Bethany Sollereder | Choose Your Adventure

Sollereder:

What we’re trying to study is God. And that is way too big for human understanding. So any understanding that I get of God is necessarily going to be partial. And that’s true of whether we’re talking about particle physics, or we’re talking about knowing another person. There’s always this sense that our knowing is always in part. And that’s not a bad thing. And yes, I do think that some things are more true than others. So I think the analogy of God being father is closer to the truth than God is a rock. But of course, both are scriptural metaphors, and both have their time and place.

My name is Bethany Sollereder, and I’m a research fellow at the Laudato Si’ Research Institute, which is part of Campion Hall of Oxford University.

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God. I’m Jim Stump. 

Bethany Sollereder’s work tends to revolve around dark topics like death, evil, and suffering. We talked to her about some of these things back in episode 7. But even with topics such as these, talking with Bethany is always fun. Her new book, Why is there suffering: pIck your own theological expedition, takes on the perennial question in the format of a choose your own adventure book. It’s not that she’s trying to make light of suffering. In fact, the format is way of making sense of suffering itself—that is, it recognizes that each person will need to create their own path toward reconciling that evil that exists in the world, with a good and loving God. We even give Bethany a bit of her own medicine, letting her choose her route through the second part of the episode. 

Let’s get to the conversation. 

Stump:

Well, welcome back to the podcast. Bethany. Good to have you here again.

Sollereder:

Oh, thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here again.

Stump:

So last time we recorded a conversation, we were sitting in the same room, I think, sitting across the table from each other. And now I’m sitting in my house in northern Indiana, and you’re in Oxford, right?

Sollereder:

That’s right, I’m looking just right out onto St. Giles.

Stump:

Tell us a little bit about the work you’ve been doing the last year and a half and how the pandemic has affected that, upside from doing remote interviews now?

Sollereder:

Oh, well, my work for the last two years is actually completely turned on its head by the pandemic, because I was meant to go to Canada and work in the Rocky Mountains with a bunch of ecological restoration scientists. And of course, I couldn’t go. So I’ve had to figure out how to do a science based project while sitting in my own living room.

Stump:

Sounds like the kind of science they did before the scientific revolution. Sit in a dark room and think about the way the world must be. Is it working okay for you?

Sollereder:

Well, yeah, I mean, the reality is, my question has changed. So what I was—if you know anything about my work, I’m continuously working on whatever is most grim and depressing.

Stump:

I’m going to ask about that.

Sollereder:

If it’s just dire, that’s probably what I’m doing. So what I’ve ended up doing is instead of doing something really positive about how restoration ecology is gonna save the world, I’ve started looking at what do we do if we cannot stop climate change? And, you know, how do our concepts of conservation and restoration have to change if the change we’re looking to is actually inevitable?

Stump:

That is a really interesting topic for us right now at BioLogos and one that I think we’ll have to come back to you to hear some more about how that’s gone. Because I think that’s really important right now. But in other grim and less than cheery topics, you have a new book that’s hot off the presses called Why Is There Suffering? And the topic won’t surprise many people as it continues the work that you’ve done for quite a bit and suffering and the problem of evil, but the format might be surprising, since it’s a pick your own adventure book where you have to make decisions and flip the different pages depending on those decisions. That’s pretty fun. I didn’t know academic types were allowed to do such things. 

Sollereder:

[laughs] I didn’t know that either. 

Stump:

How did you convince the publishers that this would be okay?

Sollereder:

Well, I was at the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion. And if you, people who have been there will know that one of the highlights is this massive book room where there’s just, you know, it’s the biggest room you can imagine with representatives all of the different presses there. And so I was wandering around sort of thinking, Oh, you know, these poor editors just have person after person coming up to them flogging their ideas, and I just thought I just can’t do this. So I’m wandering around and I see a woman who is struggling with a table that is broken. And so I went over to try and help her fix this table that was just completely unsuitable. And as we’re repairing it, she sort of said, “oh, so you know, what do you do?” And so I told her about my ideas. She goes, “well, actually, I’m an editor at Zondervan. And you know, you should think of come doing this with us.” So it was one of those providential moments where I just couldn’t face the task I had in front of me, and God seems to have provided another way.

Stump:

Well, let that be a tip to all other aspiring writers that perhaps the best way is to help somebody instead of just thinking that my ideas on their own will sell, that you join in the work with somebody else, and turns out for the best. 

So I said this was fun. It might seem a little weird to call a book about suffering fun. But from your account in the afterword, this certainly wasn’t just an attempt to make light of the problem of pain and suffering or to gamify it in some way. Right? The format of the book itself might be seen as a kind of solution to the problem of the way many people think about suffering. This is really intriguing. Would you walk us through the ideas or the what you call the puzzle pieces that you put together to say maybe this pick your own adventure is the right way to to address the problem and to lead people through the problem. How did this come about in your own thinking?

Sollereder:

Yeah, well, there were several different things that I wanted to do. And I mean, it kind of goes back to when I did my own PhD, which was on this question of suffering, or the, you know, theodicy question. I was just frustrated by two things in particular, and one was that sort of most authors came across as completely confident that they had the answer, and I thought you don’t know me or my pain. Like, how can you possibly have an answer to my pain? But the second thing was that in order to show that they had real suffering on their mind, they would use stories, just the most horrific stories of terrible human suffering that you can possibly imagine. And I found that when I was reading these day in and day out, it was so hard to concentrate on their argument, when my emotions were just being overwhelmed and traumatized by these narrative accounts, you know? I wanted to sit there in the library and weep at these stories, not sort of analytically pull them apart for their possible theological treasure. And later, I found out that actually, that’s more or less, right, that when we’re really emotionally affected by something, the logical analytical side of our brain just shuts off, you know? This is why people who experience trauma can’t just kind of think their way out of it, because our capacity to do that actually shuts down. And I thought, well, you know, for trying to think about why God allows these things, maybe having a really hard hitting emotional book does a disservice to people by putting them in an emotional state, that keeps them from being able to really think about it. And then, so that was sort of one of the puzzle pieces was my experience of sort of trying to read this, this literature, which I found very, very violent and very difficult to read much of the time. 

And then there were two other things. One was, I listened to this wonderful talk by Irene Tracy, who is an analyst. She works in anesthetics and in pain control at the Nuffield hospital here in Oxford, but she was speaking at a conference and at the Faraday Institute in Cambridge. And basically she talked about how, even at the most reductive levels, the way people think about pain changes, how they respond to it, and even how much pain they’re feeling. So she would take a group of volunteers and basically electrocute them, and then give them different pictures to look at. And so the sort of control group was a bunch of atheists and then she had some devout Catholics. And she gave them either sort of a medieval picture of a woman or a picture of Mary, in that same sort of style. And what she found was that the Christians contemplating this picture of Mary could somehow transform their experience of suffering, that they could reappraise it, they could reframe it, in thinking about the suffering that she went through, and that sort of thing. And they actually reported lower levels of pain, then, you know, the people receiving exactly the same amount of shock, and actually, less when they were looking at Mary than when they were looking at the other picture. And so there’s something just the way we think, changes how we feel and when we’re in times of suffering. I just started thinking, well, maybe there’s better and worse ways to think about why we’re suffering and how we’re suffering. And to some extent, that’s what this theology of suffering is about and should probably aim at.

And then the last thing was I met Jamie Aten, who is a professor at Wheaton College, and he runs this Humanitarian Disaster Institute. And again, I think it was at another Faraday meeting—I really need to write them and say thank you for running these things—but we sat down and just talked for hours. And what he studies is people after disasters, so people in Louisiana right after Hurricane Katrina, people in New York right after Sandy Hook, you know, going in and interviewing them and trying to understand what part their theological beliefs and their religious practices make a difference in how they suffer. And what he found was that different people believe different things about God and why they suffer, right? We know that there are different theologies. And he found that some of them actually did a much better job of providing people a framework for being resilient and being hopeful and suffering. And other ones like, God is the judge who is punishing me for my sin, was really hard on people. That didn’t leave people feeling hopeful and encouraged and resilient, or loved. And so he just sort of, you know, as a social scientist kind of goes and observes and says that. So then as I come in as a theologian, I’m thinking, well, how can I write a book where I’m not trying to impose an answer on people? I’m not saying, I have your answer for your pain. That first thing that always drove me crazy. But also giving people the tools, the sort of ways people thought about suffering, that gives them their own ability to come up with an answer for this question. So that if they have a damaging framework, that kind of thing, Jamie Aten, found, they can begin to see what other possibilities might be, and maybe recreate that theology in a way that’s better for them and for those around them.

Stump:

Yeah, that’s really fascinating. Do you know, from this work by Jamie Aten, are they the same kinds of models of thinking about God that are helpful for all people? Or do some people respond better to some models and other people respond better to other models?

Sollereder:

Yeah, well, there is variation. So there are some that seem to—you know, more people use it. And there are certain models, like I said, you know, God is judging me for my sin and punishing me through this bad act that seemed to be always bad. But absolutely, there’s variation. And I think that’s something that I have observed as well. So when I had my first sort of big heartbreak, I turned to open theism, the idea that, you know, God doesn’t particularly want these things to happen, but they happen because of freewill, or, you know, the way the world works, and God will work to restore it. But at the same time, I’ve seen people who have taken just the opposite tack, that this is all part of God’s plan. And this is absolutely what God wanted, and God’s going to redeem it and restore it, and have found such solace and such real comfort and connection to God with it that, I mean, who am I to say that that’s not a valid model? And, you know, not only is it, you know, we can talk about models in a moment, but the fact is, there are different types of suffering. So, you know, the suffering I might experience from stubbing my toe, which might be very intense, is going to have a completely different explanation, than if I, you know, was abused in some way. So, it’s not just that we have different theological frameworks, but actually very different types of suffering need different kinds of answers. And so I think that there is a way that different answers can actually be a reasonable theological ground without simply falling into total relativism.

Stump:

Yeah, I want to come back to that point in a little bit. We got pretty deep, pretty quickly there. Let me wade back up into the shallow end of this conversation and hear a little bit more of the process of writing a book like this. So do you start with the flow chart or the map—and we should tell the listeners, yes, there is a map with mountains and rivers and a lake and a forest that you can follow along with your journey—what’s the process of writing a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book as opposed to a monograph that you start at the beginning and develop one idea all the way throughout, one argument all the way throughout?

Sollereder:

Yeah, well, I started with the flow chart. So it started with kind of these decision pathway is set and in the back of the book, we’ve called it the flow chart, and you can see the whole mess of options and which way they move and it is pretty tangled. There’s about 40—I think there’s 41 different sort of options that are presented there. And I remember I was sitting in my office in the faculty here and I had a really bright student, Naomi Shammas, who came and helped me, and we sat there, writing this out. And we, the first time we wrote out the flow chart, we started where most theodicies start with, the question of, is this moral or natural evil, you know? And then kind of tried to follow from there. So we were trying to first pinpoint what kind of suffering are you worried about and then we’ll talk about the different options. And we just realized that it was going to take way too long to get anywhere. So we erased that board, started again, with the primary question, what is God like? And went from there. So after we had the flow chart, then I wrote the book. You know, it’s 500 to 700 words per sort of mini chapter. So it’s meant to be able, like it’s meant for a person to be able to sit down and read a whole pathway through in maybe 20 minutes.

Stump:

I’ll tell you, the first one I read took me six minutes.

Sollereder:

Yes, so some of them are shorter, some of them are longer, but I wanted it to be no longer than 20 minutes.

Stump:

Is it hard to write with conviction, or maybe a sense of authenticity for those paths that you yourself might not think are the most plausible, but you want to give, you know, the best sort of face of some of these options that other people might find plausible or helpful?

Sollereder:

Absolutely, I really struggled with a few of the chapters, and I won’t name them because I don’t want to sort of tip my hand. One of the nicest things people have said to me, is that they read through the book and read through the different paths, and couldn’t tell which one I advocated for. And that’s what I wanted. I wanted to argue as strong as I could for all the arguments, putting them all in their most sympathetic light, you know? And so there’s— And one of the things that helped me was just having a broad group of friends from different viewpoints. So I said, “read this and tell me if I’m getting it right or wrong, because if I’m misrepresenting you, you need to let me know and I’ll change it.” And that led to some interesting things. So actually, my colleague here in Oxford, Richard Dawkins, was actually kind enough to read over the atheist pathway and say, yeah, I think, you know— 

Stump:

I saw that in the introduction. How did you manage to become friends with Richard Dawkins?

Sollereder:

He was just kind enough to go for lunch when I said, “hi, would you give me the time?” So he was just, you know, I said, here’s who I am. I work in science and religion, I’m here in Oxford, would you be kind enough to take time to go for lunch? And he did.

Stump:

Nice. So about this writing, we’re writing these different paths with conviction and authenticity, how does this fit with what you were sharing earlier about the motivation from Jamie Aten and that some of these stories, some of these ways of thinking really might be more helpful than others of them? Because you’re not just saying, all of these are equal, or any of these are just as good as another? Is there some sense in which you’re hoping to lead people to the right path? Or does that question not even make sense for a project like this?

Sollereder:

I mean, I certainly have found some of the paths more useful for myself, and I think reflect biblical truth better or worse. The problem with that is that people’s experience and their life history are going to change which of those options are actually most helpful for them. So one of the examples that I use is a great biblical metaphor for God is God as Father. And for someone like me, who has an excellent father, that’s a metaphor I can get behind. That gives all the sense of loving, kindness, supportive, you know, etc, etc. But for somebody who has been abused by their father, that becomes a very complex metaphor for God. So even though there’s nothing wrong with the metaphor, there’s people’s experiences could make it a difficult path for them to find useful, even if that’s not the fault of the metaphor. So I think that there are paths that I have an inkling might be better for the majority of people than some others. But I’d hesitate, apart from knowing the person and their situation, from saying you should abandon that and follow this. And I, you know, I included an atheist pathway in there because I think that there are some versions of atheism that are closer to the truth than some ways that Christian tradition has been articulated.

Stump:

Would you talk a little bit more about that? What do you think those ways are that are closer and more helpful or?

Sollereder:

Well, in the sense of like, they’re, you know, if you think that God hates sinners, for example, I think that you’ve missed the central part of Christianity. And it may be that a good dose of atheism might be able to be like a palate cleanser, getting you back to a neutral place so that you can rediscover the God of grace and love and mercy.

Stump:

Let me ask you a little bit more about some of the different end points that these paths lead to because we have some of the sort of traditional ones from Christian theology where here’s Heaven and Hell, and Hell is this eternal place of suffering or Annihilationism, where the people who were there are just extinguished. Or Universalism where they’re all redeemed at some point. But some of these other end points, and I’m looking at the flow chart again, and how you get to these various, some of the non-Christian ones you were talking about there, where you might end up with maybe the more stereotypical non-Christian end point when you’re thinking about all this suffering and evil like, “well, if there is any meaning I just have to make it up myself” or the kind of Dostoyevsky protest, I turn in my ticket for this ride, I don’t want to be part of any of this. But some of these others you’re talking about, so like the circle of life, where there is a kind of redemption or maybe even just the existence is a big mystery of some sort.  Are those some that you’re saying might resonate a little more closely with some of the traditional Christian ideas or might send us back on a path toward considering the possibility that there’s more than just a physical universe out here? How do you think about those?

Sollereder:

Well, as I was writing this, I sort of talked to everybody I could get my hands on and said like, “here’s my flow chart, tell me what I’m missing. Tell me what I’m missing. Tell me what I’m missing. You know, are you represented here or have I missed you?:” And some of those ones, particularly that one that, you know, I don’t believe in God, but existence is still so wonderful and mysterious that there must be something more but I’m unable to articulate it, is one of the ones that came up out of that sort of process, where people said, well, I’m an atheist, but I don’t think everything is reducible to just me making up my own meaning in my own little story. So again, those were ones where I don’t know that they’re necessarily formally represented in the literature the way that many of these others are. But they seem to reflect the lived experience of the people I spoke to.

Stump:

What are the most crucial decisions a person has to make for how they think about God and suffering? Maybe the decisions that set us off down particular paths, and maybe in reality, and maybe even in the book, there might be lots of backtracking and looping back around and changing my mind about certain things. But are there some of these decisions about—I mean, obviously, ‘is there a god or not?’ is going to be a pretty determining one, but once I’m on that path of saying, “no, I think there is a God”, but what do you—  What are the crucial ones for understanding what we believe about God there that are really going to affect where I end up in this journey of theodicy?

Sollereder:

I think that once you believe that there’s sort of a good and loving God, the main three choices are going to be something along the lines of, is the existence of evil simply a mystery so great that we cannot penetrate it, and therefore we just have to surrender to the goodness of God right? That would be one possibility. There might be an answer, but there’s no way we’re going to see it. And so you’re probably better off just kind of getting on with life doing the best you can without trying to figure it out. The second possibility is that this is part of God’s plan and we can know that plan. And, you know, we can make sense of it here and now, maybe only in retrospect, for things we suffered in the past, we may not have a good answer for what we’re doing now. But we will be able to make sense of it in this reference frame of life. And then the third option would really be saying, “this isn’t what God wanted.” This is a result of the sinfulness of people or the limits of the world or some adversarial opposition by Satan, you know, to, in one way or another, this suffering is just really not what God desired. But God’s going to work really hard in redeeming it and turning senseless suffering into something meaningful after all.

[musical interlude]

BioLogos:

Hi Language of God listeners. Here at BioLogos we think that asking questions is a worthwhile part of any faith journey. We hope this podcast helps you to think through long held questions and consider new ones but you probably have other questions we haven’t covered yet. That’s why we want to take this quick break to tell you about the common questions page on our website. You’ll find questions like “How could humans have evolved and still be in the image of god,” “how should we interpret the Genesis flood account?” and “What created God?” Each with thoughtful and in depth answers written in collaboration by scientists, biblical scholars and other experts. Just go to biologos.org and click the common questions tab at the top of the page. Back to the show!

Stump:

So that leads me to a couple of, I guess I’ll call them meta-level questions or reflections on your book that I’d like to get you to respond to. And I’m not entirely sure which is better to talk about first. One we’ve started to get into a little bit already, related to theology and models. I’d like to push a little deeper there. But there’s another question too, and maybe I need to let you pick your own adventure in this interview. So Bethany, you’re at a fork in the road of this interview. What do you want, to veer left out into the open plain, where you’ll encounter more familiar territory and answer a question about the nature of theology as models we construct to try to understand God? Or do you want to go to the right, down into a tricky looking ravine where Jim is going to introduce some fancy philosophical terminology about doxastic voluntarism, and get you to talk about whether we really can choose our beliefs?

Sollereder:

Well, given that I don’t know what doxastic voluntarism means, let’s go down there, because I need to learn.

Stump:

By way of warning, I think this trail is a loop that is going to take you to both of these no matter which way you choose. So since graduate school in philosophy, I’ve been intrigued with this question of doxastic voluntarism. So doxa from Greek, what do I believe, and voluntarism, do I choose my beliefs? Or an involuntarist that says, “no, I can’t choose my beliefs. I just find myself believing some things”. For instance, I think it’s pretty obvious that we can’t just choose some things. I can’t just decide that there’s a big pink elephant sitting next to me smoking a pipe. I could say that but I don’t really believe it. 

Sollereder:

[laughs] I mean I’m now imagining it So maybe I can believe this on your behalf.

Stump:  

So the doxastic involuntarist says that’s the way it is for all of our beliefs, we can’t just choose them. And that seems to create some problems if we think we’re responsible for the things we believe. But the response then is that maybe there’s a kind of middle way where I can choose to do certain things, which make it more likely that I’ll come to believe certain things. That is, I could maybe put myself in a position, in an environment in which certain beliefs more naturally come to me or come to a person. And I raised this as a way of reflecting a little bit on your book and the kind of decision tree that’s at the heart of the process, because I can imagine someone at some of these junctures, saying to herself, I’d like to believe this about God, that God is loving, or that God has a plan or that God will redeem all things, I’d like to believe that, but I don’t. And I just—I can’t just decide to believe that. So I wonder about that element of a book like this. And then whether there might be things such a person could do, things that she can just choose, that might help to bring about those kinds of beliefs that I can’t just immediately choose for myself. What do you think about all that?

Sollereder:

Wow, that is such a great question. What it reminds me of immediately is some of the work of someone like Sarah Lane Ritchie, who talks about whether we can essentially convince ourselves to believe in God, through religious practice, and through prayer and worship and all those things. So if you have an unwilling unbeliever, somebody who wants to be a believer, but just can’t seem to get themselves over that place where that feels at all natural, and not just like thinking that there’s a big elephant, is there anything that they can do to do that? And so I think, you know, in the first instance, I’d say, you know, her work is really, really interesting, and is actually trying to figure out experimentally, if there are different, I think she calls them spiritual technologies that can help people believe. But I mean that’s on a sort of, I’m just going to, you know, see the brain, it’s a mechanical object that I manipulate in various ways, coming in from that. I think that if we’re looking at psychological processes, there’s something called cognitive behavioral therapy. And I’ve described this book as sort of theological cognitive behavioral therapy, because what cognitive behavioral therapy says is, the way you feel about something is directly linked, and often causally linked by what you think about it. So if you come to a decision point, and you think this is all or nothing, you know, my whole rest of my life is going to depend on how I do this on this exam, for example, then, of course, you’re going to be an anxious mess. But if you can see this, you know, Tuesday pop quiz, as within this sort of frame of reference that it naturally sets is, yeah, it’s an examination, it will affect your marks somewhat, but in the end, you know, life’s a lot bigger than that, then you can take it with better confidence, you know? And so you can apply that kind of thinking about the way you’re thinking in so many ways. And so I think that this is trying to, like cognitive behavioral therapies say, yes, you believe certain things, and you believe them for certain reasons. And some of those are going to be your experience, some of those are going to be because theologically, that’s what you’ve been taught, or you think, you know, that’s the Bible’s only option. And here are just some other gentle ways that you can explore to see if that would allow you to shift if shifting is something that’s desirable to you. So if you’re very happy with where you are, no problem. But if you’re finding like, I’m really having a hard time reconciling God in this world that I see, maybe it’s time to look for other theological options. And in terms of the person who sort of thinks well, I would like to believe that about God, but I don’t know if I do yet. This is why one of the practices that you could do to maybe try and increase that would be to read more about that position. So my chapters are all very short. They’re kind of like Impressionist paintings of these complex philosophical views. But at the back of the book, there’s a fairly long bibliography that tells you where you can look for if you want to learn more about a position. And I think tha, as a practice, you know, most of the things that I have changed my view on, it’s because I read enough to be properly convinced of, you know, what that philosophical view was arguing. And then that came from putting the time in, and reading until that came about so.

Stump:

So that seems to suggest that the things that seem reasonable to us—so whether I’m one of these doxastic voluntarists that think I can choose some of these beliefs, or whether I think I can’t really choose, but I find myself believing things that seem reasonable to me, right? And then by following your advice of reading some of these things, these positions may end up seeming more reasonable or rational to me to the degree where I find myself believing them. That seems to suggest then, that I ought to spend a little time at this meta-level, whatever the second order of beliefs of asking myself, what do I want to believe? And then taking the path that most reliably leads to the things that I want to believe. Or is that question itself going to be predicated on other sorts of my own experiences and so on, the things that I want—I mean, because I suppose somebody could come in and say, can you choose what you want to believe? And we get ourselves into an infinite regress here of sorts. 

Sollereder:

My instinct would be to say, to try and decide beforehand what you want to believe, is putting too much pressure on this journey. So follow your curiosity, follow your gut, follow what appeals to you. And then when you’ve explored it sufficiently, say, okay, do I, have I switched now? Do I believe this now? Or am I still mostly convinced by the other thing? Because I think it’s very hard. And I mean, I mark essays regularly in my job, and you can always tell the students who decided what their thesis would be before they did any of the research. And I just don’t think that’s a very good model. So one of the things that I’m trying to get readers to experience is sort of the joy of research where you’re not trying to defend a thesis, enjoy figuring out what’s out there, reading all the reasons for all the different things, and then at the end, kind of looking back and saying, yeah, okay, that, you know, I think that’s the one for me.

Stump:

So the, I suppose the pushback to this, and we’ll try to clamber up out of this ravine I’ve led us down into, here in just a little bit. But I suppose the pushback against that response is that if I just say here at the beginning, let’s just see where this path leads me and I follow my gut. Isn’t it possible that I’m so influenced—so you even just brought up that here, read a bunch of things in this bibliography and you’ll find this position more compelling or more persuasive. Do I just sort of leave that open? And where whatever circumstances I end up, then I find that compelling? Or is there the possibility for people then to be led into some paths, if you had just considered these other things, you wouldn’t have gone down this path that leads you to believing all these conspiracy theories say?

Sollereder:

Yeah, so I think that that’s part of the condition of human finitude, which is just a big way of saying we’re not smart enough to know all the possibilities and all the things, so this gives you a slightly wider glimpse. But of course, of course, what you believe is hugely influenced by the contingencies of where you happen to go and what you have to read like, what else do you want? You can’t sit back without any judgment or any commitment until you’ve mastered the whole world and universe. So yeah, of course. So I mean, I think that that’s part of the thing of taking the pressure off of saying, I have to get this exactly right. Or I’ve gotten it completely wrong. So I think that you can have a view that ultimately you might look back on and say, “wow, did I really think that?” I mean, I can think of some things I thought and argued in my early Christian years that kind of look back and woah. And yet in them, I can still see the seeds of truth that drew me towards them. And so one of the bedrock beliefs that I have, is that everyone makes sense from their own perspective. So when you find somebody who believes conspiracy theories that we just kind of look at and say, “well, clearly, that’s not true.” They believe it for what seemed to them, like really good and compelling reasons. And so that opens up the possibility of not just saying, “well, you’re clearly a complete nutter.” But saying, “really? Okay, what in the world makes that compelling to you?” Like, let me hear because I want to understand the trail of decisions and information that got you into a place where that was convincing, you know, where you’re now in that gorge of that ravine? And then I want to see is there, you know, is the only option to turn around and walk back the way you came? Or is there a path out of here? Or, actually, is this Rivendell that we’ve actually found, you know, this is the Hidden Valley where the elves sing and all this glorious, you know, and until I’m able to kind of explore with somebody, I think it’s quite difficult, much of the time, to really respect them or to enter real dialogue with them.

Stump:

And so that does bring us to this other question I wanted to ask to dig a little bit deeper into theology as models, because we have all these different paths then. And part of us wants to say, so they can’t all be correct, right? And don’t we want theology to be understood as a truth seeking enterprise? It’s not just therapy. Theology isn’t just therapy. But is there a pushback from some who say, “okay, yeah, I can see how people who went that direction will end up finding this model plausible, and other people that go this other direction would find this one plausible?” Do we want, at some point, to though say, theology is supposed to be one of the ways of knowing. What’s it really accomplishing if it isn’t really telling us the truth about the way God is?

Sollereder:

Yeah. So I think the key to that is that what we’re trying to study is God. And that is way too big for human understanding. So any understanding that I get of God is necessarily going to be partial, it’s going to be perspectival, which means I can only see it from my perspective. And the perspective of others is going to add to that, and none of us have a grasp of the whole, you know, so. And that’s true of whether we’re talking about particle physics, or we’re talking about knowing another person, there’s always this sense that our knowing is always in part. And that’s not a bad thing. And yes, I do think that some things are more true than others. So I think the analogy of God being father is closer to the truth than God is a rock. But of course, both are scriptural metaphors, and both have their time and place. And so the difficulty with a lot of things is we want to say, you know, here’s the solution, and one size fits all. And I think even when we’re talking about divinely revealed truth, that’s just not the case. Because that’s just not how we work. And there’s nothing in theology, you know, apart from Jesus is Lord, that I’d really want to sort of say, this is the absolute and the only way to think about it because of that partial sense of knowing that we always, always have.

Stump:

Several years ago you wrote an article for us on the BioLogos website about theology. And I think it was science too. And I think that’s a really important point to make that it’s not like theology is the only discipline that does this, that creates models that are not exact literal descriptions of the way things are. But you wrote an article for us about theology as maps. Can you unpack that? Do you find that that was a few years ago, but you still find that a helpful way to think about these? We were using the term model, but if we say a map, and this fits with the book, right, as, journey and an overlay of something on to our experience that draws out certain aspects of the terrain, certain aspects of reality, but not all of it, do you still find that helpful? I’ve always thought that was really great.

Sollereder:

I mean, I’m realizing now that actually, when I thought I was doing something new, I was just repeating myself in a new way, which is a little bit terrifying. But I absolutely do that. Because in that article, I think I say, I think it’s called Lost in a World of Maps. And I talked about waking up in an unfamiliar room, and not knowing where you are. And having all these maps, none of which are labeled, and none of which have a ‘you are here’. And so trying to sort of piece together from these maps that you find in a chest, how and where they fit together. And I think I talked about the difference in London, there’s the subway system. And then you have the roadmaps, right? And these, the subway system is very simplified, very easy to use. But if you try and use it for getting around London walking, you’re going to get completely lost, because its scales, and its distances are not accurate. But they’re useful for taking the tube that has these sort of predetermined directions and stops. Whereas when you’re walking around the street, you realize that, oh, those actually zigzag all over the place. And so what the map does is carry information that is useful for a particular use, and whether that’s an Ordnance Survey map, or whether it’s a map of, you know, whatever we’re thinking about, our models are always necessarily simpler than the reality because if you had, if I gave you a map to come visit my house in Oxford, that was the size and the complexity of Oxford, it wouldn’t help you at all right? So we have to simplify. 

Stump:

So that becomes I think that becomes this really helpful metaphor for understanding things like science and theology, how they’re extracting different information. Can we push that deeper here, though, to models within theology itself? Are there different maps? So we talked about God as Father versus God as a rock? Are those different maps are those, or can I understand that same metaphor where I’m extracting different sorts of information or different perspectives still within theology itself, and therefore giving me sort of complementary understandings, each picking out something important and true about God but which don’t necessarily correlate to each other? Or if they did, it would be so complex— 

Sollereder:

So one of my favorite examples is sort of the map of transcendence and the map of imminence, if I can call them that. So I think that you have a very, you know—classical theism tends to err on the side of transcendence, that God is outside of time, that God cannot be changed by anything we do, that God does not respond to us, etc, etc, etc. On the other hand, you have this sort of more open and relational map, that when you look at it, its emphasis is on God’s responsiveness, on God’s personally felt emotional love for you, about God changing God’s mind in order to answer your prayer and changing the future and intervening, you know? And both of those are mutually exclusive if you try and press them too hard. But I think both of them say something true about God who’s not contained in either model. And so one of the examples I use in the introduction to the book are those visual illusions that you look at one way and it looks like a rabbit and then you look at exactly the same picture from a different frame, and it looks like a duck, you know, or the you know, there’s any number of those sort of visual illusions that the frame of reference switches. And it’s not that the picture is both or neither. It really does represent one or the other depending on the way you look at it. And so I sort of use that as, again, its own example of the difficulty of saying this one is right, that one is wrong, when, given on how you look at it, I think that they both, they’re both representing God. 

Stump:

So just to bring that back to your book here, and one of the really interesting features is that you come upon this lake, and there are four islands out in the lake. And it’s not quite the same as I’m just the decision I make is going to send me to one or the other, but you allow us to sort of paddle around between them to sample the insights from each of those. Share just a little bit about what the islands are about, and how that might help us to see different facets or different understandings of how God works. 

Sollereder:

So yeah, those are those are the, I call them the islands of divine action. And so I was trying to think about how God works with us as we’re suffering. What is God actually doing? And this is not on the path that says, everything was planned for a purpose ahead at the time. So this is more along the lines of God is working with and responding to our suffering. What does it actually look like? And so, I give sort of four options. One is the island of divine lure, where God is luring you, is enticing you, is wooing you, as a lover towards the good and toward himself as as the greatest good in the universe. And so as we get lost in this world, there’s always going to be that pull towards God’s goodness and God’s purposes in the world. 

Another one is that God is meaning making. God is creating meaning out of events, and we sometimes think, well, doesn’t an event just have a meaning. When it happens, isn’t it just, it means what it happens. But I think that there are many times in our lives where we look back on something, and in retrospect, because of other things that happened, we can look back and say, Oh, I’m actually really glad that happened, even though you know, I was really angry at the time that I didn’t get the job I wanted or I didn’t, you know. We looked at it and go oh, actually I’m really grateful. And so the meaning of that event has dramatically changed as we reinterpret it. So I think that God creates the meaning of the world alongside our actions and draws our actions together so that ultimately, in retrospect, we’ll be able to look back and say, I’m glad that happened. Because God has recreated the meaning of those painful events. I think God is suffering with us. So I think that God feels our pain as we suffer and quite reasonably, I think some people think that that’s kind of a poor solution.

Stump:

In and of itself at least right?

Sollereder:

Yeah by itself it’s kind of like oh, well you know, if I go to the doctor and I have a terrible stomach ache, I’m not helped if the doctor drinks poisons that they have a stomach ache with me. I want relief from my stomach ache not somebody to suffer with me in every way in which I suffer, you know. But I think that what it does is it helps do that reframing work of what kind of God is this? So I think I even use this on my last podcast, so forgive me if I’m repeating myself. In the movie Shrek, there’s this guy, Lord Farquaad, who wants to go marry Princess Fiona, but is too scared to go out and face the dragon in the castle where she’s kept, himself. So he gets a bunch of knights together and tells them you know, I’m going to send you to go rescue Princess Fiona for me. And he says, “now, some of you may die. But that is a risk I am willing to take.” You know, and I just think that’s like the best example of how some Christian theologies can accidentally represent God, that God the Creator has made this great world and we’re gonna suffer terribly, but that’s a risk God is willing to take for the sake of heaven or the eschaton, or, you know, whatever Free Will or you know. And so at least if God is co-suffering with us, that is not the way that it’s working. 

And then the last one is just that God is drawing us to himself, God is soul making God is allowing us to be tempered, to be, you know, it’s like the image of the potter, who as this poor piece of clay is being spun around in circles and being jabbed at with fingers, is being created into something beautiful. And I think that that’s also a possibility to do. Now, any one of those could all be true at the same time, God could be doing all four of those things. And that’s why they’re— 

Stump:

They’re not mutually exclusive. Right? You can go to all of them.

Sollereder:

So I thought that I wanted to, at that point, have a place where you got to the complete freedom to explore all of them before moving on, because I couldn’t sort of choose between them.

Stump:

There we go. Well, Bethany, I’m so glad the path we have both taken brought us together for this hour to talk about your book, this important topic and I hope our paths cross again, in some future decision tree that we find ourselves in. Thanks for talking.

Sollereder:

Thank you very much for having me.

BioLogos:

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. It has been funded in part by the John Templeton Foundation, the Fetzer Institute and by individual donors who contribute to BioLogos. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. 

BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River watershed. If you have questions or want to join in a conversation about this episode find a link in the show notes for the BioLogos forum or visit our website, biologos.org, where you will find articles, videos and other resources on faith and science. Thanks for listening.