and all this kind of language of really sort of “Christ superiority”. But the text is really rather different, you know, the gospels show a different story.

Seth Price 1:33

Hey, there, everybody. Welcome back. I'm Seth, this is the show. I'm glad you're here. Now, then, it's been a while since I did this. And honestly, I hate that sometimes I do. But I did want to give just a quick couple PSA. So did you know that each and every episode, as best as I can, is transcribed, there are 15 or 16 that are not transcribed. And I'm working on those. But I'm doing my best to ensure that this show is accessible to as many ears, eyes, minds, people as possible. Did you also know that there are so many other things that go into this show? The biggest aspect of that is time. And yeah…so here is a plea, I need your help to continue to grow in a way that is sustainable. If you have gotten anything out of any of these free episodes of this show from any of the guests, or maybe from me, but probably from the guest, I need you to consider supporting the show over on Patreon. And you'll find links in the transcript right here. Or you can go down to the show notes or the website or there's so many ways. And I get it if some of you can't, if you can hit the button. I appreciate it.

Now then, Diana Butler Bass has been a favorite of mine for a long time. She writes well, she speaks well, she is hilariously sarcastic on social media, which I absolutely love. And she's written a new book; now it's been years since I've spoken with her. But Diane is one of the first people that ever came on the show. And that group of people hold a special place for me because those people were fuel to a confidence fire that I think was needed for myself. Either way, so she wrote a new book called Freeing Jesus, and I'm not sure how to describe it. And this book that she's written it's full of wonderful stories and some heartbreaking ones. But it is a story about how you can still be a Christian in a world that seems disillusioned with any work on who Jesus is, and seems to be entirely worried about you just believing what I believe; or I believe what you believe, or we believe what our neighbors believe. And we're all terrified to talk about it.

So I'm gonna stop rambling. I think that's what I'm doing. And I'm gonna roll the tape for Diana Butler Bass. Here we go everyone.

Seth Price 4:50

(in laughter)

Yeah, my kids will say “you're different in the morning than you are in the evening.” And I'm like, “Well, I'm tired. And you know,”

Diana Butler Bass 4:56

So is the sun. You know? (Laugh from both)

Seth Price 5:00

I like that. All right, well, let's get going. Dianna Bass. Welcome back to the show. I don't think I've spoken to you since like 2018, something like that. It's been a while. But I will thank you. I don't think I've ever told you this before. So you are among like the first 10 or 15 people that ever said, “Sure. I'll come on to some no name podcast”. And it's people like you that gave me confidence to continue to do a podcast. So it's been too many years. But welcome back. I'm glad you're here.

Diana Butler Bass 5:28

Well, that was in the pre-pandemic days, huh long, long ago.

Seth Price 5:35

That was even pre-Trump days. I think you were, I think when you were on, we talked about writing a book on gratitude during the election, as you're like, like, I remember you talking about that. But again, it's been a long time since I've even listened to that episode. But say it's been some time. It's been some time.

Diana Butler Bass 5:53

Well, congratulations for staying with it. And I know that your audience has grown. I see, you know, chatter about your podcast and different social media. So good for you.

Seth Price 6:03

I should get in social media more. I get in, I like things I get off. I can't, it makes me angry. But yeah, I enjoy doing it their worst hobbies, I could waste money on golf or something else. Instead, I read books about God. So there are worse things that you could do. So however, I frame these a little bit different, I script a lot less questions, because I don't know, maybe I'm more confident in myself, doesn't matter. But whom would you say you are? Like when I say what is it who is Diana Bass what is that? What do you answer to that?

Diana Butler Bass 6:35

Um, you know, it's a funny question, because in some ways, I open the book with the question, the apostle Paul asked to Jesus, who are you? And I make the point, in that part of the book, that Jesus really doesn't answer the question. Instead, all we have to go on is Paul's experience of Jesus over time. And it's almost as if Paul's trying to answer that question for his whole life. And I thought about that, of course, in relationship to Jesus for the book that we're going to talk about in a moment. But I also thought about it in relationship to my own life. And that is, do we ever really know ourselves?

As a writer, a big part of the spiritual quest, that I would say that I've been on, is to understand who I am in this world and what my calling is. And I just turned 62 not very long ago, just a couple weeks ago. And it's very surprising to me, that at 62, I'm still asking myself that question. Because you would think that I would know the answer. (we both laugh) You know, I mean, the basics are always there. You know, I'm Diana, I'm a writer, a gardener, a mom, a wife, and you know, I love books and ideas. I'm a teacher. And I say those things that almost sounds like those are things I do. But the truth of the matter is, is that every one of those signifiers that sounds like an activity, a writer, a gardener, a mom, a wife, it's far more than something I just do. Those are the things that emerge from my engagement with others and the world, with love. And so they wind up being who I am, as well as what I do.

Seth Price 8:39

Yeah, your gardener comment makes me want to ask you a question. I'm gonna ask it, but don't feel obligated to answer it. My wife bought tulips for Easter, because we had some family over because we're all vaccinated. And we're like, cool, let's let's do this. And I'm like, I felt like we should plant these outside. But it's Virginia. And it's still April. And there was frost on the ground this morning, but the high is 80 and I know it's gonna kill them. Don't answer that, because I don't want to talk about gardening. But that was what popped up in my head. I'm like, I really want to save these tulips because don't I think they come back every year. However I don't. Anyway, I'll figure it out.

Diana Butler Bass 9:11

This is what we get for a living in the northern most part of the South.

Seth Price 9:16

It's awful. Like my son wanted to plant, we built a huge garden last year and a big compost bin and that type of stuff, because we needed things to do. And he's like, “Let's plant potatoes”. Like, when…when do we…do we plan on now? When do we plant potatoes? I have no idea when we plant potatoes, but let's go buy some and plant potatoes. Which we did last year, and we ate them all. I love that we made homemade french fries and…

Diana Butler Bass 9:38

Oh wonderful. So they worked.

Seth Price 9:41

Yeah, it was great. They were baby potatoes, but it's probably because we don't know what we're doing or I don't know it doesn't matter. They still were edible. So you referenced your book, which is called Freeing Jesus and then it has the one of the longer subtitles I've seen in some time, Rediscovering Jesus as friend, teacher, Savior, Lord, Way and Presence which if memory serves those are the titles of the chapters, except for the last one, but we'll get there. So why…all right, so there are countless books, what made you sit down and say, we need another book on Jesus, because I haven't figured out yet if this is theology, or memoir, or a blending of the two, and how those two kind of interplay, but what's kind of the story with this text?

Diana Butler Bass 10:26

the truth of the matter is, I never sat down and said, I'm going to write a book about Jesus, as a matter of fact, of all of the subjects I ever thought I would tackle as a writer, Jesus was at the very bottom of the list. And part of my rationale for that is, you know, I have a PhD in church history. And so my specialty area is American Religion. And I'm still pretty sensitive even though I've not been in the formal Academy for many years, I'm still pretty sensitive about people's areas of expertise. And I have so many friends who are New Testament scholars, or who are scholars of early Christianity. And so I always felt when I was with any of those friends, like, this is not something I can write about. You know, I can write with confidence, a lot of confidence, about religious trends and religion and politics and how religion functions in 19th & 20th century America. I mean, there's all kinds of things that I feel like I know, intellectually, really well.

But as far as knowing the biblical, theological, source material for writing a book about Jesus, it was a little scary. So it came about, mostly, because I was going to write a sort of a longer project on theology. And it was going to be a far more general project, almost like a theological handbook for people who no longer were comfortable in church, or people who felt like they wanted to leave church or have left church to explore, you know, how you could approach different theological issues, even though you might not be part of a formal institution anymore. So it was going to be that kind of book, and kind of a map, as it were to the theology. And when I started the project, I just decided, oh, I'm gonna write the chapter on Jesus first. I don't know why I thought that there's any number, I could have written a chapter on creation first, that might have made more sense, especially with some of my former work.

But I just sat down at my desk, it was in the summer of 2019. So it was the summer before the pandemic began. And I just started writing. And I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, I wound up writing something like 60-70-80 pages, it was a lot of pages on Jesus. (Seth laughs) Yeah, you think the subtitle is long! And as I was writing, I realized, Oh, my gosh, you know, this is not a handbook to doctrine I'm writing a book about Jesus. So I called my publisher and told them that we had sort of a little back and forth. And lo and behold, that's where it came from.

Seth Price 13:35

Yeah. Are you still going to write that? Because I will go back to your other book? Because I think I saw I don't know if it's based on census data or what it's based on. But like, overall, I guess Western Christianity is now like below the majority. And I don't even know where that number is. I saw the results the other day, and I can't remember the data from that. I think that's still needed. Maybe?

Diana Butler Bass 13:58

Yeah, you know, I saw those polls too. And in a very real way my work since 2012, has been around that coming tsunami of demographic change regarding people's religious affiliation. And the poll that you saw is a pretty simple one. It just showed that in the year 2019, because this was the data crunching that happened during 2020. We haven't seen the 2020 data yet. It's always about a 14 month lag period on this kind of data. So on that the data, the most recent data available, the percentage of people who identify as religious people who attend a church, synagogue, mosque, temple, etc. has slipped to being underneath 47% of the population under 50%.

Seth Price 14:56

So 47% for I think, Republican white, evangelicals in the Southern Baptists, those numbers apparently climbed, which I found really interesting.

Diana Butler Bass 15:06

I have to go look at that, because it's interesting because white, Republican, Southern Baptists, evangelicals have been for the last 10 years in decline, pretty steep decline. So they might have had an up year. But that's in the overall trend of a lot of erosion. So the numbers show, whatever the case of the numbers, they show a pattern that has now going on for 15, almost 20 years, and that is at first (this) slow and now precipitous decline into being a multi-religious pluralistic society with an incredible number of people who are secular humanists, or just religiously uninterested. So that's a big change, you know, and, and that's a…

Seth Price 15:58

So the answer is yes, then you're gonna write that book?

Diana Butler Bass 16:02

Oh, you know, I don't know if I'm gonna write that book, per se. I don't know if you've seen it yet. Part of the reason why I'm really glad I didn't write that book is because my friend Brian McLaren, sort of wrote this book.

Seth Price 16:16

I have that book. I haven't read it. And I can't remember the title…it is over there. I can't, but I know what what you're talking about. I have it. I haven't read it yet. I want it's on the list.

Diana Butler Bass 16:25

It's called Faith After Doubt.

Seth Price 16:27

Yes, and is green or teal?

Diana Butler Bass 16:29

Brian and I were working on these projects at the same time, we're very good friends. And I did not realize that he was writing a larger project on basically theology. And he didn't realize I was writing this project on Jesus. But when people read the two books together, we've already gotten so many comments. It's like, “Oh, these two books are, like, cousins”. (we both laugh)

They are. So I think that the project of the general theology is probably have been at least put it rest for a while by this book, which does have a lot of theology in it.

Seth Price 17:08

It does. So what are you freeing Jesus from? What is that?

Diana Butler Bass 17:12

I'm freeing Jesus from a lot of different things, I'm freeing Jesus from some of the accretions that have been put on Jesus, in terms of just just absolutely rigid church interpretations. You know, there are some of us who still do go to church. And one of the things that happens often in churches were handed a plate of approved interpretations of Jesus week after week after week after week. And the struggle, I think, for some people is what happens when your own experience and those interpretations don't mesh. And so this project, in many ways, is to open the doors and let regular folks say the way that they've experienced Jesus matters. So that's one thing that I'm freeing Jesus from. But then certainly the other thing that I'm praying Jesus from the church is that the church is not the only institution responsible for putting reduce sort of narratives around Jesus that are hard to live with.

There's a cultural narrative around Jesus in the United States. And that narrative is very simple. The narrative is the idea that Jesus is absolutely the divine Son of God whom God sent into the world in order that Jesus would die on the cross for the sins of every person. And that you have to accept that Jesus in your heart, be born again, and you're going to be saved forever and go to heaven. And so when most Americans think about Jesus, they think about that theology. And they think about, you know, people holding up John 3:16 signs at football games, or Jesus Saves signs at insurrections at the nation's capitol. And in both of those cases, boy, if Jesus doesn't mind getting freed from that set of interpretations, there will be nothing left of Jesus. In another 20 years.

Seth Price 19:16

I want to lean on that sin part. So there's a part in here in your chapter on Savior where you say

Eastern theologians understood creation is good and maintained that the original goodness had been disordered and obscured but not destroyed by sin.

Then you go on to talk about Adam’s sin as a propensity to sin. And then you talk about how the Western Church has mostly spoon fed what you told me of you were born wretched, can't stand to be in your presence, and that's why. So, how do you dissect that a bit? Because when I talk about religion to people, first off, my views on Heaven and Hell are slightly different than most people's, and as well as I don't like penal substitutionary atonement, which is a much fancier way of saying what you're kind of getting at here. But what how are you freeing Jesus from that? And then what role does Jesus then play when we're talking about salvation?

Diana Butler Bass 20:08

The narrative about sin is one of the major narratives throughout the book. And it really, truly, was the case in my life that part of the inhibitions that I felt toward being completely free was this story about Original Sin, and the pervasiveness of sin. And so there were several junctures, I think, all of which I relate in the narrative, where I had to look at that story about what happened in Genesis 2, 3and 4 in an entirely different way, I'll tell you, if I was going to write a book, a different book, on a particular doctrinal issue, I'd probably write on Genesis 1-4 which I think are probably for the most important chapters in the Bible.

So my struggle with sin, what kept happening is that people kept telling me, you know, that I was really truly evil. And when you tell a person, especially a woman, or a person of color, or someone who is otherwise marginalized, in our society, a gay person, transgender person, that they're, you know, they're just wretched, they're evil, they're not worth anything. It reinforces all of the hierarchies of privilege that we have in Western culture. And it's, those doctrines of sin have functioned to keep people who are at lower levels of the social pyramid in their place. And, so, I think there's been just a tremendously negative effect of those doctrines of sin on Western culture.

So a lot of people in other parts, you know, other parts of the Christian hierarchical pyramid, who aren't at the top have chafed against that vision. And yet it's within that same sort of structure, or that chafing against that structure, that so many people who are sort of left out of the social conversation have actually found Jesus. I mean, it's one of the most sort of stunning things in say, African American experience in the United States.

I was just looking at a set of tweets by a fella named Dante Stuart on Twitter. He's a black man. And he was saying you're part of the quest of black theology. It's not just to resist white supremacy, it's not just to, you know, tell white Christianity, that it's wrong. But it's to give an authentic voice to the experience of black America with Jesus and with God.

And that authentic voice questions, you know, things like that view of sin? And certainly women have questioned that view of sin through feminist theology for a half century now. So the short answer to that is how we think of sin has a huge impact on how we think about Jesus as Savior. So if you think that you're wretched from your birth, and that there's no good in you and that you're a terrible, miserable worm, who doesn't even deserve a shred of love, the idea of Jesus as a Savior who comes into the world to overcome your nothingness and make you something in the image of God so that you can then be saved. Now, it's theologically make sense it's very compelling. But if you keep that view of sin, you're never going to do anything about that view of Jesus. That Jesus is just you know, the sacrificial Son of God or this you know, sort of glorious being who is so different than us who deigns to love us and all this kind of language of really sort of Christ superiority.

But the text is really rather different you know, the gospels are show a different story. They show a guy who came out and came from God and was born into this world and hung out with really strange people. Who, critics said, hey, look at that guy! He hangs out with drunkards and tax collector. And so the Jesus of the New Testament is really rather different than, oftentimes, the Jesus of our theological cultural imaginations. And so to get back to that, you know, I think is really important is to say, well, who is this Jesus really? How do my stories fit with that big story that the church has told? Am I awkward with it, I rejected it. Is my story corrected by that the big stories, etc, so that the sin pieces, probably the most significant theological aspect of this book?

Seth Price 26:03

Do you feel as though, I've asked this question a couple different ways, a couple different times, but if fear is like that stick, or that switch of how you're training a horse and the right way to go, or the bridle or whatever, I don't ride horses, but you know what I mean? Do you feel as though our faith is prepared to allow that to go away? Because, I feel like it becomes…people often say that I'm focused on the wrong things, because they're worried about saving from something. Like they need to be rescued from something and I'm like, no, we're supposed to be doing something. Do you feel as though organized religion, or faith, is prepared to take away that fear of original sin, especially as the churches related to it?

Diana Butler Bass 26:51

Well, no institution is ever prepared to give up fear as a motivator. You know, I think that you can see that in our education system. You have to pass certain kinds of benchmarks or you're not going to go to college, and you're going to be poor for the rest of your life. So fear becomes one of the ways that we motivate students to succeed. Same thing in politics, is that you terrify your base voters that, you know, the other side is, you know, horrible, they're gonna take away all your money, what have you. And so you keep them from voting for the other guy by creating a culture of fear. And religion, you know, institutional religion does the same.

So in that sense in as far as churches are human institutions, I fully expect fear, to continue on as a motivating factor for quite some time. But the interesting piece of it is that people are letting go of it on their own. I mean, I think those statistics help to show that is there some, you know, there's a theological rebellion of some sort brewing that shows up in those statistics. And it's not just “oh, I don't believe in God anymore”, or I don't like the church or, you know, I'm angry at corruption. There are theological questions at the basis of people leaving church about issues that have never been well addressed by Christianity in particular.

And so, you know, I think that one of the issues is this issue of sin is that people now are kind of looking in the mirror and they're saying to themselves, you know, this particular vision of the doctrine of sin: one, it doesn't really fit with my life, and two, if I did embrace it, and I tell stories about this in the book, if I did embrace it, it became self abuse. And, you know, I've seen lots of people talk about how the darkest visions of human nature lent themselves toward being unhealthy mentally. And that certainly was part of the case for me.

So I think that there is a questioning of that set of doctrines going on and people are just saying, Okay, well, if the doctrine is on, I'm a sinner from my birth, and that there is no health in me and that Adam, and Eve had sex and past sin through every human being through our DNA

Seth Price 29:41

(sarcastically) 6000 years ago.

Diana Butler Bass 29:43

(With laughter) Right! 6000 years ago! You know, I don't believe that, you know, and people are literally saying, I don't believe that. So the good news and all of this is that there have actually been other Christian options and some of those options are in Eastern Christianity. Some of those options are more in the African American tradition, some of those options are found and traditions that were actually deemed heretical by the church. And it’s because the church wanted to control this doctrine, because if they didn't control it they couldn't control human beings.

Seth Price 30:21

I want to ask you to freestyle a bit. And feel free to punt the question if you don't want to, because it's not in the book. But I found myself at the end, wondering if you were to write another chapter, I would like it to focus on freeing Jesus from prosperity. like the prosperity gospel. So I'm curious if you have anything just that comes to mind when you're like, yeah, if I was gonna try to address that, here's the angle that I would approach because I feel like that is America's Original Sin; the ability to manifest wealth and Jesus is on our side…and that's why we're loaded. And that's why we're able to spend so much money and waste so much money instead of loving human beings. Are you willing to try to tackle that even though I know it's not a chapter in there. (Diana laughs)

Diana Butler Bass 31:07

I think I'm laughing because that more or less was a theme in my last book. In the book I wrote about gratitude, and the book is called Grateful. And in that book, I sort of I kick against both the prosperity gospel it within Christianity, but it's also a book that's more widely written towards a mixed audience, people who are Christians, people who are not. And the other piece of that is that there's not only Christian prosperity gospels, but there are secular prosperity Gospels. And gratitude has often been part of that. The idea is, if you're really, it's like, weird, but the idea is, if you're grateful for what you have, you'll get more. And so gratitude becomes a strange sort of mechanism into health and wealth.

And so in the last book, I wrote, I do talk about that very directly. And, you know, I want to just sort of put these two pieces together a little bit. Because even though I don't hold the ideas of original sin in the way that I know, certain streams of Western Christianity want me to hold those options. I also don't deny the existence of evil and of real sin. And that's been the sort of the false dichotomy that's been put out, especially in the last century, or century and a half. And the false dichotomy is something like this. Well, if you don't believe in original sin how can you explain the fact of the 20th century when there were two world wars and Stalin's genocide and all of these terrible things that happened, you know, and on and on and on. And the 20th century was an incredibly violent century with, you know, massive death, and especially the Holocaust. I mean, it's just, it's a…it's a brutal century. And so people say, isn't the 20th century in and of itself completely an example of original sin? And so if you don't believe in original sin, then you must be just sort of turning your head and not really understanding what happened historically.

And I think that's just really false. I think that that's a bad narrative. Because you can understand what happened with all of that violence and sin in the 20th century without appealing to a gene that's manipulated through sexual intercourse, that's been passed down through the human race, you know, since Adam and Eve. And the way you can explain this, quite simply, it's actually the simple way that the Jews have explained this same, you know, sort of story, the same textual tradition. And the way that Jews talk about it is that sin and evil continue in the world and it's a result of human choice.

Badly formed conscience.

When people go against what they know that they are actually supposed to do, and they make the wrong moral choice. And what happens, in Jewish theology and these alternative streams of Christian theology, is the idea that if you get enough human beings over a long enough time making terrible choices, is that we become born into a world that's like, polluted with evil, it's like drinking from a polluted stream. And so it doesn't mean you're evil, but it means that you are taking into yourself, because of the environment, this, you know, really mucky, horrible water that makes you sick. And so the quest then becomes, of course, is to find that life giving stream; is to be able to understand how polluted the environment is, and do something about it.

Seth Price 35:37

Yeah. And do something, perhaps make choices that further shalom, instead of missing the mark. And I know I just blended Old Testament and Greek translation of New Testament for sin, it's okay. I own that.

Diana Butler Bass 35:50

No! It is completely legitimate because I'm pretty sure it's what Jesus did.

Seth Price 35:58

(Both break out in laughter)

That's a compliment for the day! That's why I put on the tie, Diana. That's it! So I forget what chapter it is in here. But you talk about as Jesus…it's literally what you just took in there like Jesus as prophet and priest, and you talk about him is I think it's in the chapter on teacher where there's like, a decade between him teaching people as a child in the synagogues, and then coming back later. What are we as followers that read the, hopefully, read the Bible and other scriptures what are we supposed to do when we're accused of heresy? And that's what people say, like, well, you're just twisting this to make it fit what it needs to fit for today, fit for the narrative. Because I get accused of that often. And then I read you saying that you're like, “Yeah, but that's, that's what the prophets do”. You know, I mean, like, how do those two relate? Because I struggle to answer that question very well, outside of, I just, that's just how I see Jesus?

Diana Butler Bass 36:55

One of the things that comforts me is the knowledge, and this again is the firmer ground of church of being trained as a church historian, is that nearly every significant person who writes theology, anywhere in the past, at some point or another in his or her career was deemed a heretic. And it's very few people who pass the orthodoxy test beginning to end. And, you know, even Augustine what had to be helped by the church in this because, you know, one of Augustine’s hugest opponents was Pelagius. And they had this argument over sin. And the people say now, “Oh Pelagius, that's just heresy! That's just heresy. That's just heresy.” But it took the church six tries to actually get Pelagius to be deemed a heretic and get his name sort of written out of church history.

So it wasn't an easy attempt. It wasn't like, “oh, Pelagius, you are a heretic and you're gone”. I believe it was six separate attempts on the part of the church to silence him. And then of course, what happens is his works get scattered, a lot of stuff gets destroyed. We wind up having very little original stuff written by Pelagius and all we wind up with for many centuries, we do have some of it and a lot of it's been rediscovered in only fairly recent years. But for much of church history, all we had is what Augustine wrote about Pelagius.

So what we have is what the victor of the argument wrote. And that stuff was preserved by the church, after six attempts to get Pelagius declared a heretic. And, you know, that's just one story of how this works within church history, is that the most important thing in some ways in church history is also the most trite phrase that almost everybody knows about history. And that is that the victors write history. And what becomes left to us, is the victors interpretations of the people who questioned them.

And so if you were burned at the stake, or if your book was declared heretical, or what have you, usually, all that's left of you at the end of that process is what the church wants to be left. And so therefore, you look like, you know, you really look like a heretic to everybody that comes afterwards.

What I think is sort of fascinating is when the church changes its mind. And that does happen. So you get someone like Joan of Arc, who is declared a witch and a heretic and, you know, has a lousy end in France. (She’s) in jail raped and burned at stake. Congratulations. (Sarcasm)

And, the church did it to her. And then later, you know, they turn around and say, “oops, we were wrong”. And, you know, I'm sure that was a comfort to her all these years later, you know, (we both laugh) but now she's St. Joan of Arc. So the church even admits that this process of the making of Orthodoxy and the application of heresy, infidelity, and all these, you know, blasphemy laws, has been imperfect at best.

And there are also, you know, people who are in scientific communities who suffered similar fates in their own lives. And then, you know, years later they are picked up in and lifted up as great heroes. So I don't mind when people call me a heretic because boy, am I in good company. And, you know, bring on the crown! Because I figure, you know, in another 150 years, the people who usually are the ones who are screaming, blasphemer and heretic the loudest, those people are usually forgotten. And it's the people who were on the other end of that, who are often looked back at and said, “Oh, my gosh, you know, that person was really trying to tell us something, and we weren't unwilling to listen at the time”. So bring it on!

Seth Price 41:41

So can I ask a question? One word that I would expect to see is the word Christ in a book about Jesus, but except for I want to say like five or six times as all that it's there. And half of those times, it's in the title of books that you're quoting from, like Ilia Delio and a few other people. So they're not even your words it's like, quoting something else. So why the aversion to the word Christ? And I asked that because you have a chapter called Universal Jesus, which I would have assumed would have that in there, and it doesn't. And why? Is there an aversion? It can't be an omission, because there's just no way that there's not—you don't write 80 pages accidentally about Jesus and not write the word Christ? (Diana laughs)

Diana Butler Bass 42:22

Yeah, I’m laughing because you're the first person to notice. (Laughs more)

Congratultions!

Seth Price 42:27

I didn't notice until I read the part where you quoted Ilia Delio, it's either Delio or Dahlia, I always say it wrong. And then I realized when I read the title of her book, which is another long title of a book, and it has the word in there Christ as like that, and I literally highlight it, I'm like, I think this is might be the first time. So then I pulled up a PDF copy that I have from the net galley and just Ctrl+F, and just search for the word Christ, and it only came up with a handful of places. So yeah, it was an accidental thing. But why the aversion, or the omission, or whatever that is?

Diana Butler Bass 42:58

Well, you asked me at the beginning in a why I wrote a book about Jesus. And you know, what could you say that hasn't already been said? And I, at the beginning of the project, I actually went and I looked, you know, on my shelf at the, I mean, I have an entire bookcase, almost, it's full of books about Jesus. And all of them, with only a very few exceptions, are about Jesus Christ. And my book is about my experience. And my experience doesn't deny the idea of Christ as we meet Christ in the creeds, or the more Christ parts of the epistles in particular. You know, but the truth of it is that mostly when people, you know, met Jesus, mostly in the gospels, they're meeting a friend, you know, they're they're meeting a teacher, they're meeting someone who is very human. And, you know, the few times when somebody figures out, “Oh, you are the Messiah”, you know, Jesus says, “Don't tell anybody”.

Seth Price 44:18

🤫🤫

Diana Butler Bass 44:19

I remember when I first took a New Testament class and learned about the “Messianic secret” and I thought that that was so amazing, you know, because it's all we want to talk about is that he's the anointed one. He's the Messiah. And, yeah, that was the one thing that Jesus said, don't tell anyone, you know, in the resurrection stories. As we tape here, right after Easter, we have this account of I mean, there are a couple of interesting accounts, we have one account that was read in church this past Sunday of the three women coming to the tomb and Jesus isn't there. And then they're told, shh, don't tell anybody, you know, keep it a secret.

Apparently they don't, because we know the story. (Laughs) They didn't listen to that one. But like in the story of Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb that's in the Gospel of John, which is one of my favorite ones. Is that her first word to Jesus, after she figures out that this is Jesus and not a gardener? Is that she says, Rabboni, teacher. And so she doesn't actually say, “oh, Christ, you're the Messiah” that's not the title that she trots out upon seeing the risen Jesus. And instead she trots out this title. That was probably what she called him when he was alive. You know, he was her beloved teacher, Rabboni, who, you know, she was probably the one who used her hair to anoint Jesus feet.

And so, yeah, I wanted to capture that sense, you know, not the christological glory piece. Because that's everywhere. You know, all you have to do is go to church on Sunday and you're going to get a story about the Christ. But to affirm these other stories, like the story of Mary Magdalene, where, you know, she sees Jesus and she says, “teacher”, you know, that's really an image for this book is like, when you see Jesus, you know who do you really see? Who have you known?

And for most of us it's not going to be—I don't think that for most people, the first words that springs to mind are a creed that we recite during baptism.

Seth Price 47:05

Yeah. So I want to talk about the conclusion, but I'm not, because people need to buy the book. But I will say, and I literally just put this out on the internet a minute ago, I plan to read that with my daughters this weekend, specifically, that little speech that you have there, there's like the last paragraph, and I don't want you to read it, because I do want people to buy the book. The story that you tell there when your intermixed with a bunch of other women in faith. And anyway, it's beautiful chapter, about about the voice of women. And I think little girls should hear it. So we won't talk about that conclusion because people should read it for themselves. But I am curious and this is a question I've asked everyone. So when you try to wrap words around what you mean, when you say God, what do you say to that?

Diana Butler Bass 47:48

Well, gosh, that's…that's my vocation. And it's actually the most humbling of all possible vocations. You know, it'd be so much easier, I think, if I'd stayed a college professor, and you had vocational benchmarks of, you know, getting tenure, becoming the department chair, perhaps becoming a dean, you know, or certain kinds of awards, you know. That most of us when we have vocations, there are paths of recognizing success and achievement. But when you're a writer, you know, there are some things like that, you know, your does your book land on the New York Times Bestseller list, or what have you. But, you know, the subject that I'm writing about, is the subject about God. And, you know, what's the benchmark of achievement for that?

I always hold myself accountable to letting my words carry a reality that moves beyond the words. So I recognize even while I am putting words into the world, that try to explain, to teach, to point towards divine things. I also know that those words are extremely limited. And the very best thing that my words can do is to cause someone to sort of read what's on the page and then stop and feel the presence of what's beyond the page. And so, it's not easy. And yet I keep at it, and that's to me, there are no words that you can really explain, you know who God is, or how we truly encounter God? You know, or even the question “if God?”

You know, that there's lots of questions regarding this presence that I do trust is at the core of the universe. So, you know, I just let that mystery enfold me. And then, as a writer, do my very best to work out of that mystery. And if I succeed sometimes, and people are moved by the letters that I put on a page, I am deeply gratified.

Seth Price 50:41

That question of “if God” so I have a 43 minute drive to work and 30-35-43, whatever, that's going to wrestle with me the whole car ride. So I'm going to say in advance, I don't know that I appreciate that question. Because I'll have nothing else but to think with as I go over the Blue Ridge Mountains with that question, but it's okay. It's okay. (Diana laughs) I also don't think that people humans specifically, are good at stopping and wrestling with things you got, you got that part in there. And we don't, we don't need to backtrack and talk about it, where you'd ask them to read that first part of like, John, I think it's 14:6, or something like that; maybe it's 13. And she's like, “No, I'm gonna keep reading because that belongs, like you have those to hinge on each other. They have to be together”, which is a fun thing.

Diana, where do you want people to go to obviously, they should buy the book, just to read the last chapter, if nothing else alone, but they really should read the full book. And then you’ve got like a substack, you've got a website, you're on all the social, like, where do you want people? Where should they go to do whatever the things are, that they should be doing?

Diana Butler Bass 51:37

Oh, I think that the two places to connect with me best, in terms of electronic connection, are through my newsletter called The Cottage, which comes out once or twice a week, depending upon how busy I am actually. And that's on substack, you can sign up for that by going to the platform substack itself, or by going to my website, DianaButlerbass.com, there's a very clear link that says newsletter sign up. So you can do that. And then you just get an email from me once or twice a week with my newsletter stuff that I'm thinking, stuff that I'm writing things that I'm doing. And then the other places, I'm kind of noisy on Twitter. (We both laugh) People seem to like my Twitter account, or they get really upset at me on Twitter. And so that's the place I think I'm called heretic most often.

And so if you're kind of into those sorts of things, well, welcome to my club. That's a fun place to follow me. But then I might, you know, just Facebook and Instagram, you know, are the also the normal places, so So pretty much everywhere where people hang out on social media, except I don't do Tik Tok and I haven't tried Clubhouse and all those things.

Seth Price 52:55

I haven't either. I don't even have a tik tok. I don't want to Clubhouse. I barely like Instagram. I don't actually like social media. But it's necessary.

Diana Butler Bass 53:07

I don’t either. But it's interesting, because I do get to meet cool people sometimes. And the main reason I'm on Instagram right now and trying to do anything with it is because one of the gifts of this crazy vocation as you get to know other writers and whether people I've gotten to know in recent years is Marianne Williamson, and she said, Oh, I want to interview you on Instagram.

Seth Price 53:28

You can interview people on Instagram?

Diana Butler Bass 53:32

Yeah, you can, apparently. And so she says, I want to have an Instagram chat with you. And I said, Marianne, I don’t even know how to use this!

Seth Price 53:38

Its on your phone! That isn't…why would I want to do an interview on this. Anyway,

Diana Butler Bass 53:46

So she's very good at it. And so, apparently, we're gonna do that, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure when. But yeah people connect, you know, and I know it's all very mysterious to me. But I am glad for the opportunity to hear people's voices and to receive both their critiques and their kindnesses through social media.

Seth Price 54:10

Good. Well, I appreciate what you're doing. And I appreciate you being on this morning and for working with the schedule and etc. But it's been a joy. It's always a joy to listen to you but it's a joy to talk with you.

Diana Butler Bass 54:21

Thank you very much.

Seth Price 54:38

That question that Diana posed back of not who or what is God but, if God? I've wrestled with that, quite literally almost every day since she asked me. And I said I don't know how to answer that question. And I love that. Absolutely love that.

I'm curious your thoughts on today's episode or any of the past ones and want to say thank you for your support of the show. And thank you to Remedy Drive for their music in this week's episode. Next week is going to be fantastic. So I have Jemar Tisby on the show. And then right after that, I'm going to bring on musicians Ryanhood. And that is another fun one. So support the show if able. If you can't rate and review it or just tell a friend. Send me some feedback. I am amazed by all of you that continue to download this show, and I'm so thankful.

Be blessed. I hope you have an amazing week and we'll connect again soon.