ST74: A Teachable Spirit (Nijay Interviews AJ about his *new book*)

You're listening to Slow Theology, Simple Faith for Chaotic Times with A.J. Swaboda and E.J. Gupta. Welcome back, everybody. We are so excited that you've joined us for another episode of Slow Theology. I'm here with Dr. A.J. Swaboda, the one and only. We also want to tell you that we have a book coming out called Slow Theology. So go over to the Brazos Press webpage. Brazos has been good to us. We have a long, beautiful relationship with our publisher and editors there. And we're really excited. Just take a look at it. We want to help people grow in their faith. I love this subtitle, by the way. "Slow Theology, Eight Practices to Cultivate Resilience in a Culture of Chaos." Is that the exact subtitle? No. Okay. It's close. Okay. What was the exact subtitle? I like it. I like it. "Eight Practices for Resilient Faith in a Turbulent World." Oh, I got one word off. Back it off, bro. One word. We're professors. I guess one word doesn't matter. It's what we do. But I love the idea of turbulent, because if anything could be said of the year of our Lord 2025, it's turbulence, turbulence. And so the world's a rockin', and Jesus has come knockin'. Right. I just trademarked that. Praise. Anyway, check out our book. We're excited. We'll be doing some... We'll probably be doing at least a podcast episode or a few talking about what's in the book. Weird, though. Like, what would that episode be called? What would it be called? "Slow Theology, Unslow Theology?" Yeah. Like, what do we call that episode? I don't know. We'll call that episode. "Boat Rockin'." Alright. Okay. Today... Okay. We've been going through a Holy Spirit series. It's been super fun. I've learned a lot. AJ has taught me a lot, and we've been mostly agreeing with slight disagreements. But we're taking a pause on that to talk about something I'm really excited about. So Dr. AJ, the right reverend, Dr. AJ has come out with a new book. It is called "A Teachable Spirit, the Virtue of Learning from Strangers, Enemies, and Absolutely Anyone." Great title. Great subtitle, AJ. I mean, I'm always curious, how much say do you get in the title? How... Okay. Let's do a little bit of a tell-all. Have you... Did you come up with this title? Let's put that... The "A Teachable Spirit," the main title I did, the subtitle was not chosen by me, but I really like the subtitle that they... Because it only mentions... The book itself has a series of groups or entities that I'm convinced Christians struggle to learn from. Experts, strangers, teachers, strangers, parents, children, enemies, the sort of secular culture. And they could only fit two into the subtitle. But the two that they chose, "Strangers and Enemies," I think are good starting points. Yeah. That's good. Clickbait. I'll give you that. What about your previous books? Has there been one where the publisher came up with a better title than you? You're probably pretty good at this, but tell her story, for example. I had a terrible... Absolutely terrible title. They came up and tell her story, and that's probably helped sell a third of the copies of the book. I had proposed one book years ago called "The Purpose-Driven Velvet Shack of J-Bez Like Jazz Wins," and they rejected that one, unfortunately. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. But... That sounds like Chad GPT came up with it. If you listen carefully, that has just about every popular Christian book in the early 2000s. I'll say it again, Purpose-Driven Velvet Shack of J-Bez Like Jazz Wins. All of them right there. A lot of my books are books that I chose the title. A Glorious Dark I chose. I did not choose Subversive Sabbath, although I really like that one. After Doubt, I did not. The Dusty Ones, I did. I can guarantee you, I did not come out up with introducing evangelical eco-theology, but I did come up with Tongues and Trees, and Blood Cries Out. So a number of them, yes, I did choose a number of them I did. But I have learned to trust our publishers. I mean, the publishers in general, they know the world. They know what works. They know what doesn't. Yeah. It's understandable. I've gone back and forth. We've negotiated and all of that. Well, let me just say a little bit about this book, and then we'll get into interrogation. No, I'm just kidding. So this is a great book. It's less than 200 pages, and it's, to me, there are different styles of writing, right? So this is written more in kind of the conversation style, which is kind of one of your trademarks, which I like. It's a beautiful book. Okay. It's a jealousy moment here, AJ, jealousy moment, and you, you have far surpassed me in this. One of my, like, bucket list things is to have a dust jacket hardcover. Oh. Yeah. I've published over 20 books, well over 20 books. I've never had a dust jacket. You probably had 10 of these. No, two. Only two. Only two. Really? Yeah. A gift of thorns in that one, and I can guarantee you that these will be the only two that I ever get. Really? Yeah. Well, some people, like, immediately get rid of the dust jacket. I like the dust jacket. Yeah, I do too. Yeah. I like that, because I like to see the beautiful covers. So let's talk a little bit about what you're trying to do in this book. When I first heard you talk about a teachable spirit, learning, I thought, okay, you know, ho-hum, kind of a perennial topic. This is what Christians should do. And then I started reading it, and I was like, dang, this is really timely, because what you're saying, I don't know if you say this explicitly as much, in terms of this being a 2025 sort of problem, but we live in these kind of hermetically sealed silos of information. And what you're saying in this book is part of Christian virtue, part of Christian formation, is not only being willing to learn from other people, but even pursuing it, like getting out of our hermetically sealed. So when did you come up with this book idea? Is this been percolating for decades? Is it a newer thing with, you know, election stuff, politics, or, you know, where did this book come from? I've been mulling over this stuff. I've been mulling over this for quite some time. In fact, I still remember, Nijay, the first time I was introduced to the idea of teachability. It was a funny time in my life. I was about 22 years old, 21, 22 years old, and I was an intern at my church, and my pastor at the time, Nate Petzel, required all of the interns at the church to read a book by J. Oswald Sanders called Spiritual Leadership, which is, it's kind of, some of the language in the book is super 1980s and 70s and stuff, but really actually really helpful book, just kind of an intro to like character for Christian leaders. And one of the main ideas he has in the book is this idea of teachability that always stuck with me, like a leader is a teachable person, a Christian should be a teachable person. Well, over the last, you know, decade or so of watching both in pastoral and in academic circles, watching my students and congregants and friends try to navigate a world with so many ideas, so much information, constantly never ending, flowing ideas for a lot of Christians. This poses a real, real chaotic, even threat to the Christian faith in their lives. Because who you learn from and how you are taught requires a skill set, like what do you, what do you believe, what do you not believe, who do you listen to, who do you not listen to, and here's, oh, Nij, you'll find this really interesting. I did a deep dive, I think it's, I don't remember how long the book is, but there's a lot of footnotes, end notes, I should say, which is the one thing about the book I don't like, I wish that they were footnotes, but if you look at the end notes, I quote what is, as far as I could tell, the earliest use in Christian history of the term teachable, or teachability, and the earliest use of that word teachable or teachability that I could find goes all the way back, catch this, to John Calvin, who preached a sermon, he loved, Calvin loved Deuteronomy, it was one of his favorite books to preach on, and he preached a sermon on Deuteronomy 10, which is that story when God tells Moses to come up the mountain with the empty tablets, God tells him, "Bring up two tablets with you upon which I can write the Ten Commandments," and Calvin says in this particular sermon on Deuteronomy 10, that is what the Christian life is all about. The Christian life is about you and I constantly bringing to God a tablet upon which God can write, and you know what he calls it? He calls that a teachable spirit. I like that. Isn't that beautiful? So it's the person who has cultivated that I've got space in my life to learn, to grow, to learn from God. Interestingly, Nijay, Jesus told his disciples to not call people teachers. You and I are teachers, which makes our job kind of awkward because we pay people to call us this. It's our job title. Underneath that, I don't think it's the technicalities of calling yourself a teacher. Underneath that is, I think, a really central core conviction for a Christian, and that is that our ultimate teacher, if we are followers of Jesus, our ultimate teacher is God. God is the ultimate teacher, and I think, basically, the big idea of the book is, God is going to send us a lot of people in our life to help us hear the voice of the teacher, and we've got to understand that a lot of things are God's TAs in our life, that a lot of teachers' assistance that God uses to teach us the voice of the Master. So to be a Christian is to be teachable. That's where the idea kind of comes from is that book that I read years ago. Although, can I tell you a story? Sorry, you asked one question. You may get two questions in during this interview. On a very real cultural level, the real reason that I wrote this book is derived from a story a couple of years ago where I was watching the news one night, and there was this young woman, 25, 30 years old, who had gotten caught up in this kind of political, she'd made a political mistake, and she wasn't a politician, but she worked for a politician, and she broke the law, she got caught. So she's in the courtroom, and on the news program, they aired her like public statement of sorrow. And this 25, 30-year-old woman who, in many cases, has ruined her career by this decision, she'd never heard anybody, but she's made a mistake. And she is, Nijie, I mean, she's on the stand, and she is just weeping with sorrow, brokenness of the mistake that she had made. And these are not crocodile tears, like these are real, real tears. And I'm watching her, and Nijie, I get like emotional watching this woman be broken. And I'm getting emotional because how rare is it, you know this, how rare is it now in the public space to see people vulnerably display their repentance? You know, in the Old Testament, if somebody was in a season of repentance, right, they'd rip their shirt off, and they'd cover their head in an ash, and they'd walk around, you know, swollen and whatnot, you'd have public displays of sorrow. But I was seeing this woman do this, we never see this. So that night, I made the decision to look at social media, and I was sort of hoping that everybody would celebrate, "Oh, we've got somebody who's been humble and a teachable person and repenting." And I watched Nijie for an hour as everybody on the opposite side of the political spectrum just dunked on this girl, like just trashed her. And I had this, I was holding both these stories at the same time, and it dawned on me. This is why I wrote the book. It dawned on me that we now have a culture that demands repentance, but the minute people do it, we shame them. And essentially what has happened is we have now gotten to the point where being a teachable person is a liability, culturally speaking. And so what is everybody doing? We are all pretending like we know what we're doing, we're super confident, we know everything, and we've lost the art of teachability because we've seen people who are teachable get just trashed on. So here's the point. In our cultural moment, what would it look like for the church to re-embrace what Calvin saw as a people who are able, we are still able to be taught, even in an information age, like that we see Jesus as our teacher, we are able to be taught, and we're willing to be taught by people that might be perceived as enemies or outsiders, and that those people might teach us how to follow Jesus. Yeah, that's so important, and one thing that you emphasize is, I think behind a lot of this is fear. Oh, 100%. Fear of, you know, what I tell my students is the fear of contamination, that if I start listening to that commentator, if I start engaging with that person or if I have a conversation, then they're going to set a trap, and next thing you know, you know, I'm thinking this or I'm doing that, that sort of thing. I remember you and I had a conversation a long time ago, now I'm seeing it in this book about serendipitous learning. Can you talk a little about that again, because I was thinking about this, how our culture sets us up for failure in terms of how we could just learn things in a surprising way. Let's talk a little bit about the cultural moment. Yeah, I was turned on to this by a scholar at Baylor University, Alan Jacobs, who's, I love his work, he's a deep, brilliant literary mind, historian, cultural guy, and in one of his books about reading, he writes this beautiful book about how to be a good reader. He talks about one of the price tags of the information age is that that search bar at the top of our computers, when we get on the internet, right, we get Google and we look up some topic is that we can look up what we are looking for, but we don't have to wade through a bunch of books to find it. It's I call it self-selected content. We can find the content that we need when we need it. Now, in ages past, in ages past, even when I was in elementary school, I remember the first research paper I had to do on, I wrote a paper on Africa, and I remember like having to wade through these huge books in the library to find something, like it was like I'd have read massive amounts. Do we decimal? Yeah. I mean, you would have to like go look for books and all this stuff. And when you would do that, you know, it takes a long time, but you have to wade through a bunch of stuff you're not looking for to find what you are looking for. Yes. And Alan Jacobs calls that serendipitous learning. It is the learning that you're not looking for, but you get on the way to finding what you are looking for. And the internet search bar has done away with serendipitous learning. We no longer have to wade through stuff to find what we're looking for. We don't have to go to the library. We don't have to have a bunch of conversations. We don't have to struggle with things. We can just find exactly what we're looking for, the self-selected content, and no longer have to wade through things that we maybe were not looking for. And I got to tell you, Nij, when you don't create space for serendipitous learning, which you could call as the learning of surprise, it increasing all it does is it forces us to live more and more in these entrenched silos of ideological agreement because we're just finding what we're looking for. We don't have to hear the voices and ideas of people that we don't want to hear as we move increasingly into a world that is mediated by artificial intelligence, which I would argue is a form of intelligence that is artificial. It's in the word. It's not real knowledge because what it does is it gives us knowledge, but it does not give us the capacity to think. And that's a very dangerous construct because we could find any information we want, but we don't have to learn how to think. Dallas Willard, before he died, wrote all that I'm reading, everything Dallas Willard wrote over the course of a year, and it's a lot, but it's super interesting at the end of his life how much Dallas Willard was writing about the tragic loss of the teaching of logic in public schools and how because we don't teach logic anymore, we just become people who have knowledge, but no way to know what to do with that knowledge. Yeah, interpret it. Wow. Well, let me play devil's advocate a little bit because I think I could see someone reading this and struggling with sort of certain cultural waves, cultural norms. So this is just kind of poking and prodding. If one of your premises is, I have a lot to learn. Does that mean I can't be confident in what I know? If I'm always learning more about God or more about Jesus, more about the Christian faith, because part of the spiritual spirit is openness. Is that openness in direct conflict with feeling like I have enough to know to have faith? Yeah. Yeah. Great question. Yeah. I've already gotten this question a number of times, which I think is really what you're asking. And the question is, does being teachable require that I give up what I know about God and my identity and a deep Christian faith? Like does it does being teachable and having an open heart towards learning mean eventually well, I'm just going to go the cultural way and just accept everything everybody says and lose my Christian identity. Okay. So I think it's important to distinguish between true humility and false humility. Okay. False humility to me is a form of humility that says, which I hear frankly from the progressive side a bit more, is like, be humble and have an open mind and these sorts of things. But what that often means, the subtext of that is give up your religious and theological identity and just accept what we're telling you. Right. Okay. It's this form of humility that says, lose yourself and now accept everything that you've been told by a culture or one. And that is not true humility. True humility is actually knowing who you are and being deeply rooted in Christ so that you can discern the difference between truthhood and falsehood, which of course raises the importance of, and I have a whole chapter on this in the learning from secular culture chapter, is in order to be good learners, Nijay, I would actually argue to be good learners and to be teachable, we actually have to know and love the Bible more. There needs to be a direct parallel between our capacity to learn and be taught with a deep commitment to the sacred words of scripture. There is a huge difference between being teachable in the godly sense of like, I know who I am, I know who Jesus is, I know some core things that are unshakable and out of that, I can learn, versus somebody who just walks into every room and every room just reshapes them into a new person. That's called impressionability. There's a huge difference between being teachable and being impressionable. I would say don't be impressionable. Don't change every room you go into, be teachable, know who you are, have a deep identity in Jesus, have a very high view of scripture, and out of that become a great learner. How many times in the Bible, Nijay, do we have stories of non-covenant people, non-Jews, people outside the tradition who end up teaching Israel? Yeah, all the time. All the time you've got outsiders who are teaching Israel. I think that is God being, Yahweh is our teacher, and he is going to use experts and enemies and strangers to teach us things because God is our teacher, and if God is our teacher, then he's got a lot of TAs. Love that. I want to pick up more on the learning from our enemies. This is the hardest one, right? This is the most challenging one, and I think the problem, so I might have mentioned this on the podcast. Maybe I haven't, but in the morning or sometimes when I'm exercising, I'll watch YouTube clips from the news or from talk shows, that sort of thing. Several weeks ago, I was watching a conversation between Bill O'Reilly and John Stuart. For those who don't know, Bill O'Reilly is a conservative, hundet, he's religious, he's, I don't know if he was on Fox News, but he's conservative, and then John Stuart is very progressive, comedian, but also very, very sharp-minded, sharp-witted, and they're just talking about the cultural moment. What I loved about it is, they were so confident in themselves, what they believe, that they had a fun, engaging, a little bit needling conversation, but you could see there was respect for each other. To me, I feel like we Christians have so much to learn from that conversation about how to talk to our enemies without getting nasty. I think it came from a posture of, "Hey, you're actually smart and you're good at what you do. I disagree with you, but you're smart and you're good at what you do, and you're innately a decent person." And vice versa. There has to be that coming into it. You and I have had this experience, I think you talked about in this book, where we published this article. That's in our new book. Oh, yeah. That's in our new book. That's in our new book. The book's confused. Yes, shoot. Yeah. Well, we do talk about it in the new book, where we published this article, and we were surprised how quick people were to smear us and to mock us and cheer us and all of that, and we would have actually loved a serious, direct, but gracious conversation with people that disagreed with us. And we had that with a few. We did. We had a couple individuals that were willing to engage on the idea. Yeah. And yet so many more, we're just wanting to kind of throw tomatoes and be nasty and feel like they could ding us and slam us. So tell us how we can grow in having conversations. I mean, here's the truth. Let me just give an example. Here's the truth. I'm very firmly in the pro-women ministry camp. So if I'm talking to somebody way on the other side, just to be honest between you and me, I'm not going to change my mind on this. Right. I'm not going to just change. I'm not going to go into a converse, because part of a teachable spirit, when I hear you say that, I hear openness to change your mind. Maybe that's not what you mean, but that's what I hear. So if I'm having a conversation with Joe Schmoe, I'm not really coming in saying, "God, let me change my mind if that be your will." I'm coming in with, "What should I do if I know for sure, to me at least, I'm not going to change my mind?" What would be the point of, what does a teachable look like and what would be the point of that conversation? Yeah. Okay. So there's a couple of dynamics here. So number one is, first, learning is not the same as agreeing. Yeah. I like that. Okay. I can learn from somebody I disagree with. Just because I've learned something from somebody does not mean they're right. Right. You know how I say that? Paul says in the last days, he has this line where he says, "In the last days, people will be learning, but never coming to a knowledge of the truth." Yeah. Yeah. So he distinguishes between truthfulness and learning. Like they're not the same thing. I can learn from people I vehemently disagree with. Like, I have a debate in one of my classes, Nijay, should we be reading Adolf Hitler's Mind Conf, or should we burn it, like should we get rid of the book, or should we read it? And we have a huge debate. It's a fun conversation. And in the end, I argue that actually the only way to defeat the ideas of Hitler is you've got to actually know him. Yeah. You can't undo the works of your enemies unless you're aware of them. I can sit and learn from Mind Conf and spend my life trying to defeat his ideas. I'm not agreeing with the ideas. I'm just learning what he's saying. That's one. Number two, I think we have to go back to our understanding of the characteristics of God. And when I say that, what I mean is I'm struck in the Bible how many times we have clear descriptions of God creating space for his enemies. Genesis 3, we have this awesome good garden, and out of nowhere comes this snake, the serpent. Now, somebody could say, why didn't God at that moment just destroy the snake? We wouldn't be in this mess at all. We wouldn't, all the sin and evil injustice in the world, that would have never happened. And what we find is that God is allegedly completely comfortable allowing an evil snake to be in his good garden. Could God have destroyed it? Absolutely could have. And someone would say, well, why didn't He? Well, here's the reason why. Because true strength makes space for enemies. Had God just destroyed the serpent, then people would be saying, oh, God doesn't create space for people that are different and disagree with them and He's just a closed-minded, arrogant fool. No, it actually takes strength, deep strength to make space for your enemies. And in the Bible, God even provides for people that are in rebellion against Him. I think we've got to reappropriate that God is sustaining our enemies and for a purpose. Thirdly, is to the question of how can I learn from my enemies. I do not think that it is wise for us to think that it's our job to bend everything we think to what our enemies have to say. But I will say this, there is a component of being engaged with our enemies that actually is missiological. It's mission. And the story that I tell in the book is of Daryl Davis, very well-known, there's a really well-known TED Talk of Daryl Davis, who's a black man who decided to begin to be friend KKK members. And he tells the story of befriending them and year after year after year, just choosing to be in their life. And as he gives us TED Talk, he opens this closet that's filled with KKK robes of people who left behind their evil because they had a friendship with a black man. I think, Nijie, if we don't befriend enemies, we are merely just lubricating their path to hell. Like there is an element of befriending and what did God do with us? While you were enemies of God, He died for you. What does God do with His enemies in the Bible? He adopts them. Thank God, God did not destroy us while we were enemies. And if God does that for us, good Lord, do we have to do it for others? Yeah, that's powerful. And I think that's really the strength of this book is we're living this cultural moment of a lot of fear, a lot of isolation, whether it's post-pandemic, whether it's social media, whether it's work from home, all of that. There's all good reasons why we work from home, why we're on social media. But what I love about this book is it is pointing to something that is an unintended consequence of some of the things that have happened over the last 20, 25 years. The unintended consequence, isolation, I'm on this committee where I'm with 20 people of different ages, different parts of the country, different political views, different theological views. And we get together and we spend a couple of weeks together every year and it reminds me because I don't live near my work colleagues from work. So it reminds me of how difficult it is to get along with people who think differently. However, the more time I spend with these people, number one, the more I love them and know them. Number two, the more I can sympathize or empathize with their views even though I don't agree with them. And so I think part of what teachableness, we're kind of, last words here, part teachableness I think is rehumanizing the other in a culture where it's easy to dehumanize the other. Yeah, that's right. That's right. You're no fool to first century Christianity and what the early church looked like. In one of my classes, I have our students look at some of the ways in which the Roman Empire was deeply threatened by this early Christian community. They were really kind of freaked out by them for a variety of reasons. But it's funny that they were so scared of this fledgling little community of people that claim Jesus was the Messiah. Why were they so afraid? Rodney Stark, who was a Baylor says that 75% of the early Christian community was comprised of slaves and women. And there's a reason why. It was comprised of people that in the natural world had no value and they found an identity in the church. And when you and I read Paul's letter, 1 Timothy 3, when he says, "I want women to learn in quiet submission." Most of my students, when I read that to them, I want women to learn in quiet submission. They hear like the sexist, machismo kind of mean guy. It's a great teaching moment because we fail often to recognize that he is writing to and about women who were not afforded formal educations, who were not allowed to learn. And he is not oppressing women. He's liberating women. He's commanding them to learn. And Nijie, I think that's why the Roman Empire is so darn threatened by this community. Because these Christians gave the ladies the books and they let them read and they wanted them to read. And I think the earliest Christian community was not just a movement of people to believe that Jesus was the Messiah. He was the most revolutionary learning community the world has ever seen. And if Christians can once again learn how to learn like they did, I think we will find that Rome will equally be threatened today by a community of learners who know not just the info, they know how to think. And we need the spirit to teach us how to think and use our brains because the robots are taken over, Nijie. And we need people that know how to use the gray matter that God has given to them. Love that. Now that I think about it, we think of humility as the opposite of confidence or pride. And I think actually the ability to have humility in conversation comes from a certain confidence in God and in what we know to be true of God. So encourage people to pick up this book, A Teachable Spirit from Zondervan Reflective, Virtue of Learning, from Strangers, Enemies, and absolutely anyone. I love that posture, absolutely anyone. As you go about your day, open your heart up to learning and it's not just book learning. It's learning people. Yep, that's right. It's learning from God. So check out this book. This is going to keep you busy until slow theology comes out the book. So check it out. Thank you, AJ, for writing it. And we'll be back with more Holy Spirit next time.