Beth Felker Jones | Why I’m Protestant: Scripture, Catholicity, and a Church That’s Still Being Reformed

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer, your host, and today I'm joined by Beth Felker Jones. And Beth is a professor at Northern Seminary up in Lyle, Illinois. And she's written a book recently called Why I Am Protestant. And so we're going to be talking about the book and Protestantism and just some probably interesting theology throughout the podcast. And so Beth, really excited for you to be here. Thanks so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to the conversation. I should say before we jump into why I am Protestant, I've actually read a couple of your other books, specifically The Image of God in an Image-Driven Age. I know you edited that one, if I recall. And just really enjoyed that. So thanks very much for your work and your emphasis in that area. Very helpful. Love the pieces in that book, which are by a variety of people I really respect. So, yeah. Yeah, it's a pretty fantastic book. So folks, if you're looking for something on the image of God, I'd recommend that book as well. But let's dive into why I am Protestant. I will say when I first was approaching this book, I kind of wondered if it was going to be about, you know, the conversions, which you mentioned, you know, some Protestants sort of converting into Catholicism and increasingly Greek Orthodox, you know, Anglicanism, those kind of things. But I really appreciated your emphasis on Catholicity. And so I'm wondering if you can talk through the way you sort of navigate this in the book, the reasons that you're Protestant and holding to a more narrow tradition and how that helps you be more Catholic in that universal sense. Yes, in that universal sense. So my book, Why I'm Protestant, is part of a series from InterVarsity Press. There's also a Why I'm Catholic and forthcoming will be a Why I'm Orthodox. And the series is intended to be more Catholic in the sense that it's not an argumentative series so much as a peaceful but convicted series in terms of authors presenting where they are. So, yeah, while I'm a convinced Protestant, it's far more important to me first to say that I'm a Christian. And if you want a Catholic Christian, right, lowercase c, a member of the one universal church of Jesus Christ. And as a theologian, while I'm a part of a number of particular traditions, I'm a Protestant. I'm also a Wesleyan. I'm much more interested in what unites us all as Christians than I am in what divides us. Nonetheless, I'm persuaded by Protestantism and in an environment where a lot of interesting Protestants are converting to Catholicism. It was fun to have a chance to write this book. Yeah. You talk a little bit in the book and I will say, I thought the book reads just like the way you described it. It's not antagonistic toward other sort of, we might call them versions of Christianity, I suppose, but it is very much convicted toward Protestantism. And so maybe a good place to start is, what do you see as the centering sort of core beliefs that make everyone Christian? And then maybe we'll jump into what's distinctively Protestant. Yeah, yeah. Of course, that's a harder question than it sounds like, right? What are the core beliefs that make everyone Christian? And Scripture as the source and the norm that will help us to understand any other source of norm on the table, whether that's tradition or what have you. Sometimes Protestant theologians use the phrase the norming norm, right? The norm above the other norm. It doesn't mean that we can't talk to reason and experience and tradition and all the rest of it, but Scripture is going to be understood as different in kind from those other things because it is the word of God and those other things are not. One of the things I wanted to ask you having read the book, you have a chapter called How Being Protestant Helps Me Be Christian. And I thought, like the naming, I don't know who titled it, you know, sometimes I've written before and so sometimes titles get changed. But I just found that title to be sort of perfectly encapsulating of what you're arguing in the book is that there's a Christian above this that's centered on a unity in Jesus Christ, his life, death, and resurrection, his status as Lord. And then there's Protestantism and Protestantism is going to help us in certain ways to be Christian and probably also hinder us in certain ways from being Christian, right? And so, but it's not coterminous with what it means to be Christian. Yes, I like the way that you've said that.

Yeah. And for me, Protestantism is the most biblical, the most thoughtful way of being a Christian. But it doesn't mean that my Protestant identity comes before, you know, my identity as belonging to Jesus Christ. Yeah. It's a framing. It's the impression I got from that chapter was it's almost a framing, a way of framing your identity in Christ. That sort of takes it away from sort of a amorphous, we're all together in this, and then giving us a little bit of a distinctive to understand, this is how I'm thinking about living my Christian life. Would that be a fair way to put it? Yeah. If the book could help other people think that through, I'd be happy. So, yeah. Well, talk a little bit about the church in Protestantism. This is one that I, I guess I've struggled with over the years. Yeah. Once you start seeing that, you know, there's something magical or impressive about the unity that Catholics have. Like there's a tightness to it, I think. At least from the outside looking in, it feels tight. But Protestantism isn't quite that way, you know. So maybe talk a little bit about the church and how that's been impacted in your view. That Catholic account of unity can be really attractive, right? It seems like it gets rid of the Protestant problem. Well, we all are reading Romans, but we're reading it differently, right? And it gets rid of the problem by saying, here's how the church reads Romans. The problem, of course, is that different readings of Romans haven't gone away and the need to have that conversation hasn't gone away. And that means that either one has to submit to the church's reading while agreeing with it or submit without agreeing with it. And submitting without agreeing with a reading is not an ideal account of faith. So there's this attractive thing about the unity of the church as held together by the Bishop of Rome, by the Pope. But for me, there's also the incredibly painful reality of the church, right? And that chapter, How Protestantism Helps Me Be Christian, really is about the fact that the church is really hard to deal with. There's church, there's church error, there's all the things, the horrible headlines we see about fallen leaders and so on. And if my theology required me to say the church is right, I wouldn't know how to deal with that, right? And so, while as lovely as it would be to be all held together under one authority, I think the negotiation about truth is too complicated and too hard. When I say negotiation about truth, I don't mean that the truth is negotiable. But I mean that our attempts to articulate the truth well, right, are always imperfect and broken. And I think Protestantism gives us the space for that conversation as well as space for just honesty about the brokenness of the church. That's not absent completely for Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox faith, but I think Protestantism on its own sort of internal account expects the church to be a mess, right? It expects to need to return to scripture for correction, for revision, for reformation. We know that we're broken and in need of healing from something outside of us. And for me, that's really what it comes down to. I need something outside of us. And as much as I love the church and try to love the church, it's not outside of us, it's us. And we need God instead. Yeah. Eddie, I mean, I tend to agree with that. As a formal principle, Protestantism does leave that open often. And then you have these other dynamics that tend to close it off. And so, you know, when I was, like I mentioned, I grew up Lutheran and you'd have every week, you'd have the absolution of sin. You have a group confession and an absolution of sin. That's totally lacking now in the non-denominational church I go to. And you kind of sit back and you say, are we really in touch with our brokenness in the same way as the Lutheran congregation over here or even the Catholic congregation that is going to confession and confessing their sins to a priest and receiving some semblance of absolution? How do you think about that sort of, not the formal theological principle, but its outworking within a particular community of faith? Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Yeah, yeah. That's a great question. And I think, you know, what you're pointing to there is a reason a lot of Protestants are drawn to Catholicism because it can seem like Protestantism is kind of barren, right? Like we've kind of stripped away everything but the music and like a testimony. It would be nice to have more than that, right? Like a confession of sin and repentance. That actually should be really central to our worship practice. I just hope that we can recover some of those riches of the church without needing unity with Rome, right? To be the way to recover those. And so I also want to say, though, that in the most kind of barren church, nonetheless, the Lord is at work, right? We don't get it right and our failure to get it right doesn't undo the work of Jesus Christ. And so, yes, we should seek greater faithfulness and please let's put confession and repentance back into the worship service. But the fact that we've failed to do so doesn't mean that God can't still be at work. And that's central to my account of the church. Yeah, I tend to agree. One of the things I was wondering as I was reading your book is, I wonder if we're just not... We talk a lot about the Bible being the final authority for life and faith, that norming norm within Protestantism. But on a day-to-day basis, it feels like some of that just gets lost. It gets lost in the urgency and the programming. And so what's your thought process on how we actually practice Protestantism, this idea that the Bible is the norming norm and clearing space to be deliberative in a way that the Holy Spirit can really speak into a congregation, not just our personalized, but a congregational life in a way that we're now as a congregation being guided by the Holy Spirit, not slave to our programming. This is a very theology teacher answer, right? But I do hope that good Christian education and not just formal education like at a seminary, but in the church itself, right, is a help here. And I think that a lot of our people are longing for something stronger than what we're giving them, right? We're handing out weak sauce when people are actually really interested in learning more about the scriptures, learning more about theology and so on. So any practices that can just bring scripture back into the worship service and into the communal life of the church, I would point to as good educational practices, but also good discipleship and transformative practices. And I think Protestantism is rich in these, right? Not all of our churches may be doing it well at this moment, right? But we have a strong history of reading the word out loud, of encouraging small group study of the word and private study of the word, right? And we have resources there that can draw us back to intimacy with the word if we'll turn to them. So I think the tyranny of the programming is a real thing, but we're not without resources, I think, for something deeper. And I think that's what people really want, right? They can get a nice social club elsewhere. They can't get a group study of the word of God, probably, right, elsewhere. Yeah, not very many places. And my intention is not to beat the church up. It's just, I think I kind of sit back and I actually care about it. And so, you know, I like to pick your brain a little bit on how do we get there, you know? And how do we... And it's not magic, right? Let's take that study. Let's read the scriptures in our worship. It's the normal stuff, right? And then preach sermons that are about the scriptures and not just a story about my life, right? You know, let's pull the word back into our lives in all kinds of ways. So years ago, I used to teach at Wheaton College and N.T. Wright.

Spoke there, and somebody asked him what the most important thing they could do for their spiritual lives was, and he was like, memorize scripture and memorize it while you're young and your brain still works that way. Right? It gets harder to memorize things. And that's just really striking. Like, here's a wise and well-practiced person, right, who's saying, memorize the word. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I know my son, we put him through Awana and he did all those scripture memorization, that kind of stuff. My daughters, we weren't in a place that had it. And so, and you can definitely tell a difference. I mean, it's not that they're not faithful kids, but my son, now he's kind of a theology geek anyway. He's majoring in theology and history. So it's almost unfair to compare the two, but he really does have a better grasp on a lot of where things are in the Bible, what he's doing in the Bible. Like he cultivated a better awareness for him, I suppose. And a better understanding of the overarching story, I think, through that memorization process. So I think that's really good advice. And it doesn't have to be perfect, right? Like you can critique like Awana for various things, maybe, right? But there you said, it's having memorized some scripture. That's a great thing, so. Yeah. When you talked a little bit, I'll keep going on this, problematics in Protestantism, because you have a chapter on the problem with being Protestant or the difficulties of being Protestant. When I think about, you know, sort of what we're talking around, one of the difficulties and one of the questions I get asked an awful lot is, how do you discern between two rival interpretations between passages? And what I really think people are sort of feeling there is the tension between not just, hey, people are going to have different perspectives, but a question of who determines what's authoritative? How does this work? So you address some of that in your chapter there, you know, the individualism, you know, I think is embedded within that. But can you just talk through some of those difficulties of being Protestant, like where are we feeling more friction than maybe we need to? Yeah, that question about rival interpretations is, of course, a really hard one. And we've felt it, right? If we're in relationship with a sister or a brother with whom we firmly disagree, right, about how to read the text. I'll just suggest two things here. First is, yes, that's real. I don't know if it's everything. That is, I think there's a lot of more clear, more central things in scripture that we don't disagree about that much. I'm not being utterly naive, I know it's complicated. But, right, we agree that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ are central to the story. And then maybe that means if we're in interpretive disagreement about something less clear and less central, it's just okay. And maybe it's even more than okay. Maybe we're called to learn to be in relationship with people with whom we disagree, right? And to learn to be in conversation and to seek truth together and to listen and to consider repentance and changing our minds and to consider that faith is not a matter of certainty, it's a matter of relationship with Jesus Christ. And so I think, you know, Sola Scriptura is messy, but it doesn't mean we're bereft of truth. We agree about a lot of things, right? Important things. And then maybe it's also the case that it's good for us to live in the mess a little bit and to be challenged to be in relationship in the mess a little bit and to be willing to consider, right, extending love and table fellowship across differences in interpretation when those aren't the most central things. A lot of that's, of course, very complicated, but I still believe in it, though. It is, and I, so I would tend to resonate. One of the things that I try to get people to think through is there's not a lot of ambiguity in Paul's statement that we should outdo one another in showing honor. There's really no ambiguity there. And so even when we disagree, sort of what we're trying to do is maintain the unity of the body of Christ, be kind with one another and honor one another to a degree that, you know, that's what we're competing for. And I just think there's a lot less ambiguity with that than there is with certain specific doctrines that we may disagree with. And so even in those disagreements, we need to look at those things and say, yeah, there's a place where we need to call out heresy and those kind of things. I mean, Paul does in Galatians, and he takes a much harsher tone with the Judaizers there. But then there's also a time where we just need to honor one another and make sure that we're not at odds for the sake of being right. Maybe the best way to say it. Right. Absolutely. And I love that example because it's an example that requires us to be shaped by scripture, even to begin to enter into it. Right. For many of us in contemporary Western culture, at least, right, like we don't think much about honoring anyone. You're right. You really have to dig into kind of the mind of Christ to even begin to imagine what that might look like. And then that changes the conversation about something like how do we interpret X, right? Even if X is tricky and messy. Yeah, at the very least, it changes the way we're going to go about having that conversation. You know, we can deal, we can speak about plausibility of interpretations as opposed to, you know, surety in our interpretation, which I think is a much more, it feels like that's much more of an academic thing. Like, I think at certain institutions, we do talk a lot about the plausibility of interpretation. We would recognize an interpretation that is valid, even if we don't agree with it. But sometimes when we move down into the church, that does get a little lost in part because I just think the context is so different. You know, in academia, we're sort of geeks. We like the mental runaround in a lot of ways. But when we drive it down into the church, there's a desire for certainty, a desire for stability, that that just doesn't engender all the time. Yeah, I think that's very true. And it's a challenge to us, right, as the body to, yeah, outdo each other in showing honor. Love it. Let me throw a curveball in here since you did the image of God book. There's a lot of different views on the image of God. And as I was reading through, you know, I've read that book that you edited and then I'm reading through Why I'm Protestant. And I'm wondering if you see any connections between how you're thinking about Protestantism and how you also think about being made in the image of God. Does the one sort of correspond more to the Christian side, like does image of God and Christian go together and Protestant being sort of a subset of that? How do you factor those in to your understanding of that concept? That is a curveball and it's fun to think about. One thing that comes to mind right away is that I think, you know, being made in the image of God is about being seen, right? And images are things you can see, right? And so actually in the book you're referencing, I talk about being made in the image of God as a call to show and tell, right? We're called to show and tell the truth about Jesus. And that's also the mission of the church, right? Is to be seen because if nobody can see us, how can we show and tell? How can we share the good news? And Protestants are sometimes accused of letting go of the idea of a church that you can see. That is letting go of visible unity, right? In favor of a kind of spiritualist understanding of the church. But I think Protestantism at its best can give us an account of visible unity and visible mission, right? But precisely centered on mission. So maybe I want to draw a parallel between the individual call as an image bearer and the ecclesial call for the church to be in mission in this world in visible ways. I think Protestantism can't let go of that, being visible in this world as the church of Jesus Christ. And I try in the book to offer some persuasive ways of thinking about that that are different from typically Catholic ways of thinking it through. Yeah, I think it is difficult because we tend to think in those binaries, right? How would Catholics do it and how do Protestants do it? And can we learn anything from the Catholics? And I think that's an appropriate thing to look at, like learning something from the Catholics. But I also think there's a way that we can construct that bottom up within Protestantism and start saying, how is it that, number one, I think it's appropriate for us to ask, how is it that we're visibly demonstrating? Right. How are we doing it now? Because I think we do. Just sometimes we don't get a lot of press for it. That's right. Yeah. I quote Luther in the book. He's speaking back to his Catholic accusers. And he says something like, you know, you say I broke the unity of the church, but you broke the unity of the church. Why? Because you didn't preach the gospel faithfully, right? He's calling for this faithful witness, faithful action in the world. And, you know, Luther is a very rhetorical guy, and I don't know if we need the strength of his rhetoric, but I think he's right. Like we're called.

to be an action in the world, and that is where the world should see us as being one. Yeah. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide, or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. One of the things I thought was interesting about the book, you do a lot with Augustine. I love Augustine. Yeah, I mean, I do too. Yeah, I do too. I found it, I don't know whether strange is the right word, but I was pleasantly surprised that there was so much Augustine in your book because he's almost pre-Protestant, certainly pre-Protestant. He's definitely pre-Catholic in the way that we know it today. How do you think about some of those sort of church fathers like an Augustine, who really predate the institutional church that we're more aware of in modern day? Yeah, just how do you frame them? How do you think about them? Well, partly it depends on who's a kind of Augustine, right? So I mean, Roman Catholic theologians would probably say he does it predate. Right, he's there. But I think you're right that he does. And I would see, I see those earlier centuries then as a shared resource for all Christians, Catholic, Protestant, otherwise, in that we can look back at the wisdom of some of these earlier folk and maybe imagine the church differently than in the categories that we have now, because they were living in a different space and time with different categories. I mean, I think Augustine rightly shapes Western Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, probably more than anyone else. And I see Protestantism as a kind of outgrowth of Augustinianism in following his theology of grace, right? Sometimes the Protestant Reformation is described as a recovery of Augustine on grace, but not on the church. And I think we might see it as a recovery of Augustine on grace and on the church because his theology of the church is a theology of grace, right? And it's Augustine who first says, I don't like that church over there, but God's at work in it. And that seems like a really, really important thing to say. If you remember, I remember reading a line, and I think I'm getting this right. I may not be, but I think at one point you juxtaposed what Luther was saying about the church, that the church is where the word of God is preached and the sacraments are practiced, versus Augustine, who doesn't root that in church practice, but does root it in the action of God. In other words, it's where grace is found. It's where grace is found on exercise. Does that sound like me? Yeah, that sounds like me. Yeah. I mean, I tend to want to kind of wrap things together and say, can't we learn from each other here? Can we get along? But I think there's a lot of shared space there in those traditions. Yeah. I was just fascinated. I mean, I kind of like going back to Augustine, but my impression is that if we're concerned about how the Bible gets interpreted by one interpreter versus another, it only exponentially goes out the window with Augustine. So you probably have a lot of Catholic interpreters who would disagree with you that, no, no, he's the father of the Reformation almost. I don't think my Catholic friends are going to be buying my argument. Do you find it? I don't know whether you said there was a Catholic one, a Protestant one, and an Orthodox book that are coming out in these series from IVP. Were you in conversation with the other authors at all? So our timelines kind of got split apart due to various personal delays, so less so than you might hope. The book that is out, Why I Am Roman Catholic, from Matthew Levering. Matthew and I read each other's books and we're going to do some reviews in the future. And while we disagree about all kinds of things, he's a Jesus-filled person who approaches things with grace and charity, right? And so in the conversation we were able to have, I hope, we both learned from each other. I certainly learned from him. And even in his positions on things that I don't agree with at all, the assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven, right, which I don't buy, it's a very Catholic thing. But nonetheless, I was able to, in reading his account of it, have my own faith strengthened in seeing why and how somebody with whom I don't agree finds this a matter that strengthens his faith. I recommend his book, but especially just the style of doing theology which tries to be in real conversation across difference. Matthew Levering is a great guy. You talk in the book, I mean, obviously we've talked about it already, like the Christian aspect where you have this sort of unity amongst the different sects, for lack of a better term, the distinctiveness of Protestantism. And I'm wondering, and I guess maybe I've grown up in circles where it was like, no, the Catholics aren't really, they don't have a right view of salvation or they don't have a right view of this, they don't have a right view of that. I'm not well-versed in it. I'll just put that out there as a caveat. But I'm wondering how you navigate some of those things. You know, if people are listening and they're saying, well, isn't there a fundamental difference between Catholic and Protestant? Like why would we, right? Yeah. I mean, at some point you're just like, uh-huh. But how do you think about those things when you're thinking in terms of that ecumenical Christian unity kind of aspect? So I tell my students when I teach about Catholicism, I'm in kind of a tricky place because half of my students don't think Catholics are Christians at all. Half of my students think there isn't any real difference between any of us and can't we all just get along, right? And I want to speak carefully into that space. Protestants and Catholics share the core truths of the faith and the best of Roman Catholic theology on salvation, I think Luther himself would probably assent to, right? There's a piece that if Luther had just had a better theology teacher, he wouldn't have done the Reformation, which I don't think is true. But it is true that he wasn't reading maybe the very best Roman Catholic theology, right, at the time or certainly today. So I think we share really important core truths. And at the same time, there are real differences here that I think matter a lot. And it's important to be honest about those Protestant-Catholic differences. I may be impressed by my colleagues' faith in the Virgin Mary, but I'm also not at all persuaded, right, that that's a biblical faith. And I think there are good reasons that I want to say so, right? And so I hope we can say so while also saying we both belong to Jesus, and that's the most central thing. Yeah. The unity in Christ allows for certain maybe odd beliefs that really don't exclude you from the community of faith. They can be distinctive and odd and weird and, you know, whatever, even formative. But those are things that at the end of the day, they do tend to get worked out so long as you have Christ as Lord. I think that's right, yeah. I mean, I feel a little uncomfortable about it because I'm a theology professor, right? But at the end of the day, I think it's right, nonetheless. And, you know, there are all kinds of tricky things here too, right? The very best of Roman Catholic theology versus pop theology on the ground in your grandma's church, right? Yeah. Poor grandma. I mean somebody's grandma. The very best of Protestant theology, right? Or some weird bad thing happening over there in that church. And we all have experiences with probably some of the best and the worst, right, of our own traditions and of other people's traditions. And so one really important thing we can do is just try to learn from each other and hear what each other's experiences are. So much of theology is a response to experience and that's okay because God actually cares about our experiences and wants us to respond to them. It's just good to remember that my experience isn't the only experience. I will say I was reading your book and then I was watching another video.

From someone else, this is not at all, it has nothing to do with your book, other than it may illustrate a point. So it was a pastor talking about replacement theology, and he basically talked about replacement theology as the worst possible theology out there. It was just horrible. He called it, you know, anti-Semitic. And I just was listening to it, and I thought to myself, this is completely counter to what I'm reading in your book, right? Like that there should be a charity and a graciousness about this. In addition to it just being fallacious on its face, that it's not a fair hearing, really, of the, and he tied it to more of the Reformed tradition. It's just not a fair reading of the Reformed tradition. It's a straw man. And so I sat back and I was thinking to myself, you know, I'm wondering as you're writing about being distinctively Protestant in distinction from being distinctively Catholic or distinctively Orthodox, which, you know, the Orthodox side is something we didn't really talk much about, but it's an interesting one too. And they have their own sort of, I think, strengths and weaknesses. But there can be a charity in discussing these things. Like we don't have to demonize one another in order to do this just to carve out our own distinct position. We can be fair to one another, even in that disagreement. And I just found that to be such a juxtaposition between the video I watched. Sounds like this is crazy. And then your book, which I'm like, I really resonate with this. Well, thank you. I think that's a compliment. It is. Yeah, it is. I mean, people are coming from all kinds of places. And it's good to ask about where they're coming from, right? And why it is the X thing seems like the worst thing to them. It might be the worst thing to them for a very good reason. Whereas it's not the worst thing to everyone because of very different experiences. And a lot of Christian theology is about that, right? So in Christian theology, we hold together various tensions. Jesus is both divine and human, right? Both are true. You have to say both of them. And in some places, probably we haven't focused on one enough. And in some places, probably we haven't focused on the other enough. And which place you're in is going to probably determine which one you should preach on on Sunday, right? It doesn't mean that you're preaching on the right one. It means you're preaching on the right one for this place because of these reasons. And I don't think we consider that enough, right? That people are speaking in the context for good reasons. One I've seen, just a sort of gesture toward the Orthodox, and I'm not sure what that individual will actually write, but one of the things that I've often read from Orthodox theologians is the filioque. You know, the vast differences between the way they think about Trinity and the relationships between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit and the way we articulate those. And I think that's almost like, you know, maybe this is a question for you. When we're talking about these theologies, we are talking about an articulation. They're a representation of a biblical text, a synthesis, and an attempt to explain. And so we have to sort of let ourselves remain sufficiently open that at the very least, God's word can get through, people speaking to us through the Holy Spirit is getting through, like we are hearing, you know, prophetic critiques of what we're doing. We're actually hearing substantive critiques of who we are and what we're thinking. I think if we have too much closure, not no conviction, but just too much closure, that we're stepping into a dangerous place. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Because again, like we're finite, limited human beings, and we don't have this exactly right. And also God is immense, right? So how could we tell the whole story of God and get it just right? No. Well, this has been great. We're out of time. I usually ask my guests one last question. And this is, I mean, you thought the image of God was a curveball. This one will be a little bit more of a curveball. So usually end the episode asking, as you look out at what the church is doing, we can label it the Protestant Church just for the sake of argument. What do you think God's people really need to be doing right now that they're not doing in order to be and make disciples more faithfully? Woo, that is a big, beautiful question. And so much of the answer to it is, I think, contextual, right? Which congregation of God's people. But I'm just gonna seize on the end of what you said, right? To make disciples more faithfully. And I think I wanna say we just need to claim that. It's our job to make disciples. And I think there's a lot of embarrassment about that in today's world, right? We know that sometimes evangelism has been heavy-handed or manipulative or poorly carried out. And so maybe do we just want to step back and say, don't worry, I'm not one of those people. But the good news is good and we're called to share it. And we should claim that. Very cool. Thank you very much for being on the show. It was a pleasure talking to you. Is there anywhere that people can kind of keep up with your work? Anything you want a website or anything that they can follow you at? Sure, I write regularly online at my substack, churchblogmatics. I believe the address is bethfelkerjones.substack.com or you can Google me and find it. And you can get links to everything I'm up to there. Very cool. I'll find it and we'll put the link in the show description so you can find that if you're listening. And we also have, this is an IVP published book. And so IVP graciously gives us a 20% discount. So there will be a discount code in the show notes, along with a link if you order it off the IVP website and put this code in, you'll get a 20% discount on Beth's book. I would just really encourage it. I enjoyed reading this an awful lot as someone who came to Christianity fairly late and opted to do Old Testament. I think this was a fantastic primer on what it means to be Protestant and how all this stuff works together. And so it was just a great read for me to go through and I'd recommend it to you. So Why I Am Protestant by Beth Felker Jones. Thanks so much. Great talking with you. Thank you. And we'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care, everybody. 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