Claim OwnershipThe Broken Book Bible Podcast
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© 2020 The Broken Book Bible Podcast
Description
Considering the Bible's saintly reputation, it packs surprising gore, horror, and depravity. As well as beauty, wisdom, and tedium. For millennia, the Bible has held Western culture captive to its strange stories of ancient people trying to figure out God.Maybe you're not religious, but you're curious about the Bible. Maybe you grew up in church, but you're looking for a new way to relate to the Bible. Welcome! We're Sam and Amanda. We're obsessed with the Bible. Sam is a liberal Presbyterian who became post-modern by studying the Bible too much. Amanda is a mystic naturalist Unitarian Universalist with Reformed and Evangelical roots. We are wrestling with what the Bible can mean in the midst of radical questioning, faith changes, depression, and self-doubt. We hope you'll join us as we appreciate, dissect, criticize, defend, and generally nerd out about the Bible from our progressive religious perspectives.
Where to Find Us
Where to Find Us
Podcast Directories: Stitcher, iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-broken-book-bible-podcast/id1172672907?mt=2 , Google Play
Email: sam@brokenbookpodcast.com & amanda@brokenbookpodcast.com
Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/brokenbookpod
Twitter: @BrokenBookPod
36 Episodes
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Joint project with the Christian Transhumanist Podcast! https://www.christiantranshumanism.org/podcastLots of interesting questions. How can we love religion when so many are hurt? How do we describe the reality of social construction? Does Jesus have a personality? What's St. Paul's social media presence? Is God an AI?
Adriaan Dippenaar, director of the Seattle Nonbinary Coalition joins in to discuss how queer identity, queer tension, and queer magic helps them imagine God. God is absurd, and that's okay! The divine does not fit into any clear, clean label. This is what gives God the power to create and the power to live. This power leads us to struggle with the marginalized.
If the Spirit of Christ dwells in are hearts, and if we are supposed to be Christlike. . . then the Apostle's Creed is about us.
Sam, who is on the autism spectrum, discusses how his diverse theory of mind has brought him on a unique, exciting, and terrifying journey with and towards God.People on the spectrum develop their sense of theory of mind differently than neurotypical people. Theory of mind is how we distinguish objects and ideas from each other and from ourselves. Which profoundly relates to faith. This journey has many blessings, many curses, and many exegesises of the song 'Moon River.'
This episode was originally recorded over two years ago, and shows us at a different stage in our spiritual development. Amanda, a Unitarian, defends the trinity. Sam, a relativist, defends Biblical' authority and infallibility. As modernism is challenged, new possibilities of truth open up. God can live in relationship. Scripture can serve as revelation. Humans can live after death.
After Eden, God curses the world with hard child birth, patriarchy, toil, and death. The curse sets female against male, humans against nature, and humanity against the snake. We explore how these curses mirror the evolution of humans and the birth of agriculture. But. Good news. We are fighting the curse. And success is possible.
The constant evolution of religious doctrines is an argument for God's living consciousness. The Spirit is sentient! Christianity has too often shunted the Holy Spirit to the corners of our canon, as sort of the third wheel of the Trinity. But the Spirit is where we may most actively perceive God as an active living agent in our lives.
We answer more listener questions! How does the Spirit move and change through time? How should Christians approach the Qur'an? If we could make a Bible TV show, what book would we choose? And is America the new Roman Empire? Also, what does it mean to love our enemies?
Jesus Christ flips. He is the anti-emperor who becomes the symbol of empire. He resists all elements of power, and then becomes the all powerful. He is the incarnation that eventually rejects humanity. What Jesus stands for in the Bible versus what Jesus comes to represent makes the New Testament one of the saddest books ever written.
Listener questions we consider -
What is your favorite and least favorite book of the Bible?
What would you ask Jesus (historical Jesus) if you had the chance?
Do you know anything about Song of Songs? I've heard some interpret it a source a metaphor about the relationship btw Yahweh and Israel, but that seems strange.
If you could become friends with someone from the Bible or a biblical author, who would it be and what would your friendship look like?
Have you been burned by the church? Found solace in Zen? Maybe you love your humanist discussion group. Maybe your church is the place you feel the most loved. Maybe you're disillusioned with religion in general. How do we hold the tension between the goodness and the badness of religion? Amanda shares a some stories of tension in this sermon.
Contemporary Christianity has split into hordes of different factions. And we try to find labels to identify different kinds of Christians. These labels are probably necessary in order to talk about the modern faith. . . but these labels are also intensely problematic. Let's try to use lots and lots of humility and forgiveness when it comes to finding adjectives to describe diverse groups of people.
Satan is a powerful force of evil in Scripture. He is an independent agent who challenges God, and successfully rules the world for awhile. But Satan's power rests in a very simple lie, based on ignorance and outdated science. Satan claims that some people are better, more real, and other people. In this episode, Sam tells a myth which explores how the lie creates sin, and how faith saves us from the lie.
Old Testament Law is difficult to understand, especially on the topic of blood. Blood belongs to God alone, and menstruation makes women unclean half the month. Miriam, Moses's older sister, illustrates the disappointment and disillusionment people with periods may feel when reading these verses. But in his treatment of the Bleeding Woman and of the Last Supper, Jesus takes away the shame of menstruation. In place of shame, Jesus shares with all people his divinity.
Amanda and Sam cruise all over the Bible, seeing how modern progressive ideas are ancient and Biblical. Unitarian Universalism is no longer an exclusively Christian belief network, But it is still historically linked to the Bible, and it's seven principles can all be traced back to Biblical teachings. Amanda, who is in training to become a UU minister, shows how her love of Scripture helped guide her into the Unitarian Universalist tradition.
Note: This episode was recorded very early in Amanda's UU seminary education and experience of the Unitarian Universalism. Therefore, the terminology used is a little imprecise (calling the Unitarian Universalist Association "the UU," rather than the UUA, or "Church" rather than Congregation, Fellowship, or Association) and the history is simplified and suspect.
Question - which gospel author would you most like to write your biography? Sam discusses the strengths, and weaknesses, of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. He shows what elements of Jesus are captured in each narrative. And how those same themes would be present in our own lives.
At the center of the Book of Lamentations, there's a long fantastic personal prayer. The author is hurt by God. The author loves God. The author tries to convince himself to trust God, but God doesn't seem to work that way anymore. Lamentations 3 shows off the cognitive dissonance between judgement and grace, fear and hope, the same cognitive dissonance than makes Christianity relevant.
It's a weekday night. You want to sit back, chillax, and read a Minor Prophet. Which one will be the most fun!?!?!? This minisode answers that ageold question you didn't know you were asking. How do you rank the Minor Prophets in order of Entertainment Value?
The Book of Lamentations captures that darkest sensation, when God becomes an enemy. Lamentations is our favorite book of the Bible. It has the darkest depiction of God seen in Scripture. And it may have the most hopeful, most empowering depiction of humanity in Scripture. These poems reject toxic religion.
Hard Atheism is the claim that there are no gods. This form of secularism is outdated, unnecessary, and accidentally hurts and silences progressive or alternative forms of religion. There is a theist/atheist binary that over simplifies the wisdom of modern religion and modern secularism.
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