Dan Passed the Exam! & a Timely Rebroadcast

Summary

Religion on the Mind (Host: Dan Koch)

Episode: Dan Passed the Exam! & a Timely Rebroadcast (w/Dustin Kensrue)

Date: August 3, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features two main components:

1. Dan Koch’s celebratory update on passing the psychologist licensure exam (EPPP), discussing career transitions and plans for future show content.
2. A timely rebroadcast of a classic interview with Dustin Kensrue (lead singer of Thrice and former Mars Hill pastor), originally recorded seven years prior. The conversation centers on trusting personal experience—especially religious or spiritual experience—after religious change, deconstruction, and trauma.

Dan introduces the rebroadcast as particularly relevant, drawing parallels to one of the podcast’s most popular recent episodes, “Trusting Yourself After Religious Change.” He contextualizes it within his evolving understanding, spanning psychology, theology, and personal growth.

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Dan’s Life Update and Podcast Announcements

[00:45 - 09:00]

• Big news: Dan has passed the EPPP, completing seven years of graduate training, and is awaiting paperwork to become a licensed psychologist.
• Quotable:

  “I passed the EPPP... It is the culmination of seven years of education and training... This has been just a fucking long and often brutal process. It is wild to be at the end of it.” — Dan [approx 07:20]

• Shares exhaustion from the intensity of study, reflects on the sacrifices made (including a year off for a second child), and looks forward to new creative projects.
• Announces possible future changes to episode frequency while he recuperates and adapts to life post-grad school.
• Outlines new professional opportunities (e.g., PsyPact telehealth licensure, expanding practice to 42 states except CA, NY, OR, etc.), and distinguishes between coaching and therapy, especially in the context of religious issues.
• Updates listeners on his ongoing spiritual abuse research project, encouraging participation from those with Christian backgrounds.

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Rebroadcast Introduction: Thematic Link

[09:00 - 14:15]

• Dan frames the rebroadcast with Dustin Kensrue as an exploration of how to trust (or take seriously) one’s own experience after religious change, mapping closely to topics in his recent psychological work.
• Reflects on how his own thinking then (as a new grad student) compares to now, inviting listeners to consider the throughlines in the journey of faith, reason, and personal experience.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining the Role of Experience in Faith

[14:15 - 23:07]

• Dustin: Clarifies that “taking your experience seriously” is preferable to “trusting your experience” completely. Emphasizes balancing personal experience with other sources of authority (Scripture, reason, tradition).
  • Quote:

    “I think taking your experience seriously is a better way to put it than trusting your experience… Especially for deconstructing Christians, they have probably been told in some way that their experience is not to be taken seriously. And I think that's very destructive.” — Dustin [14:15]

• Dan: Proposes a spectrum: from uncritical trust in experience to total dismissal of experience in favor of doctrinal authority.
  • Points out that totalizing either approach is problematic, as both can become arbitrarily self-referential.
• Memorable analogy: Christianity as a “plate” that supposedly covers the whole world; realization that the “world is bigger than the plate” prompts reevaluation of inherited certainties [18:08].

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2. Systems of Belief vs. Systems of Inquiry

[19:31 - 22:41]

• Cites James Carse’s idea: religions as “systems of inquiry” (wrestling with mystery) versus “systems of belief” (closed answers).
  • Quote:

    “Religions at their core are not systems of belief, but they spawn systems of belief. And those are closed things that answer everything, whereas the religion itself is initially wrestling with a mystery.” — Dustin [19:31]

• Discusses how systems of belief can act like algorithms that “delete” challenging evidence, preventing growth or reform.

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3. Deconstruction, Doubt, and Reconstruction

[23:07 - 30:50]

• Dustin’s faith journey:
  • Childhood in non-denominational evangelicalism; persistent curiosity and skepticism.
  • Crisis in early adulthood over issues like young-earth creationism and the binary reading of Scripture.
  • Inability to find nuanced tools for interpretation led to cycles of doubt and re-entry into faith with more humility, but also cognitive dissonance.
• Music as processing tool: Songs like "Stare at the Sun" reflect the youthful search for certainty and evolving perspective.

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4. Intellectual Safety and the Appeal of Reformed Theology

[31:48 - 33:52]

• Dustin’s turn toward Reformed theology offered a kind of relief:
  • Placing difficult moral questions “on the back burner” by emphasizing God’s sovereignty/responsibility.
  • The emotional comfort of believing in God’s unwavering love, even as difficult doctrines (genocide, hell) remained unresolved.
  • Quote:

    “You could find evangelicals who would articulate the same thing. But it’s very clear in Reformed circles... God’s love was steady and unchanging regardless of what I did.” — Dustin [33:05]

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5. The Mars Hill Chapter: Power, Gaslighting, and Institutional Dysfunction

[33:57 - 47:21]

• Mars Hill experience:
  • Mark Driscoll’s charisma and abuse of authority drew many, but persistent “red flags” (scandals, controversies) were excused under a veneer of spiritual forgiveness and grace.
  • Narcissistic church culture led to structures of denial and gaslighting, causing self-doubt and loyalty to harmful leadership.
• Leaving Mars Hill:
  • Ultimately, being lied to by leaders and the breakdown of internal accountability mechanisms forced Dustin and others to draft open letters and publicly exit.
  • Quote:

    “Once we had confirmation that they were actually lying to us, that really broke things open. And that's when me and some of the other pastors wrote a letter trying to get all the other pastors to step up and stop all of this… It all got squashed, shut down. I ended up leaving, writing a letter explaining to people.” — Dustin [40:03]

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6. Collective and Personal Experience: Implications for Ethics and Community

[44:04 - 46:47]

• The journey from distrusting one’s own experience (as conditioned by church culture) to extending that skepticism to others—a dynamic that undermines true community.
  • Quote:

    “When you can be made to doubt your own experience, then you definitely doubt other people's experience. When you can trust your experience, you learn to trust other people's experience.” — Dustin [44:14]

• Importance of listening and empathy: The “golden rule” is reframed as “do unto others as they would have you do unto them,” highlighting the need for true curiosity and discovery about others’ perspectives [48:41].

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7. Deconstruction, Inerrancy, and Reconstruction

[52:00 - 62:56]

• Post-Mars Hill:
  • Dustin’s further deconstruction was not driven by trauma, but by healing—a space free from psychological barriers.
  • Deep reading (especially Pete Enns and process theologians) made him realize inerrancy was not sustainable; his ultimate ethical and aesthetic commitments (the good, the true, and the beautiful) remained foundational.
• The experience of recognizing those commitments as bedrock, rather than the Bible itself, is both destabilizing and liberating.
  • Quote:

    “When the Bible fell away... those three pillars [goodness, truth, beauty] were unmoved. And I was like, whoa, look at those guys. They're fine. And then I realized, okay, something about my experience is saying that those things are deeper...” — Dustin [61:02]

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8. Moral Intuition and Cultural Evolution

[63:14 - 64:46]

• Examines the evolution of moral intuition (e.g., morality of genocide in Scripture) and how personal parental experience led to a rejection of certain doctrines.
• Jesus’ teaching cited as an example of cultural moral evolution, pushing boundaries of inherited understandings.

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9. Arrival at Process Thought and Pluralism

[70:05 - 75:00]

• Both Dan and Dustin describe gravitating toward process theology and religious pluralism as frameworks that:
  • Accommodate the messiness and diversity of experience.
  • Reject a binary or “plate” mentality for a more spacious, nuanced worldview.
• Discovering that community can thrive in theological disagreement—liberal/progressive Christians engaging deeply despite differences—was healing and generative.
  • Quote:

    “There’s an entire world of people who would call themselves Christians, who are beautiful, smart human beings who have a bunch of interesting ideas and don’t agree with each other, and all somehow seem to have real community. And that world did not exist to me before that." — Dustin [71:35]

• Redefining 'Christian': Focusing on orientation toward the teachings and example of Jesus rather than narrow doctrinal gatekeeping.

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10. Experience and Epistemological Humility

[78:45 - 81:09]

• Acknowledges that personal experience (and intuition) is always contextually constrained—by culture, time, personality, circumstances.
• Emphasizes intellectual humility: As access to experiences broadens, certainty must decrease.
  • Quote:

    “By taking experience seriously, our own and others', you start to have a picture of the world where everything is much more nuanced... It should bring you to a place of intellectual humility.” — Dustin [80:26]

• The expansion of human possibility is measured by openness to diverse experience, demanding a humility that recognizes the limits of individual perspective.

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11. Counterarguments and Cautions

[84:23 - 88:16]

• Responds to concerns that “trusting experience” can become solipsistic or uncritical.
• Notes the tendency (especially in Reformed circles) to weaponize scriptures like “the heart is deceitful above all things” in order to discredit intuition or emotion.
• Both agree that balancing experience with other sources of insight (reason, tradition, logic) is necessary, but that suppression or distrust of experience has led to much harm.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On resilience and persistence:

  “I had seven straight years of significant hurdles... and then finally studying for the final boss. That was the EPPP.” — Dan [08:00]

• On deconstruction and pillars of meaning:

  “Once inerrancy was... totally not right and has been screwing up my thinking on this for a while, that’s a heady experience... The Bible fell away... those three pillars [goodness, beauty, truth] were unmoved. And I was like, whoa.” — Dustin [61:02]

• On community after deconstruction:

  “There’s an entire world of people who would call themselves Christians... beautiful, smart human beings, who don’t agree with each other, and all somehow seem to have real community.” — Dustin [71:35]

• On the risk and reward of intellectual humility:

  “I think it’s probably a scary road to get comfortable with uncertainty, but once you’re there... the water’s fine.” — Dustin [80:49]

• On moral intuition and childrearing:

  “The times when I’m the best father I can be are not ever the times where there’s any retributive movement happening... If I can do that, clearly God is able to..." — Dustin [63:39]

• On the temptation to overperform as a podcast host:

  “I have this absurd desire to come into each of these conversations… and want to know more than they do about what they know, which is crazy.” — Dustin [93:57]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 00:45 – 09:00: Dan Koch’s licensure and life update
• 09:00 – 14:15: Introduction to the rebroadcast and its contemporary relevance
• 14:15 – 23:07: Defining 'experience' and trust in spiritual contexts
• 23:07 – 30:50: Dustin’s personal history of faith and doubt
• 31:48 – 33:52: Reformed theology as coping mechanism for unresolved questions
• 33:57 – 47:21: Mars Hill years, power, gaslighting, and collapse
• 47:21 – 52:00: Ethics of leaving, loving your neighbor, and community
• 52:00 – 62:56: Post-Mars Hill deconstruction and the centrality of beauty, goodness, truth
• 63:14 – 64:46: Parental experience, moral intuition, and atonement
• 70:05 – 75:00: Process theology, pluralism, and reconstructing “faith”
• 78:45 – 81:09: Humility, possibility, and epistemic constraints
• 84:23 – 88:15: Counterarguments: solipsism, inerrancy, and the suspicion of experience
• 89:03 – 95:18: Good, true, beautiful; podcasting philosophy & promotion

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Conclusion and Next Steps

• The episode delves deeply into the psychological and theological importance of taking experience seriously—both as a means of resisting spiritual abuse and as a path to reconstruction after faith crises.
• Dustin’s new podcast, Carry the Fire, is recommended for further exploration of the themes discussed.
• Dan promises more in-depth content in the future, with a heads-up regarding potential schedule changes as he enters a new professional chapter.

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For Listeners

• If wrestling with religious deconstruction, spiritual abuse, or career change in mental health, this episode provides validation, practical models, and language for nuance and humility.
• For fans of Thrice, there are references to Dustin's music as touchpoints for his spiritual evolution.

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Further Resources

• Carry the Fire podcast by Dustin Kensrue.
• Pete Enns’ works and episodes (especially on inerrancy and Old Testament violence).
• Previous episode: “Trusting Yourself After Religious Change” (link in show notes).
• Participation invitation: Study on adverse childhood experiences and spiritual abuse (link in show notes).

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For queries and coaching/therapy interest:

• Email: [e-mail]
• For coaching: dancohclientsmail.com

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(Note: Ads, outros, and non-content sections have been omitted for clarity.)

Transcript

[A]

I am conducting some more spiritual abuse research with the help of Dr. Lisa Adam quals and Carrie Klatt of Concordia University in Wisconsin. And we are looking at the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and lifetime exposure to spiritual abuse. Our anonymous survey is live and the link is in the show notes. The only requirements are that you are 18 years of older and that you either were raised Christian or have identified as Christian at some point in your life. Again, that link is in the show notes. And please feel free to share with anybody else in your life who you think might appreciate taking part in this research. And we thank you heartily. Hello, friends. I would like to give a little life update here. It's Dan. It's Dan Koch. And introduce a rebroadcast today, a special rebroadcast that I think is interestingly timed. So let's talk about the life update first. I think we're going to need a drum roll here. Josh, please insert a drum roll sound. I passed the eppp, the Ethics and Practice in Psychology, something I forget the acronym, but it is basically the bar exam for lawyers, but for psychologists. And at the moment I am simply waiting on the paperwork to all pass through the system here down at City hall in Olympia. And I will then be Dan Koch, licensed psychologist. And I am pumped about this. I also am exhausted. I studied for this for about 11 weeks, quite seriously. It is definitely the most sheer amount of effort I have put into a single academic pursuit in my entire life. I would include my dissertation. There were moments during this studying process that I said to friends and loved ones that I wish somebody had ordered me. I would rather have been ordered to write a 300 page book than to study for this test. I cannot tell you the number of discrete pieces of information that I eventually memorized or got close enough to memorizing that I could, you know, recall it if necessary. I mean, thousands. I think it was wild. And it's over. And it is the culmination of seven years of education and training. It would typically be six years for the average person. Plus sometimes I add in a half a year for taking some prerequisites because I didn't have a psychology undergraduate degree, it would normally be six. We took a year off to have our second child, which was a very good decision and a wise decision by my wife. So for us it was seven years. And what I'm trying to do now in the wake of having passed this is to take it a little bit easy. I want to take it slightly easy for a month or two here. I want to acclimate to life without grad school or studying or supervisor meetings without any of that stuff, just working and being a husband and a dad. But I can already feel the creativity surging and swirling within me. I do think there will be some fun and hopefully very good content coming your way in the not distant future. There are some people I've been wanting to talk to anyway that I'm now going to reach out to, but there's also some more involved projects that I have in mind, of course in the overlapping area of psychology and religion. The upshot of that is that patrons will certainly still get at a minimum two full length episodes per month, but there might be some skipped weeks, you know, in these next couple months or just months where every other episode is a full length main feed episode and every other is a patron episode. So if you want to kind of be maximally plugged in right now, I would recommend joining the patreon patreon.com dankoch that link is always in the show Notes There is also going to be a change in my practice. So now that I will be a licensed psychologist at the doctoral level that allows me to apply for what is called psypact. And psypact is an agreement among currently 42 states in the US that if you are licensed at the doctorate level you can go through this fairly straightforward process and then you can become licensed in 42 states for telehealth therapy. This is not just coaching, this is full on therapy, full licensure. To do anything I would do with an in person client here in Washington, I'm expecting that to be finalized something like October. There's no firm timeline and I'm still active as of today. I'm recording this on Saturday, August 1st. Still waiting for my Washington licensure to come through, but once it does I will begin that process. So there are maybe some of you listening who might like to work with me if you if obviously if there is an emergency or if things are in a bit of a crisis right now, I do not ever recommend waiting months to begin therapy. I would recommend finding someone right now, but I I imagine there might be some of you not in a crisis who think it might be fun to work together. So that is coming down the pipe. Just so you know, there are eight states not included. So it's 42 states plus the district of Columbia. The big ones not included for me are California, Oregon, just because it's next door and New York. New York and California are kind of famously finicky around Therapy, licensure practices. It's harder to get licensed in both of those states. There also is probably a reason for them to sort of protect the income generating ability of clinicians who live in those states which are very important, very expensive rather to live in very important, Freudian slip, coastal elite. Well, I will say Washington's pretty fucking expensive too, but nonetheless, so California, New York, you're out of luck if you live in those states. I am still offering coaching, my religious issues coaching and consultation, which I will continue to do. I'm going to continue to offer coaching because I really enjoy it. There is an episode planned soon on coaching, including like the differences between coaching and therapy and some of the stuff that I have gotten up to with coaching clients and that I've particularly enjoyed working with. It's generally like a little bit more problem solve y a little bit more, you know, getting your fingers into the dirt and figuring out solutions and you know, obviously less focused directly on mental health symptoms, things like this. So often, often what the doctor ordered, no pun intended, for issues around religion, which are sometimes, you know, directly linked up, directly aligned with mental health issues, as in, you know, religious scrupulosity connected to obsessive compulsive disorder, for instance, or you know, serious depression at the loss of relationships after religious change, for instance. But a lot of issues around religious stuff can be dealt with at that sort of higher, lighter level of coaching. So, yeah, I think so. That's still, that's still around. You can always email me dancohclientsmail.com for any of that stuff. And that email today will be in the show notes. It's not normally in the show notes. Now to the episode that we are going to hear a rebroadcast of. This is an early episode with Dustin Kenzru, who is the singer and songwriter of the Orange county heavy rock band Thrice. And this one caught my attention because it reminded me of one of the most popular episodes of the last eight months or so, which was at the very end of December. Despite being released during the holiday break, it sort of kept building listens and downloads and people would reach out to me about it or mention it to me. Clients mentioned it, friends mentioned it, acquaintances mentioned it. And that one is called Trusting yourself after Religious Change. I'm going to have Josh put a link to that episode in these show notes in case you want to go listen to that one either before or after. But this conversation with Dustin is about trusting ourselves, specifically trust, trusting our experience. But that really maps very well onto the Stuff we talked about just back in December, except this was seven years ago, is before I had really done any psychological education, certainly before any training. I had not worked with a single client yet. I was probably like two months into grad school, first semester kind of a thing. And so I wanted to listen back to this and sort of compare notes. And I just think it's kind of an interesting slice of the kind of stuff I was thinking about that far back. And yeah, I'm just kind of looking forward to listening all the way through and processing that. Maybe I'll record a sort of some thoughts about it for a future episode. Briefly comparing the two episodes and what I noticed there. Thrice also appears to be on tour this summer. That's not really a reason for doing it, but hey, if you're a Thrice fan, go see them live. They are fantastic live. And we will be back next week with a Generation Gap Culture hour with Josh and Tony. That'll be, you know, a half hour or so on the main feed and the rest for patrons only, as per usual. But I just want to say to everybody, thank you so much for sticking with me. This has been just a fucking long and often brutal process. It is wild to be at the end of it. I mean truly, it's just paperwork. I had seven straight years of significant hurdles. Classes to be passed, tests to take, papers to write, dissertation training, internship, working with supervisors just on and on and on and on. And then finally studying for the final boss. That was the eppp. There's a funny story around it too. I forgot my passport. Or actually I had my passport. I had to take it in British Columbia. Cause it was closer and sooner than driving to Seattle or Anacortes, Washington. And Jaffrey, my wife, I had to wake her up like 7:15am to drive and meet me halfway with my regular driver's license. Cause I had to have a second form of id. And I forgot to put my wallet from my yesterday pants to my today pants. Cause I had to get up early to drive up and take this test. And I was like so late and they let me take it. I was waiting at the border for forever. I was so stressed out. It took me really the first hour. They give you four and a half hours for this test. I took three and a half to do it. And the first hour, it took me that long just to sort of return to a nervous system baseline. And I did not think I passed. I thought I maybe passed okay, I maybe just barely passed or something like that. And I actually I passed with, like, a significant margin. Like, with plenty of margin. And I was surprised then. I remain surprised today. There are some kind of boring details about how they structure the test that might explain that difference, but it doesn't matter. That test score doesn't matter. It just matters that I passed. And again, thank you, guys. Thanks for sticking with me. I am really excited for this next phase of life and work, so professional life as well as personal life. And I think the boys and Jaffrey deserve some more of my time and attention as we, you know, live this last month and a half of summer here. So I'm going to do that and prioritize that. But I'm also. I'm working on some stuff that I think you guys will like, and I'm excited to share with you. Okay, let's get to this conversation with Dustin. Dustin, thank you so much for being here. I want to start with a couple things just so people have their bearings, because you are a public figure and your band is so beloved, and I would say you kind of have an outsized place in the kind of deconstruction, reconstruction, Christian world. For whatever reasons. I asked patrons of the show for questions that I fielded through the Facebook group, and there's like maybe seven or eight of those. I'm going to try and call them out if I can. When they come up, those are going to be peppered throughout. But to start, before we get into your story, I want to kind of define some terms here. So we're talking about trusting experience, but I want to know what you mean, because you sort of floated experience as the topic to me, and I want to know what you mean by experience. Like, are we talking about the Wesleyan quadrilateral, where it's like scripture, reason, experience, and tradition? Do you mean something less robust? More robust?

[B]

I do want to clarify. I think taking your experience seriously is a better way to put it than trusting your experience. Because I know. Because your experience is just one. One piece of the puzzle. Right. I mean it. In contrast, I think, especially for your podcast, as you're talking about to Christians or former Christians or deconstructing Christians, reconstructing Christians, that they have probably been told in some way or another that their experience is not to be trusted or not to be taken seriously. And I think that's very destructive. And I think it took me a long time to figure that out.

[A]

Yeah. Maybe we could frame it as, like a bit of a continuum. So on the far left hand, you would have trusting your experience completely such that, you know, you can't tell me anything kind of a thing where, hey, I know what I see with my two eyes, I know what I feel. I know that God is like, I feel God is or something. And then all the way on the other end, something like the fact that you're an embodied person with like emotions running in chemicals through your brain in a physical world that God created along with your body, that like all of that is completely sidelined for this interpretation of this sacred text. Kind of a thing where all your experiences, all your intuitions are sort of nothing compared to the, the shiny pearl that, that everybody thinks they found.

[B]

Yeah. And what's actually kind of weird about that, it's almost more like a circle. A lot of times the people who are so set on, you know, the only thing you can trust is whatever this revelation is, their reasoning for trusting it is not really there. It's just, well, I trust this. And so it's come all the way back around to the other side of my experience is the only thing that matters, but it's only in this very narrow sense and that makes me disregard everything else that I experience.

[A]

Oh, that's interesting. There's a way. Yeah. So I was thinking about this last night. If I were to ask someone who is a biblical inerrantist who believes that the Bible contains no real errors, it's like a pretty error free, you know, revelation from God. So what do you think the criteria are for that? Like how much digging would you need to do to determine that that's true. And, and by the way, have you done that digging with the Vedas and the Quran and you know, like, have you gone through all the other possible inerrant books and sort of systematically ruled them out and that's not as much

[B]

of a deal, you know, that nobody.

[A]

No, no one's.

[B]

I think you could find someone who's done that.

[A]

Yeah. I mean there are maybe a handful of scholars who are. That is their job by their asking

[B]

that same question or in the same way at least.

[A]

And it's not even probably a good thing to do with your life, but it is the kind of thing you would need to do for a certain kind of argument that it seems like people want to make a lot of times, but it is in a sense, experience. Right. Their experience is that they were raised in a Christian world or converted to Christianity at some point.

[B]

Yeah. And it gets at that. Both sides of that are not very helpful spots. They're very inflexible and you arrive there essentially by chance. Yeah, I Mean, I grew up being pretty skeptical and questioning the things that I believed and why I believe them. But I grew up in a Christian world, and so the places I'm looking for answers are Christian places for answers. And so there's apologetics, and people make arguments. And, yeah, they can make good arguments, but it's that whole idea that once you're kind of inside a certain sort of worldview, it can be really nice and tidy within it, as long as you don't push too hard against the edges.

[A]

Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I promise we're going to get to your story here. But just like the last two or three nights of my life, I kind of figured out some language for what's going on right now in my own sort of this new phase of deconstruction, which I did not really anticipate. And you never do. Right. The image I came up with is like, there was a plate of cookies on our coffee table last night when we had some people over. And I was like, I was told that this plate is the whole world and that Christianity perfectly overlays over the plate. It explains everything in or on this plate, and that's the world. So Christianity explains it. What I found out is the world is actually more the size of our entire living room. And what I'm trying to determine is if and how Christianity is actually a much bigger or more flexible thing, or if the edges of the plate are permeable or something where I need a different understanding of Christianity that is as wide as the living room, not as wide as the plate. And I'm trying to figure out on 35 different axes, you know, how Christianity can or can't do that. And if I can stay in the faith, it will be a faith that is as big as the room. Right. As big as the world actually is.

[B]

Yeah. I'm having James Kars on my podcast. I just watched a lecture he gave, and it's fascinating. He contrasts systems of belief versus systems of inquiry, and he basically says religions at their core are not systems of belief, but they spawn systems of belief. And those systems of belief are these closed things that answer everything, whereas the religion itself is initially wrestling with a mystery. And he would say religions, as well as something like science, when properly done, are both systems of inquiry that are getting at these mysteries in different ways. And so they're not opposed to each other. They're not at odds. They're just different things, but of the same kind. And so what you're making me think of with that is the plate is a very much like that system of belief. It's very defined, there's no like, edges or ways out. But Christianity as a religion, as a. In that term, as a way of wrestling with the mystery, I think can be overlaid over all of it. And I've started to wonder, and I want to ask him about this, if, you know a way to think about religions is a lens that you lay, that you see the whole picture through. Right. And maybe there's different kinds of lenses because I think maybe the system belief is a lens as well. I was thinking about this this morning. I think, I feel like the religions could be almost like analogous to ar, where you've got a picture of something and then there's things overlaid and you're like, oh, that's cool. It's this thing.

[A]

Augmented reality.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So say you're looking at your phone and then it's like showing you butterflies flying across something. It's not really there, but you're like, oh, but I see the butterflies now. Whereas a system of belief would be more like. I don't know if you've seen the weird videos where they train algorithms to delete things from an environment.

[A]

I don't think so.

[B]

It's really weird. So you can train an algorithm like, hey, here's a bunch of cars. And then take the algorithm and film an area where there's a bunch of cars and it's trying to delete them from the scene. And it's fascinating, but I feel like sometimes systems of belief are like that where it's looking at the world, but it's deleting things that it doesn't. It can't account for.

[A]

Yes. Basically, that is the mechanism by which it perpetuates itself in some of its cruder forms is just through sheer deletion, right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so that's why people say things like, I started deconstructing when I realized that all my non Christian friends were actually good people. You go to Christians in those conservative environments, they're not going to deny that there are good people out there. But it's like an implicit thing that the model can't really handle there being good people out there. So even though technically it will never deny that you pick up on that so implicitly that when you then find it, it's just a thing that had been deleted, sort of imperfectly deleted. You know what I mean?

[B]

With the app, when you watch one of those videos, you'll. I think it's a good analogy.

[A]

So that guest in that interview that you're about to do for your new show, Carry the Fire, which we'll talk about later. That sounds incredible. I'm gonna have to look out for that. It's not out yet. But let's get into some of the narrative of your life. And I want to just. If we can use this experience question as a lens as we go through where it makes sense. So can we start with just what is the childhood faith that you were given?

[B]

So I grew up in kind of a non denom evangelical church where it's in Irvine, California. And I, you know, I still know a ton of people there. People like, you know, grew up, my parents, friends, and yeah, a lot of great people there and a lot of good coming out of that.

[A]

That's exactly how I grew up as well. California white bread evangelicalism. Let's fast forward to late high school, early college, I think is when you guys get going with thrice your band. What is important to know about that period?

[B]

I kind of said this before, but just that I was always curious, skeptical. But I think part of the issue was like, I was so trained also in the idea of. I mean, it's a natural want to want certainty, but it's also reinforced, I think, within structures. So even when I, you know, I would get skeptical and I would go and I'd be like, I don't understand, whatever. And I'd go and research it until I felt like, okay, I. I have good answers, right? But it's essentially, it's still just propping up the thing that you were already in. You're like, oh my gosh, it's falling over. I need to prop it up. You prop it up and you move on. I had like a large faith doubt kind of period in my early 20s. And the thing that really screwed me up was I was. I mean, I'd been given a bunch of like, young earth creations and stuff as a kid and dug into all that. I was like, okay. And it never sat super great with me. And then I ended up really rejecting that stuff. And then that threw me for a loop on how to interpret scripture because I hadn't been given tools to understand that this could be read in a variety of ways and has always been read in a variety of ways. And so you're faced with this kind of false binary of it's either true this way or it's not true at all. You know, no one taught me, oh, this is a different genre here. This is poetry. This. Right, whatever. And so didn't know what to do. With that and just kind of paralyzed me. And this kind of ties into this idea of carrying the fire in a certain sense of, you know, holding on to the good, the true, and the beautiful. Those things are just foundational to. And this gets back to experience, too. I don't know what to make of experience if I don't understand some innate value in the good, the true, and the beautiful. Like, that's. I've realized that's more bedrock than almost anything else, because I can't even. I can't begin to make sense of things. That's just how I experience the world. So I got to the point where I was like, well, I feel like my choices are I toss those and I'm just a materialist, whatever. Or I go back and I go back with some more intellectual humility, which is never a bad thing. But I thought those were just my two choices. And had someone been like, hey, there are more choices. There's different ways to understand what God's power could be like. There's different ways to understand how you can interpret these scriptures, different frameworks, different hermeneutics. I would have gladly jumped into a third place, but I didn't. I didn't. I didn't have that way open to me. So I kind of went back in and was like, all right, well, I'm never gonna understand this stuff perfectly, but I. I'm gonna be intellectually humble, in a sense, and. And dig in here. And this supports my view of meaning of the world. And we'll just go with this, and I'll try to take it as it comes.

[A]

So I don't know exactly how old you were at various albums or, you know, in career, and then with your eventual involvement with Mars Hill and Reformed Theology. So are you talking about sort of the earlier period where you're CS Lewis, you know, titles of songs and stuff like that?

[B]

Yeah. This would have overlapped mostly with artists in the Ambulance. I think Stare at the sun is kind of representative of a lot of that stuff, which has been an interesting song over time. Just the way that it's. I don't know, it's fun to have songs that shift in the way that you relate to them over time. And that one's always been an interesting one. Cause I am too far A miracle I'm waiting for.

[A]

Yeah, so the. The line I'm thinking of at the end of the chorus is, I'll stare straight into the sun and I won't close my eyes. It's sort of an idea of like, it's basically a call to courage in the face of uncertainty. Right. You're wanting a miracle, you're wanting a sign.

[B]

Yeah. And I think, yes, you can hear though, so how badly I'm wanting the certainty right in it. Right. But looking back at it now, I would say like, I think that search is good and valuable and the questioning is good and valuable and I would put less emphasis on finding some kind of certain answer in regards to a lot of things.

[A]

At least that record came out when I was, I want to say 20, you know, I was a Christian philosophy major at a non Christian state school in California. And it's really interesting how your sort of public search paralleled mine in a lot of ways at similar points in life. Except when you went reformed, I never bought that shit. Which we're about to get to. Let's go to that. So you've got this kind of, you're wanting this certainty and you're kind of like, I recognize the move, I have language for it now that I didn't have then. The move that I would say that it sounds to me like you made was it's the thoughtful Christian kid who encounters some doubt. This is the move that I made, by the way as well and is just kind of finding out that there's like, oh, there's GK Chesterton and there's CS Lewis and there are these sort of like intellectual giants of decades past that are resources for the thoughtful Christian. There are Francis Schaeffer's in the world. It's kind of like the Christian liberal arts school approach. Maybe you might say it's not where I'm at now. It's not where you're at now, but it has some real intellectual rigor to it, right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so you go there rather than leaning into maybe a more experience based kind of a thing. Am I right?

[B]

Yeah, I think I was there before even, but I had the idea that I could really, I could nail it down. And then that that was what I was like, oh, I'm never gonna nail it down. That freaked me out and kind of spun me out.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So I definitely came back more nuanced even. But the main point was, hey, you're never going to make total sense of all this stuff. And, and that's really kind of the, the seeds of my more recent deconstruction were planted there in the. Putting on the back burner of things that were never going to stay there. But you know, things like genocide and God commanding genocide in the Old Testament, eternal conscious torment, stuff like that. Was just like, I don't know. That doesn't seem to make sense. But I can't throw out goodness, truth and beauty, and I don't have another option. So I'm going to put those on the back burner and we'll figure this out later.

[A]

Yeah, interesting. So I wonder if that could partly explain our divergence at kind of similar points in the road. So I, as a philosophy major, could not ignore the genocide stuff and could not ignore the hell stuff, because I was in these classes thinking about justice and. And virtue and all that stuff, and that stuff was just smacking me in the face. And I think that's kind of what inoculated me against Reformed theology, was that I was like, look, I understand it's intellectually robust. I understand it takes the text very seriously. I would now say in a post Enlightenment, kind of Eurocentric, individualist way, it takes it seriously. But it does. And there's a real intellectual, sort of devotional kind of tradition there that's valuable, but I could never go there. My question for you is, did you make that turn toward, like, kind of a serious Reformed thinking while those questions were still on the back burner?

[B]

Yes. And I think going Reformed, there's some relief to those questions in a sense, because it really takes everything off your plate, in a sense. Like, it's really pushing it all on God. And so you're like, well, I don't. That seemed weird, but clearly I'm not understanding something. Right. It's just not making sense to me. And so you kind of can shove it off a bit.

[A]

There's a really big backdoor in Reformed theology. Right. That you can push a lot of stuff back through of like. But my reason is not to the task. Yeah. So therefore I have reason to think I'd be wrong about this.

[B]

Yeah. And that's. It's. It's also a club you can hit people with.

[A]

Well, sure.

[B]

When they don't see things the same way as you. What drew me to Reformed theology, I really hated it, partly because I misconstrued it. A lot of people view it as like, you know, you're a robot, and that's not generally the actual view. So I hated that. And then when I realized that wasn't the case, I kind of rethought through it. But the thing I liked about it was, growing up evangelical, you get this idea that God's feelings towards you, his love for you, is very wavery, like based on how good you're doing at the moment. And so you never feel Secure. You always feel, like, a sense of shame when you are doing bad and pride when you are doing good. And Reformed theology really cuts through that quite powerfully. And so what I latched onto was this idea that God's love was steady and unchanging regardless of what I did. And you could find evangelicals who would articulate the same thing. But it's very, very clear in Reformed circles. So that was very beautiful. And so I would say, like, I still hold to that. I just have moved beyond certain parts of the reform stuff. So I think God can be persistently and consistently loving without having to be. Really? I don't know.

[A]

Well, I'm going to ask.

[B]

I feel like I'm getting ahead of myself, so.

[A]

No, I'm going to ask you about that when we get to that point in the narrative. Okay.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

We got to talk about your joining Mars Hill. So I would like to give a little background for people who were not paying attention at the time. I don't think it is a exaggeration to say that Driscoll was one of the top five most effective reformed pastors in America at that moment.

[B]

Oh, no, not at all.

[A]

And what people don't know who weren't here is that there was a huge community of, like, really good musicians that were involved at Marcel. So that's kind of the context. Like, there's been no plagiarism scandal yet. There's been no scandal of using church funds to goose the New York Times bestseller list. It's still controversial in terms of how he talks about women.

[B]

He is publicly an asshole.

[A]

So, yeah, he's a public asshole.

[B]

The problem is he's a very powerful communicator.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

And when he's not being an asshole is communicating that steady love of God in a very unique way. And so what happens, I think, with people who ended up staying there for any amount of time is you. Your Christian ideal of, like, forgiveness gets abused because you're like, well, yeah, that wasn't cool. But he needs grace, too. Right. And once you do that, it becomes a fixture. You just. You keep doing that and you're like, damn it, why did he say that this week? But then you're also on the ground with a lot of really amazing people, and great things are happening in people's lives. And so you keep excusing it. And it's not a cynical bargain or something. You're not like, well, it's hard to describe it, but it's. It's. I don't know. Most of the best People I've ever known were working there at the time. And I don't know, I came into a weird time when a bunch of people that I already knew that were there started leaving. And it was like, oh, why is everyone. I mean, I had a buddy who had worked there forever. I was gonna move up there. He's like, don't do it. He was still working there.

[A]

Oh, really?

[B]

Don't come. And I was like, I feel like I'm supposed to.

[A]

Well, and Nick Bogardus, who had managed Thrice for a decade at that point, was he on staff yet at Mars Hill? But, like, he's a connection and a guy you trusted and, you know, he

[B]

had left managing us to go to go work there. Yeah, I knew him really well. I knew Nate Burke really well. Jesse Bryant, like, there was a bunch of people that I knew who were.

[A]

Nate Burke, bassist of legendary tooth and nail band frotus.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So I have a couple questions about the Mars Hill chapter from listeners. Here's the first one. And this is. We can bring it to the experience question. This guy writes, I'd love to hear if Dustin overrode any forms of knowledge in 2012 when making the decision to join the Mars Hill staff.

[B]

Do you know, can you expand, expound?

[A]

So I guess what he's saying is like, you know, to put experience in sort of the Wesleyan quadrilateral situation with scripture, reason, experience and tradition, another way is just thinking of, like, experience is one of the ways we can know things. So perhaps. Did you override experiential knowledge? Did you override? I mean, you talked a little bit about the back burner of some of these moral questions about God's character within the reformed view. I think it's just kind of stuff like that.

[B]

I don't think that I did. I just think so the big takeaway for me, looking back, even when I, before I deconstruct, a lot of stuff, was just like, hey, like, you were right to try to have grace for someone who's struggling with whatever, even just according to a pretty basic reading of Christian scripture. Like, you didn't need to submit to that guy as an elder or authority. And that's what should have been the thing was like, oh, hey, he's a good teacher. Also, there's enough going on there that I know about that I should be like, and he shouldn't be my pastor or in any position of authority. So looking back, that's what I would have told myself at that time. And people probably tried to. I feel like Nobody articulated that nuance, and that might have helped me, but

[A]

it makes me think of kind of an interesting question of church culture in the west, which is, it seems like when you think about it, being a really good teacher and being a really good spiritual authority figure for an organization should not have that much overlap, but they're wedded for some reason, in our imagination, I think, especially as Protestants, who really value preaching because preaching explicates the Bible, and we value the Bible over all the other liturgical elements and over the church teaching and all of that stuff. I mean, that's probably part of it. There's also a part that I think is kind of celebrity driven. I think Trump is related to all of that, and mega pastors are related to all that. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

[B]

I think some of it ties into narcissistic tendencies. And the way. I mean, if you study at all, like, the. The way that narcissism actually functions, it creates a structure around itself to protect itself.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And it just naturally does. Like, the person doesn't even have to be aware of that.

[A]

Yeah, it's. It's naturally. It's actually, we think of narcissists as really confident people, but narcissism is a defense structure against being insecure.

[B]

I think so. Yeah.

[A]

One other question about the Mars Hill season. When did you see warning signs at Mars Hill? You said you saw. Maybe you had a couple. You had at least one friend before you were there. And what were those warning signs?

[B]

Like, what led to the end kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it just kept building. And here the frustrating part was, and I was a pastor at the end, and everything started spinning out. Like, there was more and more controversies coming out in new stuff, whatever. And. And this is kind of what was happening even when I was first coming. Like, the polemic against the church or against Mark made people defensive in a certain sense. And I mean, I'm sure you see this a bunch, especially with the depolarized stuff, but when there's such an attack, sometimes it causes people to double down

[A]

and circle the wagons. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And so you would hear something, and then you would get a story of like, oh, no, that's actually not true. And then that starts to inoculate you against the input that's coming in from the outside. And so people on the outside who are saying this or that are demonized because you have heard a different story to this. And so it became more and more concerning to where a lot of the pastors were trying to push to get things changed inside church, trying to have accountability. And the thing that finally really broke it was that I got confirmation that there were lying to us, which we didn't have before. And so that was really hard because we're like, okay, well, that sounds like a reasonable explanation from the inside. Okay, I guess I'll keep trusting this. And so we had been, you know, receiving these lies, giving them out to the people, being like, oh, no, I know you heard this, but whatever. So that was the most frustrating part, was being made a part of that. And so once we had confirmation that they were actually lying to us, that really broke things open. And that's when me and the other. Some of the other pastors wrote a letter trying to get all the other pastors to step up and stop all of this, put Mark on leave, figure out what was happening, that all got squashed, shut down. I ended up leaving, writing a letter explaining to people just because the letter had leaked that I had originally wrote with the other guys. And I didn't want people to feel, like, abandoned, like, hey, you just blew this thing up and now you're running away. It's like, well, yeah, I mean, at

[A]

this point, you're a pastor, you have hundreds, thousands of people, you know, like, under your at least partial spiritual care. I mean, you have to think about those people, not just the Internet public. Right?

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. And that was never really the concern. It was more just, I'm gonna do whatever I can to try to fix this while I can. And then it became clear that nobody was at the top, at least was interested in doing anything about it. And me sticking around was just going to be a. Playing a scenario out where I eventually get fired and drag my family through more nonsense. So.

[A]

Right, yeah. Okay, so let's talk about leaving. Then you write the letter with the other pastors. You co Write it, Nothing happens, it leaks. So you leave and you write an open letter. I remember reading at the time about why you were leaving. And I guess my question about that was, I mean, does that relate to the experience thing?

[B]

No. I mean, I think it does relate in. Yes. I mean, you're getting at the gaslighting of, like, everyone being like, is this all crazy? Is the building on fire? And people being like, no, it's not on fire. Yeah, I think that's. That's part of that idea is sometimes when you're like, something's wrong, it's okay to take that feeling seriously and to try to get answers for it and If I would say giant warning sign is if someone's not letting you ask those things, that you should probably just bail. It's not a. Not a healthy situation where you can't. Can't ask those. Those questions. So I have question that's really hard because at this point, people are so intertwined and invested in the community. Right. And so when you. You have. You have leverage to gaslight people at

[A]

that point, I think it is really hard to not think about Donald Trump when I'm talking about Mark Driscoll, just at a psychological sort of phenomena level. Yeah.

[B]

Mark. I'd say he's a lot more nuanced, and I'd say he's a lot smarter. Well, at least more educated. But the similarities are pretty intense.

[A]

So I have this listener question. Having gone through what you went through, do you have any strategies for dealing with leaders who are gaslighting, who are sort of. They have enough leverage, enough power, enough communication skill, whatever, to sort of make you think that the problems are not real? They must be all in your head because everything is actually fine.

[B]

Part of taking your experience seriously, I would say, is taking other people's experience seriously.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Because when you can be made to doubt your own experience, then you definitely doubt other people's experience. When you can trust your experience, in some sense, you learn to trust other people's experience.

[A]

Oh, that's really interesting.

[B]

And I think that that's really the basis of a healthy community or society where you can be like, oh, and this is. I think the way you see that play out in evangelicalism and other places is when you're made to distrust your experience, you absolutely will distrust the experience of others. And so you write them off. So if you have someone who is saying, hey, I. I'm gay, that I've always felt this way, and whatever, but people around you are like. Well, no, they're just whatever. Whatever. What you want to put.

[A]

There's 10 different. Yeah. Throwaway lines there.

[B]

Yeah. None of which are actually taking that person's experience seriously. Like, what is it?

[A]

There are ways to deflect taking it seriously.

[B]

Yeah. What is it like to be in that person's shoes and feel the way that they're feeling? And if you're going to get down to what I would say the root of good ethics are and what Jesus talks about doing to others, as you have done to you, he says that this summarizes the law and the prophets. Yeah, we don't take that very seriously. Like, that should be the core of how you approach Any ethical situation, and it's just not the way that the church generally does it.

[A]

So you kind of even hit this. But the next question from another listener was, how did your personal experiences of Driscoll's abusive and manipulative behaviors, like, collide with the collective experiences of the various people? That. There's sort of collective experience that's reinforcing the norms. But then you're also talking about this collective experience that is. Wait, is this wrong? That on the fringes of people's consciousness and increasingly less and less the fringes. Right. As time goes on and the evidence piles up, I'm just kind of wondering if there's anything else there about your personal experience and the group experience. And then after that, I love this idea that maybe you have to take your own experience seriously before you can take another's. And if you can't take another's seriously, you can't actually love your neighbor as yourself. That's fascinating.

[B]

Yeah, I think that's very true. As far as the group dynamic versus the personal, there, I think what starts happening or was happening there is. You are kind of huddled with those around you who you're experiencing this stuff with almost against the one who is at the top of this and causing these problems. But it's. I don't know, it's a complicated and really unhealthy situation. But you. I mean, every. You would bond in a way out of, like, the, like, oh, God, yeah, Mark. And.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And. But you're like, but down here, we're. This is something good we're doing. So we're dealing with that and, you know, hoping for the best, praying for him to change. I don't know what. Trying to work through the system. But the system was getting. Essentially. And that's why it all broke down, was it got more and more funneled until people were like, nope, this is totally out of control. I think what everyone thought for a long time was, we can stop this if it gets bad enough. And then it got bad enough, and people like, oh, they've removed all the mechanisms for us to stop this.

[A]

Right?

[B]

And we didn't. Which is a good life lesson. Say, like something like NSA illegal wiretapping or something, where you're like, well, I'm not doing anything wrong, so why do I care?

[A]

Right?

[B]

And it's like, no, but you can't. You can't just give all that away, because at some point it might really matter to everyone.

[A]

Right?

[B]

And.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So I'm just really intrigued by this idea. That there's different ways of thinking apparently about love your neighbor as yourself. Like a super stubborn reformed person might say, well look, that person might think that what they want is for me to take their experience seriously. But actually the best way to love people is just to get them to accept Christ or rather accept the sovereignty of God because they can't actually accept Christ on a form view. God accepts Christ for them. And so that's a kind of a twisting, I think of the, you know,

[B]

that does that literally gets settled a fair amount, I think.

[A]

Yeah, but, but here's a, here's another way of thinking about it. Like is loving your neighbor as yourself, is there necessarily as part of that a question to them of what is your life like? It makes me think of missionary work, of like, let's just go in and solve things. Or like, do we need to have a discovery period where we listen to the community?

[B]

You know, there's a, I forget who said it. It's probably a bunch of people. But I think maybe a better way to say the golden rule even is to say do unto others as they would have you do unto them.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Because I mean, it's just adding that layer of, hey, don't just assume everyone is wanting or thinking the same thing about you. A good example of this is you're going through the drive through at Chick Fil A and you're an introvert and they want to ask you all about your weekend plans and they've been told that this is a way to be loving and helpful to people.

[A]

Oh gosh, yeah.

[B]

It's only loving helpful to some people.

[A]

The dental hygienist. That's my example of like lady or sir, I just want to get out of here. Can you just do this as quickly as possible? It hurts and I hate it. And like, I'm not going to remember this conversation. You don't not going to remember what I did with my summer? I'm not going to remember what you did with your summer. But then I also think that they just read people.

[B]

Yeah, but that's reading people. And if that person is an extrovert, they are actually not being loving by not reading your introversion. No. And vice versa.

[A]

Well, I'm no introvert. I just hate getting my teeth cleaned. But I, I was thinking about this in the chair. I was having that old airplane guilt, you know, like, oh, should I be, should I bring this person to Christ who happens to be sitting next to me on the airplane. But I had it about like, I'm not loving Her. She obviously wants to talk, but I'm getting, you know, pics in my mouth and my gums are bleeding. God, do I really need to be kind to this woman? Anyway, it's a silly example.

[B]

I mean, it's the mundane, everyday thing, and I think both people are doing that. There's some kind of good thing that comes out of that.

[A]

Yeah, there's something really big there to mind, maybe in the future. And I just kind of want to flag it as a verbal processor for myself here. That, like, love your neighbor, like, do unto others as you would have them do unto you is actually a little bit. That framing nowadays in our language today is a little egotistical. It assumes that I know what's best for everyone else by proxy of what I think is best for me. Right. Which is, oh, maybe I don't. And so I like that, as they would have you do unto them, then you have to.

[B]

You have to ask you to do some work. Yeah.

[A]

And that's. And that is like, obviously more Christ. Like, it's not like that's a big jump or anything like that.

[B]

Well, if you want to look at an example a little bit when. When Christ is going to heal the guy at the pool of Bethesda, and he's like, do you want to be healed? And I mean, that's profound for a bunch of different reasons, because I think it's very possible to interpret that in a way of, like, the guy probably didn't want to be healed until that moment. Like, he probably hadn't crawled into that pool because he was comfortable in that spot.

[A]

He got. He got some, you know, poor man's version of value for being the eternal cripple.

[B]

Yeah, but I mean, that's just an interesting example of some being like, well, of course I'm gonna heal. Heal that guy if I can heal that guy. But there's. There's this discovery moment. Do you really want that?

[A]

Yeah. That's interesting. So let's get to post. Mars Hill. My experience of you is that I wasn't really paying attention. And then a few years later, you emerge as, oh, he's like a process theologian now. He's not. I think I, Tripp from homebrewed Christianity, might have mentioned something or. And I was like, oh, I wasn't. You know, you weren't on my radar theologically. I was still listening to Thrice Records, but. And so apparently I wasn't listening very closely.

[B]

No, it was a process.

[A]

So let's talk about that. So maybe just walk us briefly through that change and I imagine experience is going to play a role in that. So this week's Patron only episode is with the same person you're listening to me talk to right now, Dustin Kensrew. We get into more stuff about the band, about thrice, about touring, what it shows us about ourselves, about being a kind of public spokesperson for Christians and how that feels, the difficulties of writing lyrics for heavy music and the connection between punk rock and the kind of anti empire messaging of Jesus and a few more things. So if you want to hear that you should be a patron, you can go to patreon.com dan koch or you have permissionpod.com and click become a patron starts at 5 bucks a month. And there's also a Facebook group that is only for patrons. That has become increasingly an awesome part of my life and I think a lot of patrons lives to have that community. So again, patreon.com Dankoke back to the chat with Dustin,

[B]

Little context. So I left Marcel back down to California because my wife likes the sun and all our family's here. We were back down here. We found a church. It's a rough kind of recovery after the whole Marshall thing. When we had sold our house down here. By the time we had bought up there, it was like market had changed. We came back down, we couldn't afford a house anymore. So just big stuff like that where you're like, I had a house, I don't have a house anymore.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then just relationally trying to figure out all the damage that all had done to us, me and my wife and our family. So we were there, had some kind of healing. We're doing pretty good. And I was leading worship there again, which I was, I had taken time off and started slowly back into was actually kind of there like quarter time, like working there stuff. I was like, I'm never doing that again. And I was like, oh, okay. Well this is seems like a safe place.

[A]

And what kind of church was this, by the way?

[B]

Same kind of thing, non denom evangelical.

[A]

Okay, so you didn't actually go to like a Presbyterian or some other kind of reformed, but a lot of non

[B]

denominational churches is an Acts 29 church.

[A]

Oh, it's Acts 29. Okay, got it. So people don't know that Mars Hill was an Acts 29 church. And one of the first actually big warning signs of the whole downfall was Marcel getting removed from Acts 29, wasn't it?

[B]

Or did that that was near the end and a big part of everything kind of falling apart okay.

[A]

It was near the end. Right.

[B]

So we were there. Sorry, I'm going too long on this. Basically, let's get a lot of people out of this. Well, a lot of people, like, online will be like, oh, you're just. You deconstructed because Mars Hill, like, ruined you or something. It's not the case. So I was still in a fairly similar, like, theological mindset, was on the road with Thrice writing what would have been like, another worship record just in my time that I wasn't playing on the road. And in the process of doing that, I always do a lot of research when I'm writing anything. And so came back to the kind of inerrancy thing which had always been an issue for me and was like, oh, maybe now's the time to, like, check this out again. I think I'd seen there was a book, like, Five Evangelical Views of Veterans or something like that.

[A]

Yeah, like a Zondervan book. Is that the one that Pete Enns is in? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I read that. Or I read part of it anyway.

[B]

So I grabbed that and ended up being like, oh, Pete Enz is the only one who I think is actually, like, I can agree with what they're saying. I mean, everyone in there is, you know, smart people, but. And there's some great nuance points if you want to remain in the inerrant camp that are made. Not by Al Mohler.

[A]

Yeah. Not by Albert Mueller.

[B]

No. But the other guys are like, hey, chill out, Hal. And make some good points. But then Pete is basically like, hey, I don't think we can still be inerrant and actually deal with these problems. And one of those problems is, like, historicity of Joshua. And another one is God commanding genocide. And everyone else does.

[A]

King does King's Chronicles.

[B]

Yeah. So everyone else does the dance that you learned to do. If you're there long enough and have your brain on is. There's a bunch of ways you can kind of get it. And we. You just. You did a great episode on that. Yeah. There's all these ways you can do the jiu jitsu and kind of try to keep it going. But it was so refreshing to hear someone just be like, no, it's. It doesn't work. And I was like, yes, it doesn't work. And, yeah. So that got me into. I read a couple ends books. I read, I don't know, some different things, and was really presented with this idea of, hey, this is the way you've been taught to look at these documents is not Helpful. It's not the way that they were looked at. It's not the way they were meant to be looked at it. Like, it's not the way that, especially with the Old Testament, isn't the way that traditionally Jews have looked at this stuff. Like, especially that idea of it being a conversation over time within a community, I thought was really helpful, corrective to looking at it as this magical thing. And that had always bothered me. You know, I understood how the canon was formed, how we got these books together and whatever, but it always seemed weird to me. That was like, okay, we decided on the canon and then it magically jumped up and became something completely different. Like, all these books are good and now they're magical altogether.

[A]

So ends was so helpful to me because he starts the Bible tells me so with the Canaanite genocide. And that was my deconstructive thread. Like, that was the one that kind of started it all for me. And so I found him so especially helpful. Old Testament scholar, really focused on that issue. Was that kind of, in this phase of deconstruction, a similar string or was it more just the general idea of inerrancy?

[B]

No, that was. That was huge. I mean, because you had said earlier

[A]

it had been on the back burner. Right. And so now you're.

[B]

Yeah. On the back burner in the sense of, like, there's too much cognitive dissonance to really function right now with this. And so I don't know what to do. So I'm gonna push it back here for a bit.

[A]

So then after Marcil, get a little healing, get in a safe spot, you are able to kind of take it up again.

[B]

Yeah, totally. So that's the. That's the ironic part of people who are like, oh, it's just. You're just doing this out of like some trauma responses. Like, no, this came out of like, healing. This came out of the freedom to actually think about this stuff without psychological barriers in place, which are subconscious generally. And so, I mean, that's why it's so hard to talk to people who are pastors about certain stuff like this right now, because they. They can't really entertain it. Depending on where they're at, it kind

[A]

of depends on the status of their job. And you understand that what beliefs are required for you to maintain employment?

[B]

Yeah, and again, I don't think generally a cynical conscious determination. It's just the way that your mind survives.

[A]

Right? I mean, look, you can apply that in a lot of ways. So currently I make a living writing advertising music. One Thing I really can't think about too much right now is. Is if I think all advertising is immoral. That is certainly a possible claim that could be true, but I can't entertain it because my house is being paid for by that. I'm paying for grad school. I want to have a family. Like now. Maybe 10 years from now, when I'm a therapist, not writing any ad music anymore, I'll be able to go, you know what? Advertising is immoral. But that's just. That's the real world. So we have these material needs, and we. We cannot have everything on the table all the time. It just is impossible. And that's not a judgmental thing. I don't think. So. Was there more deconstruction, or are you about to elbow into reconstruction?

[B]

Once inerrancy was, I was like, oh, yeah, that's totally not right. And has been screwing up my thinking on this for a while. That's a heady experience when you've been in that place for a while. And I feel like there was definitely, like a day when I was like, I just don't know anything. And I think in the past, that would have been really scary. And I was like, that's okay. I'm okay. I'm here. What happened in that moment was I saw a reversal in something I had always thought, so I thought the Bible was propping up goodness, beauty, and truth, and I needed those. And so I needed a way to prop them up. And then when the Bible fell away, in the sense that I had been used to it, what I saw very clearly or experienced was those three pillars were unmoved. And that was trippy. And I was like, whoa, look at those. Look at those guys. They're fine. And then I realized, okay, something about my experience is saying that those things are deeper than at least my understanding of what this thing was.

[A]

The pillars were propping up the Bible rather than the other way around. Yeah. So I have a question here about. I think that trusting or taking seriously our experience, there is both a deconstructive and a reconstructive element to that. And so to the extent that those can be separated, let's hold off on the reconstruction. So just looking at that deconstruction, what role did experience play in that?

[B]

I mean, it played a huge role in the sense that it got to the point where I was like, I am no longer going to trust that my experience of what it means to be good includes any possibility that that could command genocide or that whatever it was.

[A]

So in that sense, maybe a better term for it is your moral intuitions, like your deep moral intuitions.

[B]

Yes, but those are inextricable from experience, I would say. Oh, yeah.

[A]

I mean, where do they come from? Right. Those aren't in the Bible. It's not like I once read that good gods would never commit command genocide. No, it's like that comes out through living a human life. You go, oh, I have this intuition.

[B]

Yeah. But I think it's more complicated than that because I do believe in cultural moral revelation or evolution. And so some of the things I think we'd be like, oh, well, obviously this. We only think obviously this because that evolution has happened and you have people who are pushing that forward. So when someone like Jesus says, hey, you, who of you would give your kid a serpent when they asked for a fish? Or who would give them a rock when they asked for bread? I think that's part of this moral evolution where Jesus is pointing out something that had not been as apparent to the larger culture at the time. And so if you take that seriously, which I started to do, I realized that the times when I'm the best father I can be are not ever the times where there's any retributive movement happening. It is when I incur the wrong from, you know, my kid or something. And I. I bear that, and I don't have to take that out on anyone. And so if I, who get hangry and don't sleep enough and whatever, if I can do that, clearly God is able to. To take that without having to pour out wrath. And so that was kind of the deconstruction of at least certain atonement theories for me, was coming out of experience, experience, experience. And connecting some of those pieces with the way pointed out in a moral evolution.

[A]

Yeah. Okay, so let's. Let's get into the second half of this theological change story. The, the ramp back up to sort of a more process view that you have today.

[B]

Yeah. Which I'd still say is very loose. I just.

[A]

Sure. Mine too.

[B]

Yeah. But, yeah, so I deconstructed and it was just kind of just there. And I don't. Most people probably wouldn't do this as badly as me, but I did it very badly where I was processing this all in the road. And I can take a lot of information and process it internally and come to a decision, and someone outside it would seem like I'm just making a snap judgment, which is the furthest thing from the truth. I've just been processing this stuff for a while. And it finally hits a tipping point and I'm ready to go. Then I'm like, oh, yeah, I've changed my mind. And that's terrifying for certain kinds of people, especially if you're married to someone and all of a sudden it seems like they've just changed their mind for no reason. So, yeah, I, like, I think I texted my wife, like, hey, I'm not sure. What do you think about inerrancy anymore? And don't do that. It's a bad idea.

[A]

I don't think my wife ever actually believed in inerrancy. Like, if you really press her on it.

[B]

Well, here's.

[A]

She never did.

[B]

Well, here's what's fun. We were. Well, we listened to you. Just had an episode that was really good and helpful for us in basically her saying that she hadn't either, in a sense, but had kind of like her natural intuitions experience led her to not think that. And we've gone on this whole experience where so for her, like, in high school, was really, really bothered by eternal conscious torment, that kind of stuff. I was like, this is wrong. And I would now say, yeah, your moral intuitions were correct. And then they got overrode by a bunch of other things. And so that's kind of what I'm trying to get back at is like something in us leaps up and is really bothered by this until it gets conditioned.

[A]

As an example, I've been reading the new David Bentley Hart book that All Shall Be Saved, his universalism treatment. And one of the things he highlights is the sort of more sophisticated arguments by what he calls the infernalists, which is like the best word for people who believe in hell. And it's this idea that, like, you basically have to find some way of saying that human beings make a rational choice, or they would have, and God knew they would have something like that. To do something entirely irrational, which is to live in hell forever, that somehow it is both rational and irrational. They do both. It's this weird move, and it's not like it makes sense. I don't think that that's what it is. I don't think people believe that because it makes sense. I think they believe it because it is a natural consequence of a bunch of other stuff that makes sense and that they have found really helpful and orienting for their life. And this is just. You got to bite the bullet and take this hell stuff because it's part of it. I think that's really more. But when you look at it by itself, it's Hardly even coherent.

[B]

Yeah, I would agree. Yeah. I definitely think it's not the reason people are drawn to anything. It just becomes part of a package. And if you want Jesus, you gotta take this stuff too.

[A]

Right. So that's. All right. What are you reconstructing toward these days? Give us some bullet points here. You were. You were with your wife.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

All right. So, yeah, I totally freaked her out and had. And she's like, just stop reading for a second. Just chill. Come home.

[A]

Like, that's awesome.

[B]

Let's try to, like, figure this out. So I was like, okay. So I just kind of paused and was just there for a bit.

[A]

I'm kind of wistful for, like, a wife that cares about this stuff. Like, I feel like my experience with my wife is like, oh, you're considering robust Christian pluralism. That's really sweet, honey. She doesn't really care about it. And even though it can be conflict, there's a part of me that's like, oh, that would be really nice if it really mattered to her where I fell on this theological question. So, hey, there's some blessing in all of that, Dustin, to do it together.

[B]

Yeah. And we just process stuff super differently, but it's definitely on parallel paths now. Maybe not in the same spot exactly, but moving together down some sort of path. It's great.

[A]

Yeah. Ours are parallel to. I describe it as. You've probably heard me say this. Just like I need about 25 times the granularity that she needs.

[B]

Yeah, I think that's probably the main difference. Yeah. Okay. So I was reading this book called Deep Religious Pluralism, edited by David Ray Griffin, and started reading it and was like, what. What are they talking about? He was talking about naturalism, but what. I forget the exact term he uses. And I was like, I don't know what they're meaning by this term. And what. I eventually figured out what they were trying to. What their meaning was. They were talking about a kind of a process framed universe or more panentheistic universe, where God can act without breaking into the.

[A]

Without breaking the laws of physics.

[B]

Yeah. Because God is always involved intimately. And so it took me a while to figure out. I was like, what are they talking about? I had no context. It was basically a book of a bunch of process people talking about how they could deeply engage in their differences, but learn from each other and also have their own faith traditions. So I.

[A]

That was like, exactly. The needle I'm trying to thread right now in my own thought is like, how do I. It's the. It's the plate thing. It's the. The plate versus the whole living room. I need some kind of pluralism because I have to take other people's religious experience seriously. But I also need my own lens for understanding the world. I don't want to pretend they're all the same thing. They're not all the same thing, but I need to live somewhere specifically kind of a thing. So I resonate with that a lot.

[B]

Yeah. And I think some of that's going to be. You're just gonna have ways that make sense to you as better ways to frame things, even if you're getting at something really similar than someone who grew up in something totally different because you grew up with it. And I was like, what is this process theology? What is this stuff? And at a party and Andy, actually, Andy Lara, who's producer of my podcast, he was like, hey, you should check out. Because no one I knew would. Knew anything about process stuff. And he was like, oh, Trip Fuller talks about that on his podcast. Whatever.

[A]

Yeah, Podcast, Process Center.

[B]

What finding Tripp's podcast did was opened my eyes to. There's an entire world of people who would call themselves Christians, who are beautiful, smart human beings who have a bunch of interesting ideas and don't agree with each other, and all somehow seem to have real community. And that world did not exist to me before that. Like, anyone outside of the, like, your way of viewing the Christian world, I mean, you kind of had different camps and you'd be like, well, you're in this camp or that camp. And then I guess all that stuff would have fallen into whatever was called the liberal camp or the main line or whatever. And you're like, oh, those people, they just. They don't even believe in whatever. I don't know.

[A]

So that's interesting. So for you, a proof in the pudding was like the way that these, these liberal theologians really differed on some stuff, but. But, like internally got along and. And lived in real community. Is that what you're saying?

[B]

Yeah, I think so. It was really refreshing to see that. You see it on N's show too, I think. Well, where it's. I mean, people outside of Christianity as well, but just who are able to. To share some deeper experience and. And disagree and talk about stuff in a way that's helpful and loving. Yeah, it was amazing to see that. And so that was cool. But I also was learning more about process theology. Process philosophy. But the philosophy part was really mind blowing to me. This completely different way of looking at the interconnectedness of things as opposed to, like, a dualistic view of the world, which I'd always just thought clearly was the way it had been taught to me. God's outside of all this. All this is separate. So Whitehead is the guy who kind of started process philosophy. And what he was trying to do was say, hey, we need a new metaphysic to try to make sense of all the things we're learning in physics because none of them are making sense together. So let's zoom back out and try to picture what is the world, what is reality actually like now, instead of taking an old kind of Cartesian model and trying to cram quantum stuff into it or whatever. People don't like that I would call myself Christian. And I don't know. Like, I just had. I had a meeting with some people the other day at the church that I was part of a little while ago and had to confront them on some stuff and be like, yo, you did me wrong, and it sucks, and here's what it is. And they were talking to me about, you know, it would be easier if I was just not a. A Christian with the things that I don't believe, that they believe or whatever. I don't believe in eternal conscious torment. I don't believe in penal substitutionary atonement. And I was like, look, if it's easier for you to love me and think of me as a non Christian, go for it. But the reason I'm sitting here in front of you, the reason that I'm forgiving you, is because I'm a Christian. These things matter deeply to me. My experience of grace, this makes the most sense of it in some way. Like, I mean, to me, at least. I'm not saying it's the only way to get there, but I think that's a much bigger plate than is allowed for most of the time. I don't know. This has been a big thing on, I feel like, in Twitter lately. Like, are you a Christian if you don't look at, you know, the cross this way or resurrection this way or whatever? And I don't know, I think, are we oriented around the teachings of Jesus in some sense? Is, to me, what. What makes someone a Christian? Like, I don't. I don't know that we need a smaller box.

[A]

Yep. My definition is Jesus. Can you say Jesus is Lord in some meaningful sense? And I was just thinking about that right now. One of those meaningful senses might mean Jesus is Lord of my life and my actions and the way that I conduct my family and my Business and my choices. That's Lord. That's a kind of Lord. Yeah.

[B]

I feel like the Lord languages, it's. It's so archaic. It's hard for us.

[A]

It is archaic. I got that from Bede Griffiths in a book he wrote in, like, 1960. So it is older language.

[B]

I mean, when they're saying there's a better way, it's like, master teacher. What? I mean, it's. There's a level of.

[A]

He was a monk, so he probably meant it more like teacher, you know, like chief monk.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Imitation of Christ. Kind of a sense of.

[B]

In the same way you're a Franciscan, you know, Francis is a big deal. He kind of sets the tone of what we're doing.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And it would be weird to be a Franciscan and be like, man, I don't like Francis that much. You know, like, yeah, it's not like you're going to agree with everything that someone did hundreds of years ago, but there's kind of a tone, and that's why you're in that camp and.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So it'd be weird if I was like, I'm Christian, I don't like Jesus.

[A]

Yeah, that would be weird. There is a big.

[B]

There's people functionally who are like that,

[A]

though, like, oh, of course.

[B]

Well, I mean, I'm just saying a lot of Christians are Christians, but I would say don't actually, like.

[A]

Well, the simplest way to be a Christian and sideline Jesus is to make everything about Jesus, death and resurrection and nothing about his life and teachings.

[B]

Yeah. Which is the problem with over focusing on creeds because they ignore all of that, or over focusing on the Epistles because they ignore all of that.

[A]

True. So there's worries both on the high church side and on the low church side. But the nice thing about the high church side is most of those denominations and streams prioritize the Gospels in the worship setting. So the Gospel is read in the middle of the room. You stand for it, as opposed to the other readings, which offsets the fact that the creed doesn't have anything really from the Gospels. None of Jesus teachings are in the creed.

[B]

Yeah, creeds. I think the thing to remember about the creeds is they're. They were trying to account for saying we don't think something as opposed to what we do. Yeah. You know, like, we don't think that. So we have to say this specifically. And so, yeah, a lot of stuff that's really important doesn't make it in there because it wasn't something people were disagreeing about.

[A]

Yeah. I want to just talk a bit about experience in the abstract here. Here is a kind of a big worry that I have, slash, a devil's advocate thing to consider. I'm not sure to what extent I believe it or it's devil's advocate, but it is a, it's an issue. And it's the sheer variety of human experience. I mean, it's, it's the size of the living room versus the plate. This is both pushing you and I outside the bounds of what we used to have. And it is sort of self authenticating that there's all this experience, but then it's so various. And the variety of human experience is not just geographical, it's not just personality and people's life stories. It's also chronological, which you've been talking about a little bit. And process Thought tries to incorporate that. But as you said earlier, like the possibilities that each of us have intuitionally are constrained by when and where we are born. And so I have a very strong intuition that black and white people should be able to be married. And I frankly would probably not have that intuition if I was born 150 years earlier. Just very, very statistically unlikely to have that intuition.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So is this where we want to walk it back and say experience is one of many or, you know, how do you want to respond to that?

[B]

So I think using the word possibility is helpful, like you said, and that's a very processy way to think of things is you don't have total freedom. Right. You don't have just carte blanche like infinite freedom. You have possibilities. And depending what kind of process philosopher you are, there's multiple things that go into that. So the past has a very big impact on the future or in the present, but it doesn't have all the say, and that's a huge thing. And process thought is that the past has a huge impact on essentially the possibilities available to you in the moment.

[A]

The past includes things like the way that my brain neural networks have formed. Right. Like the past includes my choices, other people's choices, my parents choices, and raising me, or in beating me or in loving me or you know, whatever. It's all that stuff. It greatly constrains the possibilities of the present moment.

[B]

Yes. I would say what's amazing about the present moment is we have more possibilities open to us than ever before because we have access to more experience from the way we can apprehend different points of the past because we have all this information of what people have thought and done before us. We are More connected to people in different cultures living currently. And so I think by taking experience seriously, our own and others. If you do that, I think naturally what happens is you start to have a picture of the world where everything is much more nuanced than a lot of us grew up thinking was good or possible. And it should, I think, bring you to a place of an intellectual humility in a lot of ways.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

To where that's going to be A primary way that you look at the world is saying, I'm just not totally sure about a lot of the stuff that I was happy to be sure about before.

[A]

Maybe experience acts as both. It's an expander, and then it's also a contractor of your own certainty about it, like in. In the same move.

[B]

I think it definitely. Yes, it expands those possibilities and it erodes your. Your certainty, which sounds terrifying to most people, probably, I would say, being here. I mean, it's. I think it's probably a scary road to get comfortable with uncertainty, but once you're there, I. I don't know. The water's. The water's fine.

[A]

I. I feel like it's. It's still a little scary, but it's like my experience of the world is so much richer now. And I'm like, oh, I'm already 36. I better get 50 more years of this so I can kind of make up for lost time. Isn't that just like, you know. But that's crazy.

[B]

All right. That's such a profound thought in the sense that that's really showing something about the. The benefit of getting to that place that you feel that way. And I totally. I totally understand what you're meaning by that.

[A]

This is really a new language, really. Maybe from, like, this morning, thinking about some stuff that, like, you know, I studied philosophy in college, and there was always an option for me of, well, I know I was raised a Christian, but why don't I just become a philosopher? Like, why don't I just say, these are the people who actually know how logic works. They're the people who are kind of taking the world as it comes to them and as it is and trying to think through it with as few biases as possible, you know, and that's, of course, this is the Platonic perfect vision of philosophy, which it isn't always, but there was a part of me that always wanted to be like, no, but I've got a shortcut to that, which is I've got Christianity.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

So I don't actually have to do that work And I think what I'm coming to realize is like, no, there is not a shortcut to that. Because what I thought was the shortcut is a little too arbitrarily chosen for me by where and when I was born and who I was born to, and even what the chemical makeup of my brain happens to be. And if I'm going to be a more melancholic person or a more anxious person, or there's just too many things I have no control over that I can't control for, to find out what's really going on. And I'm not going to just become a philosopher as a result of all that, because that's not. I don't like it enough, but I do have to sort of accept that, like, no, the rules for logical engagement. That's real. Even if I like someone, if they're doing a strawman argument, it's a bad argument. It just is. And there's no way around it just because. Well, I know the right people who are making straw man arguments because they accord with my understanding of this text or this religious community or something. And there is a sadness in that. But it was also kind of a laziness that is probably better to just be gotten rid of, if that makes sense.

[B]

No, it makes sense.

[A]

I was just thinking right now. It's kind of funny that this process I'm describing of being a philosophy student at a regular school as Christian, one of the many people that I thought I had this special affinity and access to that showed me that I didn't need to do all the philosophical work, was you and your songwriting because you were on the team, you know. You know what I'm saying? Like, I'm not. It's not your fault or anything, but, like, I utilized all those resources of, like, well, these are all the people on my team. And I'll just cobble together all of this instead of having to actually argue for my faith from the beginning.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, with your priors, that's a

[B]

very human thing to do.

[A]

Of course it is. So I'd like to hear from your perspective, like, what are the main counter arguments to trusting our experience or taking our experience seriously that you're familiar with?

[B]

I mean, everyone knows someone like this where their experience of the world is just absolutely the only thing that matters to them. Like, they're not taking other people's experience of the world. They're not taking logic into play. They're not taking, I think, whenever learned in history and time.

[A]

Yeah. When you say that, you know, What I think of the, like, silly version, but that totally works, is like the college or high school student going, no more drama. I'm not letting anyone in my life. That is dramatic. That's like the perfect example of someone thinking that they are going to be able to change things by asserting there's not going to be drama anymore. Like, good luck with that, man.

[B]

Yeah. So, I mean, I definitely heard this a lot, and I sure told this to plenty of people in my time, but somewhere in Proverbs, the heart is wicked and deceitful above all things. Whatever. Like that. That verse is used as this club to just, oh, you think you feel something, you think you experience something, you think there's something valid to the way that you intuit the world? Like, nope, because your heart is black and it can't do anything good.

[A]

Well, and especially that verse is really emphasized in Reformed circles in a way that it isn't elsewhere.

[B]

That's true. But I think I felt that I heard that one growing up.

[A]

Oh, me too. And my mom would use it sometimes, like in, you know, when it was appropriate to her argument.

[B]

Well, it's what gets brought up if someone says, I'm following my heart.

[A]

The heart is deceitful above all things. Yeah, right.

[B]

Cool.

[A]

But then there's also there's all this stuff of, like, you know, the God of your youth, which is, like, very desirous and, like, experiential kind of language. Right. Of like, you're supposed to trust, in some sense, that initial fire of longing for God and God's love that you feel either as a convert or as a young person raised in this tradition. And so there's obviously a tension in the text between trusting experience, but not too much.

[B]

Dan, how dare you assert tension in the text.

[A]

Well, and that's where all the Jonathan Haidt stuff and Daniel Kahneman stuff is, so. Is so incredibly helpful. You know, we quote the verses that fit the argument we're trying to make in the moment.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, but we.

[B]

We play a game with ourselves where we pretend that we're not doing that and we're representing the whole.

[A]

Yep. Yeah, that's one of the genies I can't put back in the bottle. So one more question about the counterarguments. Do you think that because you spent so much time in Reformed circles where the arguments against experience are sort of strongest, that that had some kind of bouncing effect for you, that maybe if you had been in a Wesleyan, you know, or a, you know, holiness tradition or a Anabaptist Tradition or something like that. You would not have actually been able to see the importance of experience quite as easily by having been given its opposite. I don't know.

[B]

That's hard to say. I mean, I was in it for. For a bit, but it definitely wasn't the, you know, bulk of my formative life.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So I think inerrancy is really at the root of a lot of dissonance regarding experience. I would say to be a Christian who believes in inerrancy is to live in a constant state of tremendous cognitive dissonance and. Well, maybe not for some people. For how thoughtful you are. Yes.

[A]

Yeah. Or not just thoughtful, just depending on constitutionally how much you need to be thinking about.

[B]

That's a better way of putting.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, I would agree with that. Let's talk about the podcast a little bit. By the time this airs, it's out. It's called Carry the Fire and the Three Lenses, and we've been talking about this, the good, the true, and the beautiful. Those are sort of the foundational pillars for the show. It's what you want to use as your lens for who you choose to interview and what you choose to talk about. People can go listen to the introductory, like episode zero of Carry the Fire, where I'm interviewing you and we're going to talk more directly about those three things there. But here I want to talk about those three things as it relates to experience. So how do you think of the relationship between taking your experience seriously about true things, good things, and beautiful things? And if you can go one at a time, that'd be great.

[B]

Yeah, we'll see if I can go one at a time. I mean, part of the intrigue with the good, the true, and the beautiful is that at least classically, philosophically, they're almost. You have separate streams of study, schools of study. You have aesthetics, ethics, logic. But at the end of the day, kind of the precursor transcendental is oneness. And like that all these things are essentially doing the same thing. It's almost different lenses of looking at the. The one thing that is.

[A]

That's cool. Yeah.

[B]

So.

[A]

And if something's really beautiful in some sense, isn't it more likely to be true and good?

[B]

Yes. And, yeah. So there's an intrinsic melding of all those things. It's almost as if they're, I don't know, maybe three flowers coming out of the same branch or something. It's. It's all the same plant. But I think it's hard to separate them at a certain Point from experience. Because part of what I'm doing by using that is just saying I'm talking about value. I think what has intrinsic value as a human being. And so those things are going to be like when I experience something beautiful in nature or in a song, or when something truly good is done to me or done by me. And the way that we relate to each other, I mean, I think truth. Truth is an interesting one because I think that desire for knowledge to find out what is really going on is such a good desire and is just part of us. And I think that can get twisted in the sense of you're really trying to find a concrete answer to just grab onto. And that's where that one can kind of go off the rails. But that. That feeling of wanting to know what's actually going on, I think everyone has that to one degree or another. And so these things, the good, the true and the beautiful, they just are the things that buckets of putting value in almost just ways of talking about that what actually matters, what is important, I would say. I mean, I don't know, maybe you're. You're good at being devil's advocate. You've got something that you could put outside of that. But I don't know if there is anything, I think anything valuable that you want to talk about you can talk about through those lenses.

[A]

Don't put me on the spot. I'd have to think about that and try and come up with something valuable that's neither true nor good nor beautiful.

[B]

It's a big. I mean, it's casting a wide net.

[A]

How about this? There are certainly true things that sure as hell don't seem beautiful.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And so maybe there's a. There's a different sense of true. Right. There's like true north, which is like you could get closer or further from true North. And then there's like accurate. And a lot of accurate things really suck. I mean, in a lot of ways it's really true that, like, we're not very rational creatures. And the way that our brains are structured, it's very easy to become biased and prejudiced because of these mental shortcuts we use to save energy. Yeah, that's true. But it's not very good or beautiful.

[B]

Well, but learning it is is good.

[A]

Yeah, that's true. Becoming aware of it. Although. Yeah. I mean, there is sort of some bad news about how much of that you can really change in that in the really implicit stuff or learning about the Holocaust can be true. And there's just nothing I mean, it's good to learn about it.

[B]

Exactly. Well, and so. And that's. And that's something that I think is an important way to talk about what's true and its relationship to the good. If you don't retain a handle on what's true that's happened in the past, you lose a handle on what is good in the present or what should be. I mean, you see that rampantly. I think with the way we view American history, we have this whitewashed version of so much of it, and it perpetuates evil. So this is kind of the way I'm seeing that they're all interconnected is you can't get the good a lot of times without getting the truth. So, like, even going back to what we're saying about, you know, do unto others as you would have them or as they would have you do unto them, like, you can't do that without knowing what's true of what they would want. I would say I don't think we can ever see them totally unified, but we can make a lot of connections between the three.

[A]

Well, Dustin, thank you so much, man. What an awesome. And just, I don't know, long time coming, maybe conversation between the two of us about this stuff and. Yeah. So the shows carry the fire.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Anything else you want to say about that for people? It's a brand new podcast and it's exciting.

[B]

Yeah, it's terrifying. I'm really excited about it. I don't know if you've ever heard anyone say, if you have an idea and it won't go away, there's something there. This was definitely one of those things. Once it got in there, it was like, it's not going away. You got to do this, even though it's scary and whatever. So I think it's one of the scariest things I've ever done.

[A]

I believe it.

[B]

Yeah. I'm five on the Enneagram. And so my way of interacting with the world is being over prepared and, like, I want to feel a mastery in whatever thing I'm talking about or doing. And so I have this absurd desire to come into each of these conversations with the guests and want to know more than they do about what they know, which is crazy.

[A]

A fool's errand, probably.

[B]

Yeah. Well, what's sad about it is if it was just a conversation between me and them, I don't think I would feel that. I would just be curious. And so that's the thing. I.

[A]

Public performance part of it.

[B]

Yeah. So I've got To curate that. Like, I need to go into this just curious and excited the way I naturally would be just to talk to this person and then I get to share that with everyone else.

[A]

Yeah. And then if you do that, you're actually a better avatar for the listener anyway.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I'm sure that people, a lot of times tune out, tune me out when I'm doing that, when I'm performing more and showing the guest, like, how much I know about their subject and hoping that they will tell me how smart I am at the end. And that's all ego and bullshit and probably doesn't even make the show better, frankly.

[B]

No, totally. And so that's going into it. I know that that's the temptation. And I've got to figure out how much preparation is helpful and gonna make an interesting conversation and how much is me just putting my ego out there.

[A]

Well, it's going to be fun and interesting to see how that goes for you. I'll text you and let you know when I think you're bloviating.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

And keep you, Keep you on track. All right, dude. Well, appreciate that. If people want to hear us chat about your show, that is episode zero. It's live now on the Carry the Fire podcast feed. It's much shorter than this one. And also we'll look forward to having you back as a patron to talk more Thrice and songwriting stuff. So thanks, man.

[B]

Cool. Thanks, man.

[A]

Just letting that outro music play a little longer because I love this song. It's called Hurricane. It's by Thrice. It's on their 2016 record to be Everywhere is To Be Nowhere. Something like that. Anyway, all the music on today's episode, other than the little intro that you hear every week, is Thrice music. It's songs by Thrice. You should check out Dustin's podcast, Carry the Fire anywhere you find podcasts. And again, I'm interviewing him on episode zero. Short little interview about kind of what he's doing there. Thank you to Josh Gilbert for not only editing this conversation, but doing it quickly when I needed him to so that we could work in tandem with Dustin and his producer Andy on timing. And again, if you want to hear that patron only Interview with dustin patreon.com Dan Koch or you have permissionpod.com click Become a Patron. Please share these episodes with friends and family. I hope that they can spark really interesting conversations, conversations, and let me know how all that's going. You have permission podcastmail.com I'll see you guys next week with the episode called Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies. Yeah. Get ready.

[B]

Shelter and shadows the quiet song of your breath Stirs the dark? Your skin light A rose neath my hand. Never stay my faith feel like a mist full of sh.

[A]

It's gonna rain it's gonna rain till

[B]

the Let we break Tied away spirit pain carries us somewhere day

[A]

Another fight

[B]

into the night until nothing else remains? How do we find Coming from the. Rain? It's gonna rain till the le.