Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Welcome to that Makes Total Sense, a podcast dedicated to exploring God's generosity and justice. I'm Alexis Busetti, a Christian, aiming to ask good questions and encouraging you to do the same.
Every one of us is wired by God to live out generosity and justice, but the how sometimes eludes us. That makes total sense is a way for us to get together, posture ourselves as learners, and challenge one another to practice practice generosity and justice in a tangible way every day.
Okay, so normally my pre record conversation is, you know, a little bit of banter, get to know you, blah, blah, blah. I don't know how often I have said, yeah, I was hesitant about reading this book, but that's where I kind of started with our guest today.
Spoiler alert. I'm no longer hesitant. It was brilliant and lovely and a wonderful text.
But let's see if I read the subtitle and the title. If anyone else in the listening audience might feel that way as well. I'm here with Scott McKnight and Adrian Gibson and we're going to talk about their book Traumatized Church. What Paul's relationship with the Corinthian Church teaches us about helping those who are hurting.
And I'm just going to be real blunt where my hesitation came from that you both answered brilliantly in the, in the first part of the book even, which is, and I'll say, Scott, don't start here because Paul was a pastor and many of the folks reading this book are going to feel like, no, no, no. Like myself or my community have been. We're the ones who've experienced trauma or spiritual abuse at the hands of leaders in the church. And then you'll probably have a lot of leaders in the church who are going, uh huh. And as you address it happens the other way around as well. And so I really love the way that you bring that together, which is traumatized people often traumatize other people and we as community members just don't mean to oftentimes, but we traumatize one another.
That it's not really like in my mind where I went was let's erase these lines for a minute of who's the leader and who's not.
Let's just admit that sometimes we traumatize each other and we need to be aware of that, understand better how to deal with that and how to love each other better. So I almost kind of like, I'm kind of eek as I say that. How does that land with you guys as I'm expressing that to you as a reader?
[00:03:02] Speaker B: You know, you are not the first person to wonder if starting with Paul or at least anchoring some ideas in Paul is a bad place to start. Because many people do look at Paul as an abusive person or at least authoritarian.
And this is, I think is even more significant and important.
Many people have had Pauline interpretations imposed upon them by leaders in the church, making Paul look like an ugly, mean guy, and in particular for women, because, you know, Paul has a, has a silence passage or two.
But by and large, you know, Paul is not harsh with women in his texts. He doesn't do those sorts of things, but we are aware of that. And part of the reason that I got so excited about this portion of the book that I worked on on 2nd Corinthians 10:13 is because this is a side of the apostle PA that seems to have made no impact on most people today.
And I've seen these statements about the Apostle Paul so many times and I, I say to myself, have you people ever read Second Corinthians at all?
Because he's extremely vulnerable in chapter two toward the end and at the beginning of chapter seven where he's wondering if people like him.
I mean, this is not the Paul that some thick skinned, hard nosed, mean spirited guy in chapter seven when he learns from Titus that the Corinthians responded favorably to a letter he had written or to a message that he sent through Titus, he's thrilled that, you know, it's sort of like that old commercial about oatmeal that says he and gives it to his little brother. And he goes, he likes it. Amazing. And there. And that's what I think is, is surprising. But Paul is a vulnerable, emotional, transparent person in this letter in a way that is surprising. But you've touched on something else that Adrian and I have talked about a few times already, and that is leaders.
Leaders are often accused of imposing on others.
But at the same time, if you know church leaders, you know that the people of the church can be extremely mean to them.
And so this book, it could be about pastors. It's not really.
It's about leaders and Christians who experience trauma from other Christians. So. All right, that's. I'm sorry I went on so long. I got excited.
[00:06:05] Speaker A: No, that's great.
[00:06:06] Speaker C: Well said.
[00:06:07] Speaker A: Exactly. Very well said.
Side note, this is the next question is going to be for Adrian, but I feel like this is not a very scholarly thing to say and I don't know where I read it or heard it, but when you were talking about Paul, I have heard some people say it help it helps me imagine Paul. Maybe I heard this in seminary. I don't remember. It helps me imagine Paul when I think about him, like, George Costanza, that he's kind of this, like. Like, maybe even, like, you know, some of these mannerisms, some of these, like, even his appearance, which you talk about in the book a little bit, but some of these things where you're just kind of like, he's. He's. He's just trying to. He's just trying to get by. And like, as you said, it's like, dude, I don't even know if they like me. You know, like, I can. I can feel George. You know, I'm kind of saying that. But anyway, not scholarly and totally a side note.
Adrian, you're an lpc.
[00:06:55] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:06:56] Speaker A: And you tell the story. You both tell the story in the book of kind of how, in some ways this book came to be. But I want to ask you about how
[00:07:09] Speaker C: we can.
[00:07:10] Speaker A: And how it's helpful to begin to look at biblical characters like Paul kind of with.
I'm using this in this language of like, with a lens or kind of with a hermeneutic that reflects modern mental health understandings and knowledge. So I know that it's helpful, which is brought out in this book. There are also some challenges and limitations to that. And so I'd love for you to talk about that. Some.
I will say, one of the first times that I recall being introduced to, maybe even we might say, a hermeneutic like this would be through. And I anticipate that both of you are familiar with Daniel Smith, Christopher's work on Ezekiel and Exile. And he talks about Ezekiel in a similar way, talking about Paul, of someone who would possibly be diagnosed with PTSD today.
He has lost his community. He has lost his home. He was ripped from some of these places. He's lost his spouse without the ability to grieve these things.
And he's trying to continue his work as a prophet and as a leader in the community with all of those things going on. And sometimes when we read Ezekiel Smith, Christopher talks about how we read it and find his behavior to just be very odd.
[00:08:32] Speaker B: And.
[00:08:33] Speaker A: But if we look at this, you know, saying he's experienced something very traumatic, his community has experienced something very traumatic. If he were living today, a therapist might diagnose him with ptsd. And how does that shift how we read Ezekiel is kind of some of the questions that he's asking.
And you guys are doing something very similar with Paul. And so I'd ask you, as the Therapist, how's that helpful? How do we start to begin to do that as readers?
And also, what are some of the limitations and challenges that you come across when you start to apply some of these modern understandings to these biblical characters?
[00:09:14] Speaker C: Well, I think it. One of the many benefits of seeing all of the characters lives in the Bibles kind of this way is to remind us of their humanity.
We often lose that in looking at these stories. It. For me, a lot of the stories started in the Old Testament because a lot of the families that get unpacked in the Old Testament, we get to hear a lot more about their stories. I get to kind of see the mess of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob's lives because they share a lot more context of, like, marriages and children. And so I started to see a lot of trauma taking place in Old Testament stories. So it's easier to see those characters and go, they're human. I want to see their humanity.
They're not heroes. To put them on a pedestal all the time where we're like, they get to do everything right. You get to kind of look at their lives and go, their lives were. They're a lot more like mine. And I think then we transition that and look at Paul's story. We. We don't look at Paul's humanity very much because he's writing these letters and we're supposed to be taking these theological concepts that he often unpacked for the first time for many of the cities in congregants. But, like, we're missing that humanity aspect. So even in seminary, when Scott or Dr. Kohick or someone would be unpacking the humanity that he did about including people's names and stuff like that was so easily missed, where we're like, he had friends and he cared for people and people cared for him. And so some of this is just, again, making Paul human. And that's what I think I've learned the most from Scott in unpacking 1st and 2nd Corinthians was then we get to see this very, very human aspect of Paul where now I get to look at him and go, like, he really was a human like me.
Like, he really had these struggles.
He really had people who didn't like him. He had people who did like him. He had really hard things that he had to say.
He was impacted emotionally the same way I would be impacted emotionally. So, like, those are the. That's the beautifulness of the humanity. To go like, oh, if. If people critiqued me this way, or people said these things about me, I would respond in such a similar manner.
But often we never put Paul on our level. He just lives on this different plane, this different level. And I'm like, no, Paul's a human like me. Scott loves to talk about Paul's height. I'm 4:10. So I'm like, oh. So Paul and I had some. We have some really similar struggles. And, like, what we just have to.
What we have to counteract when people first meet us. There's a lot of assumptions that are made for short people. But I'm like, just that humanity is so beautiful. But there's also. Like you were bringing up. There's also a catch 22 in that we only get the pieces that got shared, you know? So, like you were saying, like, we might diagnose Ezekiel or even Paul with ptsd, but we have to say might, you know, because I don't get to have a conversation with them. I don't get to unpack some of that. I don't get to hear their story. There's so much that we just didn't get. So there's. There's just. There's always going to be those limitations. And as a therapist, I never.
We never diagnose someone we haven't met. Yeah, that's.
[00:12:29] Speaker A: That's a good point. Yeah.
[00:12:30] Speaker B: Well, I. I read a psychologist. Adrian's good on that. I. I haven't heard much about Ezekiel like this, but I have heard about Job. There's a really fine book on Job about being traumatized. But the.
When. When I think of Paul now, and I learned this from Adrian, so in a sense, I can answer some of your questions.
It was understanding trauma in her master's thesis that made me, first of all, say this book needs. This thesis needs to be published, because the church needs this kind of understanding of trauma. But even more, it was when I was writing a small commentary on Second Corinthians that it dawned on me that these categories of trauma apply to Paul. And I found a psychologist who also had a degree in theology. And I don't know if it was New Testament as well, but he was a seminary professor, and he diagnosed Paul with PTSD on the basis of his experiences, a lot of which that he diagnosed from 2nd Corinthians 10 to 13.
But one of the things that dawned on me, and I said this on a podcast, and I recently mentioned it to a scholar of Second Corinthians, and I said Second Corinthians 10:13. And this is a set of chapters, four chapters most people ignore.
I understand that. But I hope some of them will read. It is. It's like discovering the Apostle Paul's journal, private journal, because he's saying things that you normally. Well, he doesn't talk like this in any other of his letters. He can get kind of angry at people and he can, he can get emotional in Galatians is a very emotional letter, but there's nothing like Second Corinthians 10:13 elsewhere, choppy sentences, sarcasm, irony.
He's just buckling down, defending himself, telling everybody he's not defending himself. And at the same time, I'm thinking, this is a man who has been through trauma. He's. He's bearing his soul here in ways that only therapists actually hear from. From most people.
So. Well, unless you have a relationship with your spouse that you, you talk about everything, there's no, there's no other place that you would hear these kinds of stories in the ancient world or from most Christian leaders.
[00:15:06] Speaker C: Right.
[00:15:06] Speaker A: Which is like, takes me kind of on a. If I had a thought bubble and we'll pop it and move it over there. But it makes me, you know, but it, but it also makes me kind of think about the relationship, right. That you guys talk about some in the book, but the relationship that Paul must have had with, you know, some of the Corinthians to let. Even though it was painful to let them in on, you know, some of those things that he was feeling and experiencing and that journal, like, dialogue or monologue that he was having in those letters.
Adrienne, before we get too. Too much further, I'm going to ask you to give us just kind of like a working definition of trauma, I will say, like, the thing that is funny. I just recently took a class at the doctoral level from a fabulous professor who's a therapist and a theologian where we talked a lot about trauma. And that's where I learned. I mean, I knew already that I just know nothing, but also just like, how many kind of definitions and nuance there is in trying to nail down, like, what is trauma? And I might say as a parent of like a bunch of gen zers or whatever the next one is after that, that this is something that this is a word that also just kind of gets to thrown around, you know, trauma and trigger and, you know, all of those kinds of things. And so I think it's like, we probably think we have a good working definition of some of it, but I don't. But I don't know that we all really do. So if you could help us with that Just so we can kind of get on the same page as we continue the conversation. That'd be awesome.
[00:16:38] Speaker C: Yeah. This is exactly what my heart is for, of helping to try to unpack this understanding and give people more of a working knowledge. Because like you said, these are catchphrases in this next generation that people are using more frequently, which, on one hand, I'm like, this is beautiful and wonderful to hear, but the more we use it, I actually find that some of it, it's being diminished in its understanding because it's kind of then you being used for so much.
The working definition that we put in the book Traumatized Church is it's an event or an experience that overwhelms your capacity to cope.
But trauma is not the event. So it's not the catastrophic flooding, the horrific car acc.
[00:17:20] Speaker A: The.
[00:17:20] Speaker C: You know, I'm not one of these many examples, because those are triggers.
So it's not the event. It's. It's. But the working title or the working definition, the event or experience that overwhelms your capacity to cope. So trauma becomes this embodied experience. When I realize my nervous system goes, I don't know what's on the other side of this one. I don't know if I'll survive or I don't know if I'm going to know how to live on the other side of at this. What that might mean for me, or do I want to. Do I want to experience whatever this is going to take away from me. What will that be like? So the experience then is when our nervous system then has to go into that autonomic response that is fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, because our bodies were meant to survive. And so when that kicks into gear, we go into that event or experience. And I don't know how I'm going to cope with this. But your body goes, I'm going to do everything to keep you alive.
[00:18:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:18] Speaker C: And then we're left with that calling card of my nervous system did this thing, and I now have to live with the experience that I didn't know if I would survive.
[00:18:29] Speaker A: Adrienne, thank you so much for that. That is what I think stood out to me the most in that definition was the embodied response. And so now if I'm just like. If I'm kind of keeping track, we're talking about Paul is human. We're talking about, you know, bringing out the humanity of these biblical characters. Many of us have just read and read and read forever. And it's kind of like, you know, when you say A word so many times, and you're like, I don't know, this just sounds silly now, you know, like, I can't even say. It feels like it doesn't have any meaning, but the bringing out the humanity in this. In these. In these biblical characters, who we see, and then this embodiment.
And I think that that's so important for the. The text and understanding of the text and so important for what much of this book is about, which is how do we respond to one another when we have experienced trauma? How do we care for one another?
You know, I think that sometimes there is a lot of focus on having good words or the right words when people have experienced something that they're grieving or experience something traumatic, which is important, and I don't want to discount that. But just recognizing that along with the biblical text, our response isn't just verbal. It's not just something that we say and someone else hears. It is the. What they're experiencing is embodied. And, like, how can our response also be embodied? How can we have a more holistic understanding of what's happening? And you named the four responses to trauma.
Fight, fight, fight. Wait a minute.
Fight, Flight, freeze, and Fawn.
[00:20:23] Speaker C: You got it.
[00:20:23] Speaker A: But thinking about those as, this isn't just what we say. These are embodied responses. You know, like, I just. I just took my dogs for a walk before we came on this call, and we saw a squirrel.
And my dogs both had embodied responses to seeing this squirrel, right? They started. They crouched low and they started moving real slowly. And the squirrel also had an embodied response to being seen by the dogs, which is to run quickly in the opposite direction.
And it's just when I think about those four responses of how you're talking about, our nervous system responds to it, our bodies respond, our heart rate goes up, or all of these things that you're an expert in, and I'm not.
Just as a reminder to how holistically we respond to trauma when it. When we're experiencing the event, and then how that play serves as a reminder of how we can care well for one another when we're interacting with people who have experienced trauma. And one of the things I think it might be, Scott, who mentions it might be in the sections on Paul of how part of what we talked about at the beginning is like, Paul, we kind of see him as harsh, but a lot of times it's because he's responding and out of his trauma, and he's. He's giving a response that is kind of affected by the trauma. That he's experienced, but that it doesn't always mean that that's kind of the right way of, of doing it. You know, you guys talk about how it's the, it's the impact, not necessarily the intent.
And I think that's true when it's kind of the initial trauma and also a response to that. So I don't have a great formulated question there, but I do kind of want, I wonder if each of you could maybe respond to that on looks like when we're, when we're reading and studying the text and how, what we can learn from that. But also, Adrian, I'm looking more to you for the, for the other one of like in Community.
You know, you guys talk a lot about that and, and have a lot of sections on how we can, how we can listen well, how, how we can care well for each other.
But maybe Scott, maybe we'll start with you on like how does that embodiment, like, what can we learn from Paul and the Corinthians about trauma response being embodied?
[00:22:58] Speaker B: Well, Paul isn't so forthcoming on some of, you know, my, I feel anxious about these things or I feel hyper aroused about these things. But.
[00:23:08] Speaker A: Right.
[00:23:09] Speaker B: But as we read Second Corinthians 10:13, and really much of First Corinthians, or at the end of First Corinthians, the beginning of Second Corinthians, we begin to see Paul responding emotionally to the Corinthians. All he has to do is sit down with pen and paper. Now, I don't know that Paul actually wrote anything. And in fact, he says he's not very good at handwriting like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but that he was.
When he begins to think that he's communicating with the Corinthians, I think his blood pressure went up, although that's not a diagnosis. I think he went into some hypo arousal and hyper, hyper arousal and he began to get angry and he was defensive and just the back and forthness of Second Corinthians 10:13, where he starts and stops and he can't seem to forget the wounds that he has experienced from the Corinthians. Now I, I would say that the Second Corinthians 10:13 reveals embodied trauma in Paul because of the way he's responding.
I, I don't imagine he sat there with his arms, his hands behind his head, leaning back with a cigar in his mouth, relaxed and just saying, you know, I had some tough times with the Corinthians, but it was it. He's, he's worked up and even the grammar of these passages reveal the emotions that he's going through.
So. And I totally agree with you that that trauma is embodied. And that's one of the key terms, I think, in defining what trauma is.
And it is, in fact, the body experiences it before the mind is aware of what it's experiencing. The mind tries to assemble the feelings of the body into a category or coherencies that make sense of how they're feeling. And that's what I think is going on in Second Corinthians especially, is that he has experienced so much rejection and wound from the Corinthians. He's so disappointed in how things have turned out. He can't go there. He has to send Timothy or Titus to those places because he.
He just knows what will happen if he. If he shows up at the doorsteps.
And so he. In a sense, he has fled.
He's a part of flight. He's gone back to Ephesus, and he's nice and safe there. And they even say, you know, his way. His letters are weighty, but when he's around us, he's timid or he's easy to take advantage of. That's not the Paul most people know. They only know the letter writer, and they project a personality on him. But I think this. This guy was someone whose body knew the score. Is that. Is that the title of the book? Okay. His body revealed his relationship to the Corinthians every time he thought about them.
[00:26:41] Speaker A: Gosh, you know what? I. The image I got in my head, Scott, as you were just talking, was when. When you were saying that the. The body responds before the mind has the ability to kind of figure out what's going on. And. And I thought of, like, being in a household with people and imagining right now that someone sees a spider or something like that, and you hear the scream, because that's the reaction that comes out. And you run to try and figure out what's happened. And then they tell you, oh, my goodness, I thought I saw a spider, or I did see a spider. It's right over there. And so kind of that you work to understand the scream after the scream has happened. And I wonder now, thinking about Paul, how much of this is we're kind of hearing the scream, but we're not getting necessarily from the text itself a whole lot of that explanation of why did we just hear this loud scream? And so then we don't really know what to make of it. And we kind of.
Some of us have created these stories in our heads you know, as you're saying, like, he's harsh, he's mean, he's kind of, you know, this or that. Well, maybe he metaphorically saw a spider. You know, like he's having an embodied response. His body is responding to these, these, these wounds, this trauma.
[00:27:56] Speaker C: Or he saw too many spiders.
[00:27:58] Speaker A: Right?
[00:27:58] Speaker C: He's.
[00:27:59] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead, Adrian.
[00:28:03] Speaker B: Yeah, but, you know, and I'm not going to say I'll. We can talk about this in a few minutes.
Paul does reveal some of what was going on.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: Right?
[00:28:12] Speaker B: So he, he does talk about the spiders he's seen.
[00:28:16] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
In the clinical world, we call it the fastest traveling 18 inches. So what Scott was saying, he said so. Well, Scott, you're doing. I don't even need to show up. You're doing such a good job with all of this trauma talk.
[00:28:30] Speaker B: I learned it all from you.
[00:28:31] Speaker C: No, the fast is 18 inches is because everything we think we usually feel in our bodies first. And I can't say 100%, but most often because everything starts as a sensation. But we think it so quickly. Most of us think this started as a thought, but it's like the spider thing and even hearing the scream and not knowing what it was about, your body did something and then connected it to the brain and you had a thought like, someone's attacking my child. Or, you know, all of that stuff. But what it also shows us, though, is that not only was Paul embodied, but it's also in our humanity. Why would we not show some of our emotions and responses? Because then I think it's also saying, like, we're going to have embodied emotional responses.
And so many of us have been conditioned and taught, like, keep emotions out of it. Don't be too emotional. But we are emotional beings now. It's often what do we do with our emotions that get us in trouble. That's why people are like, don't be too emotional. But no, we need to be emotional beings because our body is communicating something to us with the emotions that we're experiencing. So, like Paul getting it out of his system and writing some of this down or being able to put it into a letter, that's the impact. Not knowing what the intent but the impact is going though. I need to also get this out.
I need to have an embodied experience to say, like, this is. This is how this is impacting me. And this is my bodily response to some of the things, the critiques, the harshness, or the words that I'm hearing from you. So then he's also showing that humanity of like, yeah, I'm gonna have an imp that's gonna impact me. I'm gonna have a. A moved, embodied, emotional response to what's going on around me. Because we live in community.
And Paul is then writing to community. They go, we're going to be in community. Community's going to hurt us. We're going to heal in community. We're going to live in community. We're going to work in community.
[00:30:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
Talk about how we can respond to folks in our community who have experienced trauma. The two things I'm thinking of right now are listening, but also safety.
And one of the quotes I wrote down from the book is that safety is defined by the person seeking it.
And I just, gosh, I just thought that was so important.
Again, one of the first times that was introduced to me was I was reading books. We have one of our kiddos is adopted. And I was reading books before he came home.
And now that I'll look it up and put it in here later because the names of those super famous people who wrote this book are escaping me.
But they talk about the idea of felt safety.
Like saying your kiddo might come home and you might know that he or she is safe, but they may not know that they're safe. And so how can we as parents help them have a feeling of safety? How can they feel safe? Not just, oh, try to be assured that your parents who are now in charge of taking care of you understand that you are safe. Like, not an intellectual understanding, but like a felt safety. And I think this, this rang as similarly true to me that safety is defined not by the person who needs to help give it, but as a person who is seeking it. So listening and safety were two of the things that pointed that stood out to me in the book. But really, anything else that you want to share about responding and caring for people, well, who have experienced trauma?
[00:32:20] Speaker C: Yeah, safety is the overarching thing theme of what we wanted those last few chapters of the book to be about. As we grow trauma, informed spaces, you know, and we give kind of these tools and tricks to. To build it, they all fall under the umbrella of trying to build safety. And like you're saying, if we try to convince our brains that we're safe, but our body doesn't feel safe, our brain won't believe it.
We just can't believe it. If your body doesn't feel safe, your brain's going to be like, but you're not. But you're not. But you're not as much as you try to convince yourself. And so safety is a felt sense and it, so it's dependent upon the person's body who needs to feel safe. And that's why in ministry there are going to be a lot of well intentioned people who think they're doing things to build safety, but if it never became part of the conversation, they just don't know. And so I think that's why safety and listening go hand in hand. Because you have to then ask and then what you're growing is their agency and autonomy to speak up. Because I think I even put this in the book. You could ask and they might not know at first because they're just like, I don't know. But then it's just, it's slowing things down and going, well, then we'll figure that out. Like I, I'm not gonna then give you what I think you need for safety. We'll just slowly do it and then you can start speaking up. Is this helpful? Is this not? And so it's, it's, yeah, the, the person who needs to feel safe. Safe gets to start to define what that looks like in relationship.
Because relationships are going to be the hardest aspect for traumatized people to step into. It's hard to grow safety with other people because it's, that's the, the, the, the counterpart that they have no control over is the other person. But yeah, building safety in community and relationship takes listening.
[00:34:13] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that part about, about stepping in one of the other notes I have, because it rang so true with me, is that essentially trauma, experiencing trauma can cause us to no longer trust ourselves.
And that feels really hard. I want to say it was one of the endorsers, Lisa Harper, who I heard at a conference a hundred years ago, who was talking about not being married.
And she said to the audience that her picker was broken when it came to men, that she'd had some bad experiences and that her picker was broken.
And I remember after we had experienced some trauma as a family at two churches, like back to back, and I remember just telling my husband, I said, I can't, I can't be trusted to even choose a place to visit right now because in the words of I think maybe Lisa Harper, hopefully that's not wrong.
My picker is broken, you know, and that phrase was helpful for me because I was just like, I thought I knew, but look what we did.
We were present in these couple of places and we experienced some really, really significant hurt. And I'm afraid to step into anything. I don't trust myself even because of what I have experienced. And it took me a long time to kind of be able to sift through that and get to where I could maybe, you know, step out again and recognize that maybe it wasn't just me, you know, that that wasn't the only factor was, well, I'm just this moron who can't make decisions when it comes to community.
Scott, I feel like I see your wheels turning.
[00:36:12] Speaker B: Well, no, I mean, this is an Adrian question, but when I'm thinking of Paul is.
Because I was sitting here thinking, what is Adrian going to say?
Because these are good points you're talking about.
I think. I think Paul felt unsafe for the Corinthians, so he. He. He lied. He didn't want to be there.
And he had jagged edges. He had a broken.
Something was broken in his system of deciding how to care for a community, that he knew if he tried to care for them, they were going to come back against him.
And this is the side of Paul that I think we miss unless we.
We actually see this, these chapters as his journaling for the sake of his therapist.
And, and he, you know, he goes through the various systems or the various things that he's experienced from them. And I think that that's listening is that one of the things I would say is most people who think Paul was mean have not listened to him.
Now, okay, they've read Second Corinthians, second Timothy, and they hear Paul saying that women shouldn't do this. And they've read First Corinthians 14, and they've heard that women should be silent. They. And so they've heard these things, all right, they shouldn't be teaching, etc.
And so now they've got a projection of Paul. Like, they think that Paul was like Mark Driscoll, okay, To use a name.
And.
But they haven't listened to this guy enough to actually feel what this man feels.
Because in listening to how he describes his experience with the Corinthians, if you don't have empathy, you might be the problem rather than Paul, because he went through a lot.
And, you know, leaders in all sorts of fields experience this all the time. I mean, I'm a teacher. I've had students blame me for things in my career that are just outlandishly untrue about how I grade or something like this. Knows that I don't like them. And I think, you know, I, I don't. Wasn't even sure who you were. I had such a big class. I'm not even sure that you know what you did.
So I don't know you well enough not to like you and Adrian, as a therapist. Some people would say, you know, my wife's a therapist. If they don't get what they want out of a therapist, they blame the therapist and go to another one. All right? And leaders in churches wake up on Monday morning and can be. It can be euphoria from a great weekend, or it can be misery.
And they're trying to figure out, how in the world am I going to get up on that platform or lead this class next week after what I've experienced this week.
That's what we need in listening skills to Paul. And I think if people sit down and read 2nd Corinthians 10:13 and say, I'm going to list every criticism that I think Paul is. Has heard from the Corinthians, they're going to come away thinking, oh, this guy's been through a lot. Maybe. Maybe I should listen to him more.
[00:39:46] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:39:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
Adrian, what do you think, trusting yourself?
[00:39:55] Speaker C: I don't. I had so many thoughts that came up. I don't know where. I'm like, what. What to hold on to.
I have nothing to add. Sorry. That was so well said. I'm like, no, I love it.
[00:40:09] Speaker B: Adrian's talked about this, is that people who are in trauma can't trust themselves.
[00:40:16] Speaker C: Oh, yeah.
[00:40:17] Speaker B: And, I mean, I've heard. I've heard her say. Say things about this. And let's just say that you are driving down the street and someone plows into your car.
You might not trust yourself to get in that car again and drive.
You'll be fine. But that doesn't mean you feel fine.
I'm just making up a story.
[00:40:42] Speaker C: Yeah, no, I forgot about that story at the beginning. No, I'm glad you brought it back, because I think it matters, too, when we start not trusting ourselves because of ourselves.
And that's what a lot of trauma does. Like, I trusted the wrong person.
I joined the wrong thing. I didn't see the signs that everyone else saw. And everyone left, but I was left because then you start to just doubt your ability to do things. So that story you shared with me, like, I. My picker, was wrong. I kept choosing the wrong churches. And so we kind of throw it on ourselves. Of like, I made the wrong decision over and over again. I don't trust myself. Trauma takes away our trust and our safety. So then, as a church or a ministry or someone who's just trying to love and care for someone, that understanding of, like, they just don't trust yet. They don't. They don't know where to place any of that because they're like, I trusted the wrong person. I trusted myself. I. And all of that fell apart. And so to even to figure out how to listen to someone and to try to build safety back, when you go, you think your picker is wrong. You think all of the decisions you made led you to this. You think you made all your decisions. Are all of these ramifications. And that person's like, yeah, I'm out.
I. I can't do any of this there.
That's why they can't. They have such a hard time trusting anybody.
[00:42:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:01] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:42:02] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. I'm looking at the time and going, I have half a page of notes still that we're obviously not going to get to, but I want to leave.
I want to leave you guys each to take, you know, a minute or less and say, the book is fabulous. I'll just put it there. There's.
I'll put where folks can grab a copy in the show notes. And so there's so much more that you guys cover than what we talked about today.
But what do you feel like leaving people with? Because you wrote this for? I mean, we didn't cover it, but my intuition as a reader is that you wrote this for people like me.
People, you know, who are in the. Specifically in the U.S. churches. You know my context, but people who are hurting, you know, Christians who are. Who are hurting Christians who may have accidentally hurt other people.
And we're just. We're kind of trying to feel our way around.
So what do you feel like leaving us with today at the end of this conversation with the hopes that folks will. Will dig in a little bit more.
[00:43:09] Speaker B: I'll. I'll start with this, and Adrian can have the final word then. But one of the things that happened in my classes, I asked, well, I asked friends and some students after I explained trauma a bit, to tell me the story of their pain in churches. And some of them are pastors.
These stories show up in this book, and there are some grievous stories. I mean, these are serious stories. So this is not a textbook in the sense of. This is like the DSM. What, 5. What is that, 4? 5. It's not the DSM 5. This is. This is a book that is laced up at times with stories that reveal the deep pains that Christians have experienced from other Christians, whether they're leaders or whether they're not. But a lot of them were leaders.
And so I want to leave them with the fact that they're not alone.
Paul is on their side, but so are a lot of other people. And you don't have to worry about Paul, because these stories will reveal some of that to you.
[00:44:19] Speaker A: Yeah. Amen. Thanks, Scott.
[00:44:21] Speaker C: Adrian. That's a hard one to follow up. I should try to go first from now on.
The thing I like dropping in at the end is the hard words of vulnerability and honesty. This book is a conversation that's going to require vulnerability for the people that read it and honesty to look at themselves. I think the message I would want to leave is this work starts internally first. This is one of those books where we read and we might want to think through, like, what do people around me need to know? Or what do people around me need to do with this?
I hope it impacts and they apply it to themselves first. So the vulnerability is I have to look at what I bring to the table, the hurts that I have, the situations that I've been through, and then the honesty of this is how that has impacted me. And this is now I know what I'm reflecting out at times. It's vulnerable and it's honest.
[00:45:21] Speaker A: And of course, my dogs are barking.
That's. We're trying to end it. Thank you both so much. Again, we've been talking about traumatized church, what Paul's relationship with the Corinthian Church teaches us about helping those who are hurting by. My guest today, Scott McKnight and Adrian Gibson, thank you both so much for writing this, for coming on, for sharing, for the conversation, and for the encouragement and the challenge to do what you just said. Adrienne. Thank you both so much for being here.
[00:45:49] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:45:50] Speaker B: Thank you very much. Yes.
[00:45:52] Speaker A: The links for all the resources mentioned in today's episode can be found in the show notes, music and podcast production by Seth Buscetti. Be sure to give us a review on itunes and subscribe at your favorite podcast listening app. You can also visit us at. That makes turtlesense.com.
[00:46:16] Speaker B: Sam.
