“This Is a Guy Who’s Pretending to Be a Pastor, a Priest, a Reverend...”

A Response about God, Scripture, and the Gospel We Preach

The negative responses to my New York Times Op-Ed keep coming. I’m not surprised—and I’m not especially bothered. I’ve been in public ministry for a long time, and I’ve got a pretty thick skin. I also know that responding to every critical comment or insult isn’t advisable.

But I also believe that moments like this—when divisions surface and tempers flare—are not just distractions from the work. They’re part of the work.

Because if my writing and my work are about anything, they’re about confronting the theological assumptions that create these divisions in the first place. And sometimes that means naming those structures directly when and wherever they appear. It is, as my father used to say, a learning opportunity.

In response to my article, Preston Scott, host of the nationally syndicated ‘Morning Show with Preston Scott’ on iHeartRadio, dedicated a segment to critiquing my Op-Ed—and me personally. “This is a guy who’s pretending to be a pastor, a priest, a reverend… a man allegedly trained to teach God’s word…” he said, with something between disdain and disgust.

I didn’t feel anger. What I felt was a quiet, familiar sadness—we see and hear this rhetoric more and more. It is easy to produce, entertaining to hear and great for revenue.

That’s why I try to write and speak with grace. But I also want to respond.

I want to be explicit about why I read Scripture the way I do. Many have found my approach illuminating—and that’s how I offer it. Others find it frustrating, even offensive, because it challenges long-held convictions. But I believe some of those convictions are less fruitful than we’ve been led to believe. More on that in a moment.

So let me be clear:

I utterly reject a picture of God shaped by theology that is: penal (rooted in punishment), transactional (reliant on merit and an economy of exchange), and privatized (detached from reciprocity, community, and society).

“What I felt was a quiet, familiar sadness—the kind that comes when someone has been handed a theology and told it was the truth, rather than a lens.”

I do not believe in a God whose justice looks like a courtroom, whose love must be earned, whose grace is withheld, or whose forgiveness is conditional— and whose holiness resembles a king’s fragile ego more than a parent’s open arms.

Not because those views aren’t part of our tradition. They are. But they are not the whole tradition. And they are certainly not the beginning of it.

I reject this theology for three reasons.

First, it rests on a deeply flawed view of Scripture—one that treats the Bible as a seamless system rather than a sacred library. This theology flattens the text, ignoring its tensions, genres, historical layers, and the chorus of voices it contains. It assumes the Bible always speaks with one voice, when in fact it invites conversation, wrestling, and discernment.

Second, this theology is not rooted in the witness of the early church. It would have been unrecognizable to the first disciples, who followed a living Christ before there was a New Testament, and who understood faith as a way of living together—not a set of doctrines to be defended. The penal, transactional framework emerged centuries later, shaped more by empire and feudalism than by Jesus or his earliest followers.

Third, and most plainly, it’s not bearing good fruit—not for those who hold it, not for the communities that espouse it and not for the world which I believe is in desperate need of Good News. Theology predicated by this system produces stunted souls and distorted disconnected communities.

The theology that undergirds much of American Christianity today is rooted in what I call Imperial Scholasticism. I know that may sound like a lofty academic phrase, but it names something quite simple—and deeply consequential.

Imperial Scholasticism refers to the kind of theology that was forged not in the early church’s countercultural witness, but in the hall of medieval power, between the 11th and 13th centuries. By that time, the church had long ceased to be a community of resistance, proclaiming good news to the poor and freedom to the captive. It had become an institution of immense cultural power—one that offered education, hospitals, and social stability, but often at the cost of aligning itself with imperial authority and feudal control.

It had become an arm of imperial power—aligned with the crown, enmeshed in systems of social control, and increasingly shaped by the logic of empire rather than the liberating story of Jesus.

But this was not a sudden betrayal. It was a recurring temptation—a pendulum swing across the centuries between imperial assimilation and prophetic resistance.

At times, the church mirrored the empire’s architecture, values, and governing structures. But in other moments, it remembered its roots—and pushed back. The desert fathers and mothers fled to the wilderness to reclaim a purer form of discipleship.

Monastic communities emerged as alternative economies, grounded in prayer, humility, and shared life. Mystics and prophets rose up to call the church back to its cruciform center—reminding it that the way of Jesus was not about power, but surrender; not control, but compassion.

Still, the gravitational pull of power was strong. Among the temptations Jesus faced in the wilderness, none was more seductive than the offer of political rule over the kingdoms of the world. He refused it. But the church, again and again, accepted.

Rather than resisting the values that defined the Roman imperial imagination—military expansion, rigid social hierarchy, and economic extraction—the church slowly absorbed them. And then it sanctified them.

The iconic architects of this theology were Anselm of Canterbury who gave the church penal substitutionary atonement theology and Thomas Aquinas who systematized and codified this theology in the Summa Theologiae (The Sum of all Theology). They were towering thinkers, devout Christians, and faithful products of their time. But the time itself was not neutral.

Medieval Europe was defined by monarchy, feudal hierarchy, divine right, and a penal vision of justice. Society ran on honor and debt, loyalty and obedience, reward and punishment. And theology, instead of challenging these structures, baptized them.

Anselm’s satisfaction theory of atonement imagined God as a feudal Lord whose honor had been violated by human sin—requiring a violent payment to restore cosmic balance.

Aquinas, drawing deeply from Aristotle, built a moral universe that mirrored the social one: structured by order, tiered by value, and organized around hierarchy, dominion, and a fixed vision of divine order and human destiny. Together, they helped codify a vision of God as sovereign monarch, of salvation as transaction, and of the church as custodian of divine grace and authority

The result was a theology no longer shaped by the radical grace of Jesus or the liberating memory of the Exodus—but by the logic of empire. And rather than subverting that logic, it upheld it—dressing it in sacred robes.

This Imperial Scholasticism became the operating system of Western theology. Even the Reformation didn’t escape it. Though Protestants rejected papal authority, altered the liturgy, and wrote new hymns, they did so with the the underlying architecture intact: A God of wrath. A salvation of penal substitution. A moral order premised on debt and guilt.

But this system is not original to the Bible. It is not the theology of the early church. And it is not—despite its deep entrenchment—producing the fruit of the Spirit.

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In the next section, I draw out in more detail this deeply flawed view of Scripture.

PART I

“The bible says…”

I was watching a debate—atheist vs. theist. The moderator did the usual: a few formal remarks, introduced the topic, welcomed the speakers, and took his seat. The atheist leaned forward and fired the first question before anyone had really settled in:

“Do you think the Bible is true?”

I practically jumped out of my chair. I wanted to reach through the screen, pause the moment, and take over the conversation—not as a theologian or apologist, but as a moderator who actually wants the dialogue to go somewhere meaningful.