Blue Ocean Reflections Part 4: Religious Squabbles and the Third Way

This is the fourth post in a six part series. You can find Part 1, Solus Jesus is HERE, Part 2, Centered Set HERE, and Part 3, Childlike Faith HERE.

The Blue Ocean Reflections series consists of my personal interaction and history with the six "distinctives" of the Blue Ocean Faith movement as laid out in the book of the same name (you can find my review of the book HERE). Throughout the series I intend to talk about my own history and journey of faith and to offer some thoughts on how what I have come to believe impacts my understanding of the world. As such this series is likely to have a heavy focus on theology, philosophy, and politics. But since my formal education has been as broad as I could make it, my reflections are apt to be fairly wide-ranging as well.

"There are people who take the bible seriously, who also believe that it is OK to be gay."

I realize that it probably sounds hopelessly naif, but I honestly did not realize this was true until I heard Dave Schmelzer explain it at a Blue Ocean conference (I had downloaded the talks) in 2010. Writing six years later, I find this almost embarrassing but the fact remains. Now to be clear, Schmelzer did not enunciate the whole Third Way concept at that meeting; the idea as it is now applied to LGBTQ+ folks was developed a little later on by Ken Wilson and popularized when he turned it into the book A Letter to my Congregation. Back in 2009-2010, if my memories are correct, Schmelzer and the other Blue Ocean folks were in the process of trying to work out what their approach was going to be when it came to the hot button issues of the church. But for me, the real power of taking a Third Way perspective on church controversies became real, the afternoon I listened to that talk for the first time—if was the day I began to understand that being correct is not actually the final goal of faith in Jesus.

This section of Blue Ocean Faith actually contains two of the concepts which I have come to associate with Blue Ocean thinking. Chapter 5, Religious Squabbles Are the Worst (But There's an Antidote!) works out both with the Third Way approach to controversial issues, and also Schmelzer's application of M. Scott Peck's stage theory of spiritual growth (which, I understand, Peck developed in Further Along The Road Less Traveled). This works out pretty well as the stages theory does a good job of explaining why many (particularly religious) people have a hard time with anything like practically applied Third Way thinking, but it also means that I have a lot to reflect on in this post. So please please bear with me.

Stage Theory

Schmelzer's understanding and use of Peck's stage theory works best as a descriptive approach to understanding how a person's approach to, and understanding of, the project of religion or spirituality develops over time, with the additional observation that many people get "stuck" at one stage or another. It has some resonances with spiral dynamics theory as well. Rather than trying to summarize a summary, let me just quote the descriptive paragraphs from BOF:

Stage 1 you might call "criminal." 

It corresponds with being a toddler. Toddlers don't entirely know where the end and you begin, and so they're prone to being grabby and self-focused...Peck suggests two institutions that interact with this stage: jain and the boardroom (or any other position of power. Jail serves Stage 1 people, because it provides clear boundaries—the bars of the cell if nothing else. High-functioning Stage 1 people can also become the kind of effective narcissists that get power because you and I don't realize that they're criminals doing everything for their own gain. Think Bernie Madoff. Or Stalin.

Stage 2 you might call "rules-based."  

Now we're six or seven and we want to obey Mommy and Daddy's rules. Peck suggests two institutions which serve and promote Stage 2. First is the military, which is famously excellent at transitioning young people out of Stage 1 and into Stage 2, at teaching them discipline and honor and making the productive citizens. Second—of greater interest for our purposes—are churches. Peck argues that churches (and mosques, synagogues and other places of worship) famously teach people right from wrong, good from bad. He's at pains not to judge this, pointing out that Stage 2 creates the backbone of most societies. It creates the good people who volunteer, pay taxes, obey the law and raise great kids. 

Stage 3 you might call "rebellions." This corresponds with being a teenager. Suddenly the Stage 3 person is asking, "Who died and made all those Stage 2 rules the rules?" They become skeptics. If the Stage 3 young person is surrounded by a Stage 2 community, they might feel suffocated. Where's the open questioning? Are all these Stage 2 "truths" just shallow grabs for power? Peck says the institution that best promotes Stage 3 is the university. For one thing, universities are filled with kids in this age range, and often their stated mission is quite Stage 3—to get students to question everything they've been taught.... 

What Stage 3 doesn't realize is that its skepticism might not be the final word, that there might actually be answers to its questions, but answers that look quite different than the answers proposed by Stage 2.   

Stage 4 you might call "mystical." 

Stage 4, in Peck's view, isn't the end of the process. At the earliest, we hit this stage in our early 20s, and then we spend the rest of our lives walking out the implications of this. In Stage 4 we realize that many of the things that we were taught in Stage 2 do, in fact, seem true, but in a more expansive perspective than we'd previously understood... 

One way to think about this is that Stage 2 is dominated by answers. If the key is to be a good person and to get things right, we need to know what is and isn't right. In a Christian world, it might take some work to know what you need ot know about the Bible. You might need to read not just the Bible, but the current favorite Christian thinker of your friends. But, after you've done this, you're good. Maybe you won't know everything, but you'll have the answers you need. 

Stage 4, though, is dominated by questions. You've realized that reality is way bigger than you are, and that the way to navigate its vastness is relational. You are the sheep listening to and following the good shepherd. This will make Stage 4 Christians seem slippery to Stage 2 Christians. They seem to use the same language, but they mean different things with it.

It can be a long road but every step is good.

I have found this tremendously helpful (and, for the record, I tend to see myself as probably somewhere in Stage 3 with Stage 4 aspirations) when it comes to thinking about my own spiritual journey. Stage 3 began to break into my Stage 2 thinking around the time I graduated from Bible College, but the process was fairly gradual for me and I don't think I really gave up on Stage 2—that is, on the bedrock belief that there were answers out there for all of my questions and that all I had to do was learn and understand them—until my mid-late 20s. Fortunately for me (and I credit a lot of center-set dynamics, the Truth seeking/always questioning culture of my grad school, and some wonderful spiritual mentors who were not afraid of my questions) the transition from Stage 2 to Stage 3 did not entail any particular need to walk away from Jesus. I certainly despaired of the institutional church for a while, but Jesus was always "there with me" and was entirely happy to hear my questions, absorb my frustrations, and sit with me in my fears and doubts.

But stage theory helped me to make sense of what was going on with myself and with the Christian world around me. It gave me a grid with which to process things, and it has proved to be pretty robust at that job since I first started using it. The shift, from baseline selfishness to a reliance on rules and answers to structure life and existence to an awareness of the damage caused by those rules and answers and an attendant rejection of rules and answers as such and then beyond into a slowly-unveiling appreciation of the Truth in which at least some of those old rules were grounded but which is bigger than they seem to envision, resonates really well with what I have observed in the world of Christianity.

One of Schmelzer's most on-point observations in this chapter is that much of the contemporary "culture war" in the US, and particularly the conversation and tension between American White Evangelicalism and the Progressive Christian conversation seems to represent a Stage 2 vs Stage 3 conflict which periodically seems to shunt various folks into Stage 4.

As my relationship with Jesus has grown, as I have gotten to know him better and better, and as that has led me farther and farther outside the generally accepted bounded set of American Evangelicalism, I have experienced so much of what Schmelzer talks about here. I remember when I was in Bible college, I generally understood the "business of Christians" to be to learn the answers about Jesus, a task well suited to Peck's "Stage 2" and I genuinely believed that there were straightforward answers out there for me to find. To borrow another metaphor Schmelzer uses in the book. I thought that Truth was something I would eventually be able to comprehend, to fit in my own head. As time went on and my Bible College professors, then the books they recommended, then the books the authors of those books recommended, failed to answer my questions—or more accurately, as the answers they provided failed to satisfy my growing questions—I began to worry that the answers just weren't out there.

One wry observation that Schmelzer makes in the book is that, when introduced to the concept, Stage 3 Christians have a bit of a tendency to identify as Stage 4. He is probably right about that but it makes it hard for anyone to say that they actually are in Stage 4. That may be fairly accurate though, one of the hallmarks of the mystical approach to truth and God is an awareness of ones own limitations which would tend to prevent folks in that stage from having any particular sense of having "arrived", I suspect that a lot of mystical stage 4 people think of themselves as somewhere on the border between the rebellious stage 3 and the mystical stage 4. I certainly do and I am happy to leave it up to those who know me to decide whether that is accurate or indicates that I am actually fairly far gone in mysticism (my penchant for getting into internet debates likely counts against me here).

The Stage theory approach works really well for understanding a lot of the Blue Ocean project itself as well. If you think back to the previous sections (Solus Jesus, Centered Set, and Childlike Faith), all of them smack of this mystical/relational approach to God. They rely on the premises that reality is bigger than we can ever really comprehend and that there is a loving relationship available to guide us through it. Reality is both fundamentally wondrous, dangerous, and good. It reminds me a good bit of the classic line about Aslan from The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe:

Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion." "Ooh" said Susan. "I'd thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion"..."Safe?" said Mr Beaver ..."Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.

This fundamental assumption that we cannot and need not "know all the things", that reality and Truth are just too great for us, and that Jesus is there to walk with us, is what—in my mind—grounds Blue Ocean thinking, it is the thread that holds all six distinctives together. It is also what I think drives a lot of Evangelical Christians (who represent the "rules and truth" stage 2 group with which I most identify) so crazy. Blue Ocean thinking delights in questions and the exploration of God without feeling the burden of needing answers (though answers can be pleasant and delightful enough when the come around) while a lot of Evangelicalism experiences an almost chronic anxiety in the presence of unanswered questions about reality, and religious cynicism experiences a mirror anxiety in the presence of confident answers. My experience from within both of these latter groups has been almost a deep frustration with the very idea that one could be at peace with questions or with answers. Maybe that is why Blue Ocean Faith feels so much like being able to breath again.

The Third Way (Handling those "Squabbles")

OK, so the Third Way is my jam. The essence of what Blue Oceaners call the "Third Way Approach

to Debatable Matters" is that Paul's advice to the Roman Church about how they ought to navigate their theological disputes over the observance of special "holy" days and the eating of meat which had been sacrificed to idols, can and should be applied to debatable matters in the church (universal and local) today. As I mentioned above, the Third Way was first enunciated and fully developed by the Blue Ocean Ann Arbor pastor Ken Wilson back when he (together with quite a few of the Blue Ocean group's other pastors) was a member of the Vineyard movement. Wilson first presented the idea in paper for at a Society of Vineyard Scholars conference as an approach to arguments over the level of participation the Vineyard ought to allow to LGB individuals. He later developed his ideas into a book A Letter to My Congregation  and it is his more fully developed version which Schmelzer cites as a Blue Ocean Distinctive in his book.

The Third Way approach begins by identifying its own scope. Riffing on the work of Roger E.Olson, the Third Way breaks religious claims into three potential categories: dogma, doctrine, and opinion. Dogma is defined as the basic beliefs of Christian faith, essentially those propositions without which we are talking about something which probably isn't Christianity. Schmelzer identifies the Apostle's and Nicene creeds as good candidate for this category. Doctrine would be those propositions which would seem to necessarily derive from dogma, usually by only one or two steps; most of the theology that people get really heated about online falls into this category. Then opinion is everything left over; it is the category for those propositions which we might hold but don't feel to be at all critical to our overall understanding of the nature of reality. Within this taxonomy, Third Way is an approach to differences over doctrine. 

The Third Way approach is an approach to what Ken Wilson has called disputable matters. He, and Schmelzer in Blue Ocean Faith, define disputable matters as 1) doctrine; 2) bringing two biblical truths into tension; 3) disagreed upon by otherwise faithfully Jesus-following people. 

Once we have decided that we are involved in a debate over doctrine (and keep in mind that debates over the theology of LGB sex have been the experimentum crucis for the theory) the Third Way approach is to look at which "side" in the debate is arguing for greater liberty of conscience and behavior and which is arguing for a greater degree of holiness or constraint. In Romans, Paul identified one "side"—the one which holds to more laws and have a more tender conscience—as the weak and the other—those with more liberty of conscience—as the strong, and within that framework, each group has a responsibility to the other. In Dave's words:

• By all means hold the belief that you hold and never violate your conscience
• Shun contempt and judgement and trust God to judge wisely
• Make clear to yourself and others that you understand that your belief is not dogma and that reasonable, faithful people disagree with you.
• Do not exclude anyone from full participation in the community over disputable matters—so long as they also abide by these four principles.

This has meant that Blue Ocean churches are functionally "open and affirming" in that they will not prevent an LGBTQ+ person from participation in the full life of the church, they perform same-sex weddings and have ordained LGBTQ+ clergy. However, they aren't technically "open and affirming" since, to quote Schmelzer (working from Ken Wilson) again:

...the "affirming" part of "open and affirming" seems to go against Paul's command here not to judge. To "affirm" someone, in this context, often means something like to "grant them moral approval." I have to meet them and ask myself, "As best as I can figure out, do I morally approve or disapprove of this person?" Then I decide, "I approve!" Along with Paul here, Jesus profoundly commands us not to judge anyone. The issue in Third Way is not passing judgment positively or negatively on anyone, it's to include all people who hope to follow Jesus as the disputable matter works itself out.

The upshot of all of this for me has been a long term commitment to, on the one hand, hold and advocate for my beliefs on this and other subjects as strongly as I know how (feel free to check out my defense of LGB relationships HERE and my defense of the gender identities of transgender persons HERE if you are curious) while remaining in relationship and spiritual community with people who disagree with me.

So far as I can tell the Third Way is really the only viable way forward for the Church as a whole, but I want to acknowledge that it isn't easy at all and, frankly, still needs a lot of working out. I still have questions about what it looks like to take a Third Way approach when there are people who have suffered spiritual and emotional abuse at the hands of those who are the weak (it is interesting to note how often the weak have power over the strong).

Some Resources

• For those who are interested, Ken Wilson and Emily Swan maintain a blog series dedicated to thinking about the Third Way over at The Third Way Newsletter, they have even allowed me to contribute periodically.
• Anyone with questions about Transgender folk and theology would be really well served to check out Austen Lionheart's YouTube channel Transgender and Christian

Click HERE to check out A Letter to My Congregation on Amazon

Click HERE to get Blue Ocean Faith on Amazon

Blue Ocean Reflections Part 3: Childlike Faith

This is the third post in a six part series. You can find Part 1, Solus Jesus is HERE, and Part 2, Centered Set HERE

The Blue Ocean Reflections series consists of my personal interaction and history with the six "distinctives" of the Blue Ocean Faith movement as laid out in the book of the same name (you can find my review of the book HERE). Throughout the series I intend to talk about my own history and journey of faith and to offer some thoughts on how what I have come to believe impacts my understanding of the world. As such this series is likely to have a heavy focus on theology, philosophy, and politics. But since my formal education has been as broad as I could make it, my reflections are apt to be fairly wide-ranging as well.

The third "Blue Ocean Distinctive" is a belief that "childlike faith" is the best (only?) path to spiritual growth. Of all of the six distinctives, this one has probably been both the most important and the most counter-intuitive for me. It is also thoroughly intertwined with several of the other distinctives.

Kids are generally black-and-white, concrete thinkers, and I was no exception to this. For all of my childhood and adolescence and on into my early twenties, I was eager to find out "how the world works" and believed that my answers were out there. In terms of my relationship with God, this had the effect of driving me into the arms of theology and apologetics (for those of you who do not share my conservative Christian background, apologetics is the discipline of offering evidence, arguments, and proofs in defense of Christian tennets of faith). It was never enough for me to know that someone had apparently solved a particular problem, I had to know how they had solved it and evaluate the quality of their argument.

And I really enjoyed it.

To this day, there is little which I enjoy more that the rigorous back-and-forth of well crafted argument and response. I experience clarity of thought and elegance of expression as a particular beauty; I find it energizing and life giving. And I don't think that there is anything wrong with that at all, in fact I think that appreciating, critiquing, and crafting arguments is part of my vocation in this world.

But that is what makes childlike faith counter-intuitive for me.

Schmelzer opens this chapter of the book with the story of a conversation he had with a woman who approached him with questions about opportunities for academically rigorous classes as a means for spiritual growth. In the account, the lady is eager to get training in theology or apologetics based on her belief that these disciplines will effect spiritual growth. Essentially, she believes that spiritual growth consists in knowing more truths. In contrast, Schmelzer suggests that spiritual growth consists in knowing Jesus more fully. 

I have found that a linguistic distinction has been really helpful in getting my head around this—unfortunately it is not a distinction which exists in English. In many other languages though there is a distinction between the kind of knowing that has to do with fact and the kind of knowing that has to do with relationships or acquaintance. "I know that 2+2=4" would be an example of the first, "fact" type of knowing. The Turkish word for this sort of knowing is bilmek, (in German it is wissen, in French savoir) while the Turkish for relational knowing is tanımak (German kennen, French connaître). On one level, we could say that the woman in the story believed that spiritual growth is achieved—at least past a certain rudimentary point—by an increase in bilmek, while Schmelzer maintains that spiritual growth is all about tanımak.

In my own experience, the distinction between bilmek knowing God and tanımak knowing God, started to really stand out while I was in Bible college. Certainly before that I would have spoken sincerely about having a "personal relationship with Jesus" and I still believe that that relationship was a real one. But if I were being honest, even then, I would have had to say that the adjective "personal" in that particular trope really meant something like "strong" or "powerful". I had a relationship with Jesus but it didn't much occur to me that the relationship itself was the point. I sort of thought that being right about everything was the point (notice how intertwined this "distinctive" is with the first two?)  Facts-about Jesus rather than Jesus himself were what I thought really drove my spiritual life. And that led me to prioritize using bilmek knowledge to draw as accurate a boundary as I could around my bounded (rather than centered) set faith. 

This led, frankly, to me being a jerk on an unfortunately frequent basis. In my defense, it is really hard not to be a jerk when concerns of ultimate importance are all about which propositions someone does or doesn't accept as true. The sheer pressure to get people to agree with you has a tendency to turn differences of opinion into condescension, disagreements into quarrels, and debates into fights. When saving someone is the same thing as convincing them, friendships become incredibly difficult. I did manage it occasionally, but some  of my least favorite memories with my non-Christian friends in highschool have to do with our conversations about religion. Most of the time I just talked to them about other things altogether—and then felt incredibly guilty.

And it really wasn't much better with my Christian friends. Particularly once I started at Bible college, each discussion about God (a subject I genuinely love to discuss) was too frequently haunted by possibility that one or both of us might be falling into heresy. There were places our discussions simply mustn't be allowed to go, ideas which were simply too dangerous to explore.

And I think that is what saved me.

I still don't get it—there should be a black dot in the center right!?!

I have never been very good at just letting a question go. I remember getting in trouble once in middle school because I wouldn't be satisfied with any explanation of why I didn't see a black dot in
the middle of my field of vision when I looked through a Newtonian telescope. When the teacher gave up and told me to just drop it so that he could continue the lesson I must have said something rude about his knowledge base. It didn't end well.

The thing is, that impulse to keep pushing until I get an answer which actually satisfies me, ultimately led me to some pretty scary conclusions about the availability of bilmek knowledge out there. This whole process will likely get its own blog post one day, so for the time being let's just say that the biggest lesson I took away from Bible college is not only that we don't know nearly as much as we pretend to, but that we can't know nearly as much as we think we have to. I had gone to the very place where I was supposed to get answers (bilmek knowledge) only to discover that those answers which I had been assured I would understand with enough education, didn't seem to actually exist. At least they didn't exist in any form that satisfied me.

Three years later I went to a secular grad school where we played with ideas, asked questions, and did our best to discover what truth we could find. It was freeing, beautiful, and life giving. It turns out that the pursuit of truth is way more fun once you give up on needing to find all of it and instead "settle" for insights into Truth.

The upshot was that, as much as I love it, I discovered that bilmek knowledge wasn't especially helpful for my own spiritual growth. The most I can say for it is that it taught me its own limitations.

But what does all of this have to do with childlike faith? Schmelzer describes "childlike faith" using the analogy of a three year old child in downtown Manhattan. From the book:

Imagine that you're a three-year-old child in downtown Manhattan who says to your parent, "Hey, thanks so much for all your help to this point. I totally appreciate it! But, you know, I'm good at this point and I don't think I'll need you anymore. I can take things from here. I'll get a job, get a lease on a nice apartment, and set myself up just great. But thanks again for everything!

What I think is utterly critical here is the relational aspect of the faith in question. I am convinced that the God who wants to be tanımak known, is far less interested in us having high degrees of certainty when it comes to facts-about-the-nature-of-reality than in being trusted in relationship. It has become my nearly automatic habit to mentally replace the word "faith" whenever it appears as a command, with the word "trust". You see the difference? "Faith" has all to do with bilemk knowldege, where trust rests on tanımak knowledge.

Paul Ricoeur

Schmelzer works this through riffing of the the spiritual development model of Paul Ricoeur (he also builds out a terrifically compelling model based on Joseph Campbell's Monomyth using Tolkien's work as the primary example—you can find some of his best explanation of that HERE):

Now how Ricoeur uses this and how I'm using it are not one-to-one, but here's the central idea. When we first experience Jesus, were plunged into the first naïveté . Whatever anyone says about the Bible is awesome. Whatever insights we get in our own scripture readings or prayers are fantastic. Jesus begins to talk to us, and it's astounding. We're confident there are only good things in store for us in this amazing journey of faith we've just been invited onto!

But then, Ricoeur says, we enter "critical distance." We realize that things we'd innocently assumed to be true just don't hold up,either because we get a little learning about the Bile and churches, because we get pushback from smart people, or because life itself doesn't work out the way we thought it would. Our expectations have bee messed with.

At this point we have options. One powerful urge would tell us to stuff critical distance at all costs! Go back to the first naïveté! Ignore all that stuff you've been hearing or the experiences you've been having! All those insights about life aren't really worth having if they cost you the first naïveté! Do what you can to crawl back into the womb! In hopes of regaining the safety and security that we've lost, the price we pay when we make this choice is a sort of permanent opposition to everything that called us into critical distance. WE become combative, religious people, "standing firm" against challenges from ... well, from those lousy people who are experiencing critical distance.

Or, we could camp out in critical distance and become profoundly reactive to combative, religious people. That's another option.

But our goal is the second naïveté, which is this resurrection...The second naïveté is the "childlike maturity" that Paul is talking about in 1 Corinthians 13, or the author of Hebrews is talking about in chapter 5. ... Almost none of us gets this. The road is narrow that leads to life 

The second naïveté is, I would argue, the complex, relationally difficult (because it is relationship after all) discovery of tanımak based trust in a living, interactive Jesus who is far more profound, and far more fundamentally True, than any of the truths we sought through bilmek knowledge. The second naïveté is coming home, only to discover that "home" is a more terrifying, painful, beautiful, awful, awesome, glorious adventure than we could ever have imagined before.  

The surprising result of giving up my attachment to the pursuit of bilmek knowledge of God as an ultimate end and replacing it with a committed and (at least aspirationally) trusting relationship with the person who is Jesus has been that my intellectual life, my study of philosophy and theology, my enjoyment of debate and conversation has actually gotten richer. The quote (I heard it first from David Foster Wallace, but I don't think it is original to him) that "the mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master" turns out to be true. Once we come to understand spiritual growth to be a process of learning to trust a loving God more and more—always deepening our relationship, our tanımak knowledge—we become free to explore our questions and posit answers with far more joy and freedom. It is one more iteration of C.S. Lewis' Law of First and Second Things:

Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first and we lose both first and second things.

For Part 4: Religious Squabbles and the Third Way, Click HERE

Click HERE to get Blue Ocean Faith on Amazon