Episode 1: Pete Enns & Jared Byas – What Is Faith for Normal People?

Jared  

You’re listening to Faith for Normal People, the only other God-ordained podcast on the internet.

Pete  

I’m Pete Enns.

Jared  

And I’m Jared Byas.

Jared  

Welcome everyone to this episode of the podcast! Before we get started, Pete’s new book, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming, or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God has officially been released into the wild.

Pete  

That is a long title. 

Jared  

Yeah, I wasn’t gonna say it…

Pete  

It’s almost like chapter one. The title is chapter one.

Jared  

Exactly. You’ve already made it 1/10th of the way through the book just by reading the title.

Pete  

I know, that’s basically all you need to know. So, you don’t have to…You can buy the book, but you don’t have to read it. You know what’s really cool here, though, Jared? Is that the timing here between the release of this book and our new podcast Faith for Normal People…Uh—nobody planned this out.

Jared  

Yeah. People may not believe that. 

Pete  

It’s just weird.

Jared  

But we really are just not that smart. 

Pete  

We’re not—we don’t plan at all. 

Pete  

Folks, you have no idea. But anyway, the thing is that the book and the podcast are very similar in the sense that it’s sort of asking the “So what?” question and how have my experiences in life just minding my own business, how has that affected how I think about God, Christianity, Jesus, the Bible? And that’s a lot of what we’re going to be covering in the podcast. So it’s sort of nice how these two things are complementing each other. 

Jared  

Yeah! In some ways it’s also—it’s not coincidental, because it makes sense that these have been your experiences and these are the conversations that we’ve been having over the years. And so to have them come out about the same time—Faith for Normal People and Curveball—it does make sense.

Pete  

I thought you were gonna say that it’s not coincidental because God orchestrated it. 

Jared  

Have you been listening the last six years? 

Pete  

Yeah…[chuckles]

Jared  

Okay. So all that to say, if this podcast resonates with you today, maybe pick up a copy of Curveball, because it’s going to extend that into Pete’s personal journey, and how this concept that we’re going to be exploring over the next hopefully several seasons of Faith for Normal People has played out for Pete in his faith journey. So hopefully you can learn something from that. You can get Curveball wherever you buy books. And don’t forget to leave a…Leave a four star review. 

Pete  

Huh?

Jared  

So then Pete has incentive to keep writing. I’m just kidding.

Pete  

I hadn’t thought of it that way.

Jared  

Give it five stars, even if you hate it.

Pete  

Yeah.

Jared  

Because you have to balance out the people who are gonna give one stars, who don’t even read it. They just say, “Oh, Pete Enns? Ugh. One star.” So you got to balance that out. Five star review. And like Pete said, you don’t have to read it! Just buy it.

Pete  

Just buy it.

Jared  

There are other ways to engage our faith outside of just reading, and rereading, and rereading the Bible. So Faith for Normal People, for me, is about exploring those other tools. A healthy view of the Bible and our faith will lead us to the conclusion that people of faith need to engage other sources in other fields, other parts of culture. That’s not a loss of faith, it’s not like a secularization, but that’s always been part of the Christian tradition.

Pete  

Hello, everybody, we’re so excited! Today, we’re going to introduce you to the only other God-ordained podcast on the internet—and that is Faith for Normal People.

Jared  

Faith for Normal People. Now, for some of you, this may be your first time hearing the podcast, you haven’t listened to our other God-ordained podcast…

Pete  

The first only God ordained…

Jared  

The first! 

Pete  

Right. 

Jared  

I’ve been getting confused by all the ordinations. 

Pete  

How can it be only and more than one? I don’t know.

Jared  

I mean, we’re Christians…

Pete  

It’s all in the mystery of God.

Jared  

We believe three equals one. I don’t know what to tell you. 

Pete  

I know. It doesn’t matter, anyway. All we know is that we’re right.

Jared  

Pete  

Everyone else is wrong. Simple as that.

Jared  

Oh, my goodness…

Pete  

Okay. 

Jared  

No, but the Bible for Normal People. And we thought we would maybe start this episode as we launch into this new endeavor, where there will be highs and there will be lows, there will be ins and outs, there will be fisticuffs…

Pete  

Oh yeah! 

Jared  

There will be make-ups. It will be the ride of your life, this podcast. But before we get into all of that, we thought it might be good just to recap who we are. Because some of you who may be even listening to Bible for Normal People, we haven’t really done like an introduction of who we are. And then we’re going to talk about a little bit of our faith evolution and how Faith for Normal People fits into that. And then we’re going to maybe talk a little bit about what Faith for Normal People is and why we’re excited about it.

Pete  

Alright well, so who are you, Jared? I don’t really know you that well, myself. We never really introduced ourselves to each other. 

Jared  

Yeah, that’s true. 

Pete  

That’s true. So, go ahead.

Jared  

Well, I was born and raised in Texas as a Southern Baptist/non-denominational/charismatic evangelical, which is a mouthful for anyone not from that world. But for those of you who know, you know. And I had my sights on getting a PhD in presuppositional apologetics (no need to look that up). It’s just a PhD in proving why my version of Christianity was right. That’s what, that was my lifelong goal. 

Pete  

They give PhDs in that?

Jared  

Yeah, apparently. Only a couple places. I gave up on that and became a pastor. And then after a while I gave up on that and became a professor. And then after a while I gave up on that. And for the past six years, I’ve been having hundreds of conversations on the questions, “What is the Bible and what do we do with it?” 

Pete  

Jared  

I think that sums it up. That’s a lot of giving up. I don’t know. 

Pete  

Why did you… 

Jared  

Maybe I should redo that?

Pete  

Why did you give up on that stuff?

Jared  

Yeah, that’s what Faith for Normal People is going to be about.

Pete  

Aha! We’ll have to wait for that.

Jared  

That’s exactly it. A cliffhanger. I told you it was going to be an emotional roller coaster!

Pete  

Very emotional. I’m getting emotional right now. 

Jared  

Okay. Who are you?

Pete  

Anyway, yeah. So okay. My parents, long story short, were immigrants from Germany. Actually, my dad was raised in Russia, my mother in Poland. But they were German. It’s weird. It’s a World War II thing. Anyway, so they came over, met on the boat. And yeah, I’ve been sort of interested in matters of faith. I came to understand my interest in the Bible like later, after college. I was graduated from college and it sort of hit me like, I really want to get into this stuff. So, long story short, you know, graduate school after seminary, and then now I taught in seminary for well over a decade. And now I teach at a college, I teach biblical studies. And, yeah, I write books and stuff and have a couple of podcasts that I do with you, Jared!

Jared  

That’s right. 

Pete  

We do all sorts of stuff, to talk about things that matter to us and matter to I think a lot of people who are, you know, in the world of faith in some sense, like what this sacred book is doing and how to handle it, but also some larger questions.

Jared  

Right. And we started Bible for Normal People with this understanding that a lot of what we were taught in seminary and graduate school about what the Bible is and what it isn’t, and recognized there weren’t a lot of tools and resources for getting that message out, that scholarship, those resources to everyday people.

Pete  

Yeah. 

Jared  

And so we had just a passion to talk about it so that everybody could understand on a more basic level, what’s being talked about in academic circles.

Pete  

Right. And that’s what you know, we call it “the Bible for Normal People.” And it’s not—maybe the more expanded title is “the Bible and how scholars handle it” for normal people. We’re trying to bring the best of biblical scholarship to bear on the lives of people who are interested in this sort of thing. 

Jared  

Right. 

Pete  

And that’s, that’s how we did that. But then we, we made a move, didn’t we, Jared? We’re doing it now.

Jared  

Well, there’s this evolution that happened, where more and more we began to—And I think it’s something you know, we talked about this before—this isn’t new to us, but I think in our pursuit of the Bible for Normal People, it became more and more inevitable for us to talk about. And that is, the Bible is one tool in this toolkit of faith. If you look historically at the Christian faith, and if you look, even geographically now in different denominations in different places, the Bible doesn’t take up the space that it did for at least in my tradition in Evangelicalism. It was—it was the be all end all. And even in seminary. 

Pete  

It answered all our questions.

Jared  

Sola scriptura.

Pete  

Right.

Jared  

Which is Latin for, “the only thing that matters is the Bible.” That’s not a literal translation.

Pete  

Not at all, not at all, but that’s okay, close enough.

Jared  

That’s okay. So…

Pete  

We have to do Latin for Normal People now.

Jared  

That’s an oxymoron. 

Jared  

But, so this idea that the Bible isn’t the whole toolkit. There are other things and other ways, there are so many ways to express our faith that don’t rely on Bible study at 6:30 in the morning, every day. There are other ways to engage our faith outside of just reading, and rereading, and rereading the Bible. There’s a lot of other things to explore. So Faith for Normal People, for me, is about exploring those other tools, those other sources. So if we have this—I think I can speak for you—But I think for me, a healthy view of the Bible in our faith will lead us to the conclusion that people of faith need to engage other sources in other fields, other parts of culture, that’s not a loss of faith. It’s not like a secularization, but that’s always been part of the Christian tradition. 

Pete  

It’s inevitable too because we’re people, we’re encultured people, and we have a toolkit that we’re accessing all the time anyway, for different things. It’s just we can’t make-believe that’s not true when it comes to matters of faith. And, you know, that’s always been the case, I think, in the history of Judaism and Christianity, where people living at certain times are trying to engage this ancient faith, but they’re asking questions, and engaging with let’s say, data, that were not on the table 500 years, 1000 years, 2000 years, 3000 years earlier. So this is a very serious look at faith and meaning and being human, and what is God? And all the big questions that, you know, frankly, I think occupy a lot of people. People may not be always occupied by, “I wonder what this specific story in 1 Kings is telling me,” they’re actually interested—and we are too, this is why we’re doing this—we are interested in these bigger questions of meaning that are just part of the human experience in general, and how can we process some of these things.

Jared  

And some of those tools in the toolkit, if that’s like a vague metaphor, I think to be a little more specific, we don’t know what all those are—that’s part of our exploration. But some of the things that we talk about quite a bit are things like sociology, or physics, or psychology. These fields: philosophy, arts, literature, and even I would add in there theology. At some point we were going to call this “Theology for Normal People.” And it’s amazing how many people we engage with who don’t actually even understand that there’s a difference between biblical studies and theology, and there is a big difference.

Pete  

Big difference. 

Jared  

And sociology is one of these tools, that isn’t biblical studies. Those are not the same thing. But there’s a lot of theology that can happen in exciting and creative ways outside of just, well, what did first Kings mean back then? And what does it have to say for us today?

Pete  

I mean, a theological question that like comes from the Bible can be, “What is God like?” Because the Bible has really different portraits on what God is about and what God is doing, and trying to bring those things together, as the Bible describes them, that’s oftentimes called biblical theology. Right? But we’re talking about theology in a very different sense. It’s more engaging…Okay, listen, moving beyond the pages of the Bible itself, what does it mean to think of God in light of things we know today that maybe people haven’t known, or maybe in some cases, the things that people have known all along, and have been engaging for many hundreds of years now? And one of them, you mentioned physics, and I mean, science in general has been a big game changer for people. So how do we talk about God in light of things we know about the nature of physical reality, that wasn’t even a whisper of a thought in the minds of people living 2-3,000 years ago, but we are, right? So what? What does all this stuff mean? How do we bring it together? What relevance does that have for existence? We’ll be talking about these things.

Jared  

Yeah. And in a way—and this is where I can always look for nuance is, again, I grew up in a tradition where it was always, “What does this mean for us today?” But there was a lot packed into that question around what it could mean for us today and what are the sources we go to for—

Pete  

Yeah.

Jared  

—that truth? 

Pete  

Right.

Jared  

It was, we only had the Bible. And so we had to sort of… It felt like we were forcing the Bible to say something that wasn’t intended to address.

Pete  

Yeah.

Jared  

And so I…

Pete  

Cause that’s the only thing in the toolkit: the Bible. Right? 

Jared  

Right. And I think what Faith for Normal People is about and what we’ve been wrestling with for years now, probably our whole life—like you said, we just do wrestle with this—is we are facing, and I think this is the heresy that it almost—I feel weird and uncomfortable even saying it, which is funny, because I’ve been outside of that tradition for so long. The things that we wrestle with today require us to go outside the Bible to address them, because not everything is addressed in the Bible. And what are the tools we’re using? And I think that’s what was hard for me in my tradition, looking back now, it was assuming that the Bible did have everything that we needed to address, current things. And so if you asked, “What does the Bible have to say about X, Y, or Z, cell phone use?” We do construct a whole theology, but we don’t call it a theology, we just call it “that’s what the Bible says.” It’s like, “No. What do you mean? The Bible says this about cellphones? It wasn’t in the Bible.”

Pete  

Or recycling or what to do in your leisure time on the weekends and things like that. Right. 

Jared  

Right. 

Pete  

You know, we do talk here, Jared, we’ve used this phrase more than once in the Bible for Normal People to talk about the Bible as a means of grace. Which is a very different thing than saying it has all the answers to all of our questions, because it doesn’t. I mean, just one example that just came to mind now, it’s something that made me really think about expanding the toolkit. Many years ago, I was reading Father Thomas Keating, who some of you may know, but he was a Roman Catholic contemplative theologian who brought—he reintroduced, really, I think modern Christianity to a lot of the strands of contemplative thinking that have been a part of the church for a long time. But anyway, he refers to God—now, don’t flip out when you hear this, folks, but this is part of why we’re doing this podcast—but he refers to God as “the divine therapist” to heal the dysfunction that we all have simply by virtue of our being human and having horrible coping mechanisms and things like that. That’s a very different way of thinking than God is this Savior who’s going to wash you clean of your sins. I’m not suggesting those things are polar opposite ways of thinking, but Thomas Keating is bringing into the discussion things that we’ve learned over the last few generations, certainly even longer, about just human psychology and what makes us human. And, you know, when a toddler screams, because he’s not getting his way…Is this sin? Or is this developmental? Right? It’s a very different way of thinking. And when adults do really horrible things, are they sinning? Or are they still languishing in sort of a wounded child syndrome, or, you know, like, that kind of language. That’s become very meaningful to me, honestly, and I can’t address my own humanity apart from expanding the toolkit. And, you know, maybe toolkit is too sterile a way of putting it without having different conversation partners, and gaining the wisdom from other people. And it’s like, “well, that’s not in the Bible.” I know, but most of what we do and think when it comes down to it really isn’t in the Bible.

Jared  

Well, and even to go—not to get back nerdy into Bible talk. But since it’s kind of a bridge and introduction to Faith for Normal People, even the Bible doesn’t represent the religion of the people who were alive at the time the Bible was written, it also didn’t capture everyone’s experience. And I think that’s an important way to think about it because, again, we can sort of think that this is like “progressive” or this is a new, like, postmodern thing to do. But it just is how it’s always been. 

Pete  

It’s how it’s always been and I think we know that from the earliest moments of the church itself (sticking to Christianity) it’s just simply not a new thing. It’s, my goodness, things have happened. We’ve experienced things that make us think differently about God and faith. And again, not to get into it too much, we’ve had podcasts on this. But I think, you know, the apostle Paul is an example of that.

Jared  

Yep. 

Pete  

You know, of trying to figure out, where does this God thing lead us now, in light of all this Jesus stuff, right? And that’s just been multiplied countless times in the history of human development and cultural changes and linguistic changes, and for people living in Asia it’s different than people living in Canada or South America. It’s just…We want to talk about our humanity, and how all this connects to the question of faith and God. And, you know, we’ll usually get into Christianity specifically, and Jesus, and the gospel, and the Bible, all those things come together. Those are the topics of wide ranging conversations that are philosophical, that are theological, that are scientific, that are hermeneutical—like how you interpret things. And it’s fascinating, but it’s bigger than just the Bible itself. That’s the point.

Jared  

And I think that’s critical for me in this journey, is recognizing over the years, I’ve recognized when I’m talking about God, or when I’m talking about the Bible, often when I’m trying to understand it I’m using the language of other fields. And it is not helpful to remain ignorant of those other fields, if I truly want to understand it. For me, a big part of that was understanding literary criticism. Because it occurred to me one day, the Bible is a literary product. It’s written in words. There are stories in it. And for me, to really understand what’s going on in the Bible, I have to understand literary criticism. And to understand literary criticism, I have to understand language and on and on it goes. The questions are unending in terms of our curiosity, and even thinking through, you know—to tie these together, just something that came to my mind—is you said kind of the early church and how they’re wrestling with this from the beginning. You said Paul, in light of his culture and experience of Jesus, has to rethink a lot of things. I was just thinking of, going back to the creeds, and one of the most important parts of the creeds of the church was this phrase, “homoousia” which is so influenced by Greek culture. 

Pete  

Jared  

That phrase itself.

Pete  

What does it mean? 

Jared  

One Substance. To be of the same substance.

Pete  

The son is of the same substance as the father.

Jared  

You don’t—That’s already…In the creeds we have very philosophical language.

Pete  

We have non-biblical language. 

Jared  

It seems to—

Pete  

It describes something.

Jared  

But it’s not just non-biblical. They didn’t make it up from whole cloth. It was a part of a Greek philosophical tradition. 

Pete  

Right.

Jared  

So they’re borrowing from Greek philosophy to make a declaration about who Jesus is, and that…We’re still doing that today.

Pete  

And how can we not? 

Jared  

Right. 

Pete  

Right? That’s the point.

Pete  

In this podcast, we want to own that, and have conversations based on curiosity and not to come up with…I mean, those of you who have listened to us, you know what’s coming here, not to give the final answers on complex things, but just to ignite our curiosities about our own human predicament, and how the whole God thing factors into that. I think to me, it’s that simple. And that is a conversation that has to take you beyond Bible verses, or even the biblical world, and acknowledge how in a sense we’re very similar to people who lived thousands of years ago, but in another way, we have nothing in common with them whatsoever. 

And if we believe God is real—still real, not just back then real, but still real somehow, today—How do we talk about this God? How do we talk about this Jesus? How do we talk about this faith? How do we talk about this tradition we call Christianity? How do we do that? And once you start asking those questions, you find yourself very quickly in, let’s say, a multidisciplinary world, right? Where things like psychology or science, I mean, you can’t read Genesis one and two, without—a modern person, without thinking like, “Yeah, but science says, something a little bit different. How do we think through this?” That’s a very easy example. But it’s, it’s hard to avoid and I don’t think it’s something we should even consider avoiding. It is, I think, responsible for us as human beings to think creatively and—what’s the right word here?—synthetically about our faith to bring in these quadrants of our reality as we experience them, to be at peace with the whole question of religious faith. And that’s a task, I think, that’s very much worthy of doing. I mean, I’m, that’s why I mean—I love the Bible for Normal People, I love nerding out, I love thinking about those texts, in part, because thinking about them drives me to these kinds of questions. That’s how these two things are related to me. 

Jared  

Pete  

It’s my work in biblical studies, as you know, in seminary and doctoral work and now teaching and writing for 30 years. It’s because of all that, that I have expanded my conversation partners far beyond this ancient text that we call the Bible.

Jared  

Right. And speaking of that tie, you know, the questions we ask at the Bible for Normal People have been: What is the Bible? And what do we do with it? And the “what do we do with it” has expanded into this vision for Faith for Normal People with two other questions: What is faith? And how do we live it? And so I don’t want to end this introduction to this podcast without the flip side. While we’ve talked—I think for some people, this is gonna feel abstract—you’re talking about physics and science and sociology. As a field that seems abstract, but very practically, we want to bring wisdom and experience and expertise to questions of faith. And how can we better lean into the fullness of the human experience and how it connects with faith and belief? And so our hope is that this doesn’t stay abstract, but that it is personal, which is uncomfortable for me and probably for you. I don’t know if it is. It’s uncomfortable for me to make it personal. I’m fine talking about it in academic terms and the abstract. 

But I don’t want to let us off the hook. I would want this podcast to help us explore more personally this faith question. And so for us, this is about you and I being in the position of learners. We both taught biblical studies, you for longer than me, but we’ve both been in this world. And so Bible for Normal People is a space we’re really comfortable in. Faith for Normal People, we’re going out on a journey to ask questions and be curious. And I don’t really know where it’s going to end up, to be honest.

Pete  

And that’s fine. That’s just the way it is. But to have…That’s why, you know, we’ll have people on who might talk about a topic that may for them hold no real religious meaning, but it may for people of faith. So you and I are going to make a habit of almost debriefing after some of these episodes and talking about, “Well, here’s what I’m hearing about this thing that this person said” about cosmology, or about child development, or about what it means to be in a group of people in a context like sociology, things like that, how that affects us. They may—our guests may talk about these things from the perspective of their own field, but we’re going to try to tie these pieces together because that’s the stuff. I mean the stuff that’s changed me most has not been things like, “here’s a book that makes you think differently about God or something.” It’s like, no, here’s just the book that just talks about stuff, and I’m reading it—and who hasn’t had this experience?—You read it and it’s like, “This has implications for how I think about everything else.” Those are the kinds of conversations we’re looking forward to having.

Jared  

Absolutely. So we’re very excited about Faith for Normal People. It’s going to be coming your way starting next week. I mean, it’s here today, but we’ll have our first guests next week. And we’re opening with—again, to anchor this in storytelling, which isn’t always going to be the case, just like Bible for Normal People—we’re gonna have a diverse set of guests with diverse contexts and fields and everything we’re going to be talking about. But we’re opening with Rhett and Jessie McLaughlin, from the duo, Rhett’s from the duo Rhett and Link, who have gone on a spiritual journey. Rhett and Jessie both have gone on this journey in some ways together, maybe some ways apart, we’ll see. But we wanted to start with a story of faith transition and how this looks in real life. And so we’re really grateful for Rhett and Jesse to launch us on this new journey here.

Pete  

It’s gonna be fun! Looking forward to it.

Jared  

Alright, we’ll see everyone next week. 

Jared  

Well thanks to everyone who supports the show! If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/give. 

Pete  

And if you want to support us and want a community, classes, and other great resources, go to TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/join.

Jared  

And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show.

Outro  

Thanks for listening to Faith for Normal People! Don’t forget you can also catch the latest episode of our other show, The Bible for Normal People, wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by The Bible for Normal People podcast team: Brittany Prescott, Savannah Locke, Stephanie Speight, Natalie Weyand, Stephen Henning, Tessa Stultz, Haley Warren, Nick Striegel, and Jessica Shao.