Phew, feels like it’s been a long week. I’m working to form a new team here at work, and it’s… hard work. Negotiating with others to define goals and practices; making final pitches to execs, project work planning and staffing…
It’s working out well, but let’s just say I’m glad it’s Friday.
Review: The Widening of God's Mercy by Drs. Christopher and Richard Hays
There was no small amount of buzz accompanying the announcement of The Widening of God’s Mercy’s publication. Father and son, both Biblical scholars of some renown, publishing a volume where the elder would reverse his public and well-known position about same-sex relationships is not an event that most anyone had on their Evangelical Christianity 2024 bingo card. I was not immune to the anticipation, immediately pre-ordering the book. My eagerness was tempered only by the depth of my to-read shelf, which means I am only now reading and commenting on this book.
[Note: I found out only hours before writing this post that Dr. Richard Hays passed away less than two weeks ago at the age of 76, as the result of pancreatic cancer. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.]
The Widening of God’s Mercy, written by Dr. Richard B. Hays and his son Dr. Christopher B. Hayes, describes a stunning change of position on Christian acceptance of same-sex relationships. Richard had, in his 1996 book The Moral Vision of the New Testament, argued against their acceptance. His book has been used as a primary authority by many evangelicals over the past three decades, interpreting a handful of New Testament verses seemingly opposed to homosexuality as conclusive. And so this book comes as a genuine surprise. The book is concise, clear, easily readable, generous, and contrite. And yet for the life of me I can’t understand why this was their chosen approach to the question.
Widening makes the case that a careful reading of the Bible will show, contrary to traditional theological assertion, that God frequently changes his mind, being influenced by humans who appeal to God. The book is structured in three parts. The first part deals with Old Testament texts; the second with the New Testament, and the brief third part drawing conclusions.
Old Testament
The OT section is the most convincing in that respect, discussing texts from Genesis through the Prophets where the text blatantly describes God changing his mind. Traditional interpreters might argue instead that since God is, per theological agreement, unchangeable, that these texts must mean something more like humans came to a new understanding that looked like God changing God’s mind. Drs. Hays choose instead to take the text at face value: God changes his mind, and almost always in favor of more mercy and more inclusion. Good enough so far.
New Testament
The New Testament doesn’t include (at least to my recollection) any passages that explicitly describe God “changing his mind”. The second section of this book instead reviews a multitude of cases in the Gospels where Jesus brings a new, more expansive, more merciful interpretation of the OT law. Healing is appropriate on the Sabbath. Women are treated as fully equal to men. Prostitutes and sinners are embraced, not rejected.
It then spends its most significant time in Acts, examining Peter’s vision and experience with Cornelius, resulting in the church’s acceptance of Gentiles. This is the key interpretive text for the Hays' as they argue for LGBTQ inclusion. They suggest three steps discerned from the Acts account of the subsequent Jerusalem Council that could be used for the church today in similar re-evaluations of understanding:
- The community’s discernment depends on imaginative reinterpretation of scripture.
- The community’s discernment depends on paying attention to stories about where God was currently at work.
- The discernment is made in and by the community.
This, too, is good as far as it goes. The church community should work together with the Spirit to discern God at work and how our understanding of God’s work needs to change over time.
And yet…
But this is where the book’s argument struggles. The section on the NT never argues that the NT accounts represent God changing his mind. It argues for the church’s “creative reinterpretation” of Scripture based on the leading of the Spirit, but the authors don’t try to argue that this represents a change of God’s mind. One could just as reasonably argue (as I think is more common) that God’s mind has always been for mercy and inclusion, but that humans have progressively had a clearer understanding of God’s mind over time.
If God’s change of mind is how we understand these interpretive evolutions, I am also left wishing for more insight into how we know that God’s mind has changed. What’s the trigger? The authors point to a series of interpretive changes of the past — they mention the acceptance of slavery as an example — but leave the how to the reader’s imagination. (They also ignore the many historic voices who spoke out against slavery even when the official voice of the church accepted it. Had God’s mind already changed and the church was just slow to catch up?)
Let me explain. No, it’s too much, let me sum up.
Am I happy where the authors have landed in their views of sexuality? Yes. Is it very heartening to see men admit their change of heart in public? For sure. But is their argument compelling? In my opinion, no, it’s not. I am sympathetic to arguments that God can change. It’s certainly the easiest way to deal with all the texts that say God changes his mind, and also the easiest way to think, say, about the efficacy of prayer. But the book fails to tie that idea to believers' renewed understandings in the New Testament, and progressive revelation seems to me a much more reasonable interpretation given the textual evidence.
Curiosity → Attention → Love
I’ve been letting that quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates rattle around in my head a bit the last 24 hours, and it brought this quote to mind from the wonderful movie Lady Bird:
Sister Sarah Joan (SSJ): “You clearly love Sacramento.”
Lady Bird (LB): “I do?”
SSJ: “You write about Sacramento so affectionately, and with such care.”
LB: “Well, I was just describing it.”
SSJ: “Well, it comes across as love”.
LB: “Sure, I guess I pay attention.”
SSJ: “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing — love and attention?”
Coates laments the lack of curiosity by those in great power of those with none. Another way to say that, I think, is that the lack of curiosity is demonstrated in a lack of attention. And, to riff on the thought from Lady Bird, that lack of attention reveals a lack of love.
To put it conversely: curiosity about our neighbor should result in paying attention to our neighbor, which should then result in us loving our neighbor.
Amen.
(Personal commentary: my wife is such an excellent model of this for me. She’s inordinately curious about people, including/especially our immediate physical neighbors. That curiosity results in attention and actual demonstrated love for those people. I could learn a lot from her.)
The great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it.
…I don’t really care much for hearing “both sides” or “opposing points of view,” so much as I care about understanding the literary tools deployed to advance those views—the discipline of voice, the use of verbs, the length and brevity of sentences, and the curiosity of mind behind those sentences. It is this last I find so often lacking. Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it. That incuriosity is what afflicts the dullest critics of safe spaces and the like. But if these writers, teachers, and administrators could part with the privilege of their own ignorance, they would see that they too need safe spaces—and that, for their own sakes, they have made a safe space of nearly the entire world.
—Ta-Nehisi Coates, from The Message [emphasis mine]
2025 Reads: The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates 📚
Brilliant, beautiful writing. Coates lets us follow along through his own growth and (to borrow an insightful word from my friend Kari’s review) deconstruction.
“The moment we root our worth in castes and kingdoms, in ‘civilization’, we have accepted the precepts of those whose whole entire legacy is the burning and flooding of a planet. And then we have already lost.”
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, from The Message. Phew.
Finished Only Murders in the Building Season 4.
Paul Rudd : OMITB :: Kenny : SouthPark?
Tried out a podcast episode of The Rest is History. Quite entertaining. Then I look at the backlog: they are up over 500 episodes in just four years? How are these guys turning out this much content? I know there’s not a lot of production but that pace is staggering.
On Jimmy Carter and Evangelical salvation anxiety
Former president Jimmy Carter’s state funeral is today. Carter, perhaps one of the most famously evangelical Christians of the 1970s, continued to work in service to God and his neighbor for the four decades after he left the White House. Whether it was building houses with Habitat for Humanity or teaching Sunday School at his local Baptist church, he maintained the humble integrity that was the hallmark of his presidency.
To recognize this, Christianity Today editor Russell Moore (a famous evangelical and Baptist of the current decade) writes in CT today arguing for Carter’s salvation. That, 50 years after his election to the presidency, this is still the topic of debate in the evangelical world highlights the level of anxiety rampant in evangelicalism, even (or maybe especially) in determinism-friendly Calvinist evangelicalism, about salvation assurance coming through having the right doctrine and cultural positions.
I keenly remember this discussion in family settings when I was a kid. My grandparents were all faithful members of mainline Protestant churches (United Methodist and ELCA), and from the midst of our most fundamentalist evangelicalism there were anguished family discussions about whether or not they were “really saved” because they couldn’t/didn’t articulate the Gospel message the way we learned and shared it. As a young teenager I knew enough that I was supposed to be concerned for them, and suspicious of the churches they attended.
My paternal grandfather passed away in 2010, and opportunity of his funeral and the family gatherings around it gave me the chance to hear stories I’d never heard before. I knew my grandpa as a hard working, blue collar guy who loved his family and liked to tell a good joke. I knew from our visits to their house that he was a diligent member of his Lutheran church, with a big cross necklace hanging over his necktie as he headed out the door on Sunday morning. But then I heard about his other practical service. He was a zillion-gallon blood donor. For years he arranged rides so that mentally impaired residents of the local group home could attend church. And I started to ask myself: if evangelicals suspected this man, who faithfully loved his family, was baptized, confessed the historic creeds, participated in the Eucharist regularly, and served his neighbors, was likely “not saved” because he didn’t articulate the same Gospel presentation or support the same political party they did, maybe something was wrong with their (our) evaluation grid.
I was a couple years into my early evangelical deconstruction at that point, but the realization triggered by my grandpa was a significant further step in that direction. Is God really going to put on eternal blast those faithful folks who just didn’t articulate “the gospel” quite right? And how right do you have to be to be “right enough”? (There’s that evangelical anxiety!) And if we can logically posit that even the theologian who has it the most right (I think at this point I was using Al Mohler or John Piper in this argument) is wrong about maybe 10% of his theology, how does he know which 10%? And why doesn’t that inspire a little more humility in his approach to others? And does it really make sense then to believe or fear that there’s some threshold of theological accuracy to pass the heavenly gate?
Fast-forward to today. I now, too, am a member of a mainline Protestant church. I am quite convinced that the hallmarks of a “real faith” are a love for God demonstrated in a loving service to those around us, not in some doctrinal or political purity test. I’m also pretty convinced that, through Jesus, eternal reconciliation is coming for everyone, but that’s a different post.
If you are still anxiously in the middle of the evangelical game of trying to establish a level of doctrinal understanding and correctness that’s “good enough” for God and your church leaders, friends, it’s time to take a lesson from WOPR: the only winning move is not to play.
One of my favorite parts of having a book habit is then being able to share books with other people. Packing one up tonight to send to a friend whose name jumped to mind while reading it.
2025 Reads: Blessed One by Cynthia L. Rigby 📚
An interesting little set of essays. The final one, on Mary being a co-creator with God, was the highlight.
Catching up on Only Murders In the Building, Season 4. The cameos are hilarious, and then Melissa McCarthy shows up as Steve Martin’s sister and puts it completely over the top. 😂
Some thoughts on my first EV experience: driving a Tesla Model Y for 3 weeks
For the past 3 weeks I’ve been driving a Tesla Model Y with full self driving (FSD) enabled. It’s a employer-leased car that’s being passed around our division with the intent of letting us get insight about human-machine interfaces and autonomous driving functionality. It’s was my first time driving an electric vehicle, so I wanted to sketch down a few thoughts on the experience.
Yes, it’s a Tesla
Let’s just get this out of the way up front. Unfortunately, Tesla == Elon Musk. This reason by itself is enough to ensure that I will not purchase a Tesla of my own. But as other electric cars get successful in the market, I could be open to the idea. So anyway, other thoughts…
1. Electrification / Charging
The biggest change in driving an electric vehicle is that it needs recharged. A gas station stop isn’t going to help you here. If I were to buy an EV of my own I would get an electrician to put an appropriate plug in my garage, but for 3 weeks I just had to make do.
Charging gets rated, somewhat confusingly, in “miles per hour” (now there’s a unit that’s not used any other way with regard to autos!) - that is, the number of miles of range added per hour of charging. Just plugged into a standard 110-volt wall plug at my home, the car charges at about 4 miles per hour, which ain’t much. By getting a different adapter and plugging it into a 110-volt plug on a 20-amp circuit with a NEMA 5-20 outlet, I could get up to 6 mph, which, when left overnight, feels like you’re sort of getting somewhere. My employer has subsidized EV chargers at work which charge at 20 mph. I also discovered a city parking ramp downtown that has free 20 mph chargers as long as you pay the 75 cents/hour to park. (I was downtown quite a bit for orchestra performances this past month!)
I did try a Tesla supercharger once - there’s only one in all of Cedar Rapids - and it’s ridiculously fast charging by comparison - probably 600-800 mph charging. You pay for the convenience. If I had my own EV I’d charge it at home and occasionally at work and it would work out just fine. I’d have to think about the feasibility of longer road trips, especially in the Midwest where superchargers are fewer and further between.
2. Range
This is the Model Y Long Range version. For local driving with regular charging, it urges you to only charge the battery to 80% to increase your battery’s lifetime. An 80% charge equates to about 225 miles of estimated range. In practice, at least in the winter here in Iowa, the range ends up being somewhat less because you’re using that precious battery power to run the heater to keep your tootsies warm. I found myself charging a couple times per week just to keep the charge level up where I wasn’t nervous.
3. Automations and Self-Driving
The sensor set in the Tesla is pretty impressive. The main display shows you the current situation as the car’s sensors perceive it, including nearby cars, pedestrians, curbs, traffic signals, street markings, etc. It uses all that info in real time to make decisions about driving you around, including lane changes, when to stop, when to run a yellow light, and right turning on red. On the whole I was pretty happy with full self driving. There was a software upgrade about halfway through my 3 weeks and FSD 13 seemed like a significant improvement over FSD 12.
FSD itself feels pretty amazing. You put your destination into the nav system, it charts the course, and then you pull the lever down to engage FSD, and off it goes. If you stop paying attention to the road, it’ll beep at you and eventually turn off FSD to force you to actively drive. If you want to disengage FSD, you just grab the wheel and start driving. Otherwise, you sit back, keep an eye on the road, and let the car do its thing. For highway and interstate driving this felt like it’d be a very desirable tool. For city driving, I felt like I spent as much or more mental energy monitoring to make sure FSD did the right thing as I would have done just manually driving.
The one thing I would love to have on a regular basis is the self-parking function. Drive slowly through a parking lot and the sensor system will identify open parking spots. Tap one, bring the car to a stop, and hit the Park button and the car will back itself into the parking spot. It’ll also do parallel parking, which came in handy yesterday. I’m a proficient parallel parker, but I’d still take advantage of that automation any time I could.
4. Its actual usefulness as a vehicle
My first thought when driving the car is that it seemed heavy. I looked it up, and turns out I was correct. The Tesla Model Y Long Range weighs about 4300 lbs, which is a full 1000 lbs heavier than my usual 2015 Toyota RAV4, and even a little bit heavier than the family 2008 Toyota Sienna minivan. For all its weight, though, those electric motors provide very nice acceleration when you put your foot down. (If I start thinking about the amount of momentum in the car then I can get a little nervous… but I digress.) The interior is comfortable enough - heated seats both front and back, a decent-sized rear trunk and a front storage “frunk” that is big enough for a couple bags of groceries.
5. Random other thoughts:
- It seems fairly quiet when you’re inside it driving. (I imagine I’ll be surprised by how loud my RAV4 engine is tomorrow when I start driving it again.)
- It doesn’t like snow and ice. The silly door handles get frozen up too easily and the door also needs to slightly lower the window to get the door open. Too many surfaces to freeze up if you’re trying to open it without warming it up first.
- The automated windshield wiper sensor is terrible. Decided it needed to turn on yesterday in bright sunshine and made me jump right out of my skin. Other times when it was lightly raining it wouldn’t turn on and I needed to trigger it manually.
- Having an app to get the car to pre-heat is pretty awesome.
- Having an app to let my phone serve as a digital key rather than requiring that I carry a stupid key fob is also pretty awesome.
Conclusions
Driving the Tesla for 3 weeks convinced me that I would be happy with an EV as my daily driver for commuting, around-town errands, and day trips. I think I’d still like the gas-powered option for longer road trips, though. The Tesla FSD automations are impressive. Mostly now I think I’m hoping that my RAV4 holds out until I can buy a Rivian R3.
Started the workday with a 7:30 AM video call with India and it hasn’t slowed down yet. Welcome to 2025!
2025 Reads: A Pale Light in the Black by K. B. Wagers 📚
It’s as if you crossed Becky Chambers with Dale Brown. Not as subtle or graceful as Chambers' writing. but very pleasantly entertaining. I’ll read the next one.
Getting out of bed early on Saturday morning to prep these wasn’t so much fun, but in 30 minutes or so they are gonna be delicious.
Family movie night: That Thing You Do! (Extended edition, which drags a little but has a lot more color.)
Love the music, Steve Zahn’s humor, and Tom Hanks’ fist pump.
Mostly, deep down, I know I’m Guy Patterson. #IAmSpartacus
Today my Christmas present for myself ( I spent Xmas gift $ on it) shows up: my first turntable. So far my vinyl collection consists of 2 or 3 LPs that came as part of Kickstarter rewards packages. Will 2025 be the year I become a vinyl guy?
Back to work after a nice holiday break. The office is pretty quiet this morning… wonder how long I’ll be the only one here?
My 2024 Reading In Review
Another year full of books! (Previous summaries: 2023,2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007…
I read 63 books for the year, a few less than last year. I keep saying I’m going to stop logging to Goodreads, but it’s so easy and I’ve kept track there for so long that I still do it. I also keep my Bookshelf site over on my own website which I prefer to link you to instead.
The list is almost exactly a 50/50 split between fiction and non-fiction.
Here’s the full list of reading, with particular standouts noted in bold:
Theology / Ministry
- Varieties of Christian Universalism by David W. Congdon
- The Lost World of the Prophets by John H. Walton
- Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson
- From The Maccabees to The Mishnah by Shaye J. D. Cohen
- A Window to the Divine by Zachary Hayes
- Wounded Pastors by Carol Howard Merritt
- Lamb of the Free by Andrew Remington Rillera
- Making All Things New by Ilia Delio
- Reaching Out by Henri J. M. Nouwen
- The Experience of God by David Bentley Hart
- The Hours of the Universe by Ilia Delio
- A Private and Public Faith by William Stringfellow
I wrote about the Zachary Hayes book this summer. It’s small and delightful. And I’m looking forward to revisiting Andrew Remington Rillera’s Lamb of the Free as a part of a book club starting next week.
Science and History
- The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory by Tim Alberta
- Finding Zero by Amir D. Aczel
- The Murder of Professor Schlick by David Edmonds
- Ringmaster by Abraham Riesman
- The Grand Contraption by David Park
- Neurotribes by Steve Silberman (RIP)
- 3 Shades of Blue by James Kaplan
- A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis
- Space Oddities by Harry Cliff
- The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms
- Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergman
- Black AF History by Michael Harriot
- Debt by David Graeber
Ringmaster is a biography/history of Vince McMahon and his WWE empire. It’s a must-read as we enter four more years of a Trump presidency that will be about image and story line rather than truth.
Graeber’s book was fantastic as social science but prompted me to think theologically.
Memoir and Biography
- This American Ex-Wife by Lyz Lenz
- The Exvangelicals by Sarah McCammon
- An Autobiography, or, The Story of My Experiments With Truth by Mahatma Gandhi
Other Miscellaneous Non-Fiction
- Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell
- All Things Are Too Small by Becca Rothfeld
- Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
- How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren
Fiction
- The Downloaded by Robert J. Sawyer
- Hell Is a World Without You by Jason Kirk
- In Universes by Emet North
- Exordia by Seth Dickinson
- Through a Forest of Stars by David Jeffrey
- Sun Wolf by David Jeffrey
- The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain by Sofia Samatar
- The Light Within Darkness by David Jeffrey
- The Future by Naomi Alderman
- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
- The Year of the Locust by Terry Hayes
- Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
- The Revisionaries by A. R. Moxon
- Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
- I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger
- The Midnight Line by Lee Child
- Blue Moon by Lee Child
- Do We Not Bleed? by Daniel Taylor
- Heavenbreaker by Sara Wolf
- Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde
- Airframe by Michael Crichton
- Extinction by Douglas Preston
- Killing Floor by Lee Child
- Die Trying by Lee Child
- Moonbound by Robin Sloan
- Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
- Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
- 2054 by Elliot Ackerman
- Shadow of Doubt by Brad Thor
- Tripwire by Lee Child
- Spark by John Twelve Hawks (unintentional re-read)
Summary
I didn’t realize until I typed up the list for this post that I had run through so much fiction. Guess it was a year I needed some lighter reading. I did a quick count on the books on my to-read shelf and if I constrained myself to just those books, I might have it cleaned off by this time next year. (I mean, that’s unlikely, but it’s a decent goal.)
