Christian Thinker: Eugene Peterson
In this episode, Dr. Darrell Bock kicks off a new series called, “Christian Thinkers,” where he talks with Winn Collier about the extraordinary Eugene Peterson, focusing on how his life and pivotal works revitalized pastors and the Church.
Timecodes
- 01:29
- Collier reflects on how he was introduced to Peterson
- 04:44
- Story behind the Bible translation, “The Message”
- 08:27
- How “The Message” influenced ministry and pastoral practices
- 12:16
- Challenging themes readers and pastors may encounter
- 17:40
- Peterson’s pastoral reputation
- 23:18
- Peterson’s approach to “cultural wars”
- 26:49
- Ways Peterson taught others to pray
Resources
Books by Eugene Peterson: Working The Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity, Spiritual Theology Series, The Jesus Way: A Conversation on the Ways that Jesus is the Way
Book by Winn Collier: A Burning in My Bones
Transcript
Darrell Bock:
Welcome to the table. We discuss issues of God and culture. I'm Darrell Bock, Executive Director for Cultural Engagement at the Hendricks Center at Dallas Theological Seminary. And our topic today introduces a new series that we're going to be doing on occasion, called Christian Thinkers. And, my guest is Winn Collier, who directs the Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. Is that correct?
Winn Collier:
That's right.
Darrell Bock:
And, where exactly is Holland located in Michigan?
Winn Collier:
So, we're right on Lake Michigan, we're about 40 minutes west of Grand Rapids.
Darrell Bock:
Okay. And, you've just started there, right? You said last August was your starting point. So, you're new in the role.
Winn Collier:
That's right. We moved from Charlottesville, Virginia, where I was a pastor. And, new folks to Michigan.
Darrell Bock:
So, was that at All Souls in Charlottesville? Is that where you were at?
Winn Collier:
That's right.
Darrell Bock:
Okay. So, how does a nice guy like you get into a gig that involves being focused on one person and his ministry, Eugene Peterson?
Winn Collier:
Well, it started back in 2000 when I was a bi-vocational pastor in Denver, Colorado, and, there was a struggling church, and I was a newer pastor, fresh out of Dallas Seminary. And one day, after Sunday, one of the elders of the church came up to me and said, "Winn, I have a book and I think that you'll enjoy it." And, he handed me a copy of Eugene's "Working The Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity.” And I realized later, what he meant was, "Winn, I think you need this." And I went home that afternoon, and I was only paragraphs in, and my heart was smitten because I began to get language for a kind of vision of pastoral life, and conviction that I think my soul longed for, but I didn't have a language for it.
Winn Collier:
And, I started writing him letters. He became a pastor to me through letters. And in 2016, when I was visiting he and Jan, I was going back home and thinking about how someone was going to write his story, and the day was drawing near when that was probably going to happen. And so, I started thinking about how I hoped that story would tell his life, and we began talking about it. At first, he hated the idea. But we just kept talking, and eventually I ended up doing it. So, it was really just born out of my own questions, and yearning, and deep love and affection for Eugene.
Darrell Bock:
Would it be fair to call him kind of a pastor's pastor, in terms of the way in which he approached discussions on ministry, and the life of the pastor in the local church?
Winn Collier:
I mean, absolutely. I really don't think it's hyperbole to say that, probably no American pastor of the last 75 years, at least, was more influential directly to pastors. And, I was recently working with a church that was going through transition, and was interviewing potential new pastors. And, it was remarkable. I would say 85 to 90% of the pastors who sent in resumes, applications, somewhere referenced Eugene. That was just really stunning to me.
Darrell Bock:
Well, of course, most people know him because of the work that he did in Bible translation or Bible paraphrase, depending on how you want to break it down. I tell people there are two ways to render scripture: one is a translation where you're really, solely concerned with rendering the original language, and the other is more a paraphrase where you're trying to bring out the force, and the significance of what is being said. They're both very legitimate ways to render the word of God. And, The Message was certainly a significant piece of work that he did, that I'm sure many, many Christians are familiar with. Do you know the story of how that came to be?
Winn Collier:
Yeah. And I think the story is actually really important. He didn't set out to write a paraphrase, or a translation of scripture for America. That wasn't his goal. Eugene always said that theology, to be true theology, had to always be relational because it's always tied to the Trinity. So, it began in the 70s when he was a Pastor in Bel Air, Maryland. And there was a lot of cultural fear, a lot of racial ethnic tensions in Baltimore, a lot of flight out of Baltimore, a lot of his parishioners were buying guns, he realized a lot of his neighbors were building bomb shelters, and he was really concerned. This wasn't a Christian posture.
Winn Collier:
And so he said, "We need to study Galatians because Galatians is a book of freedom, and freedom sets us free from fear." So, he organized a Sunday School class. There were 11 or 12 of them sitting around a six-foot table, Styrofoam cups of coffee, and he opened up Galatians. These electric words that he thought was going to just be like dynamite. And he said, "The first three to four weeks people's eyes were glazing over." No one saw what he was seeing in Galatians. No one was making the connections. He said, "I got to do something about this. Why aren't they hearing the power of this language?"
Winn Collier:
So for the next week, he took the next section of Galatians and he just paraphrased it. And, he paraphrased it for those particular 12 people, and Xerox copied that section of Galatians, the next Sunday passed them out. And he said, "Nobody touched their coffee." The minute they began reading, everybody was locked in. And he thought, "I'm on to something." And so, he did that for the rest of the study of Galatians.
Winn Collier:
Eventually he wrote his book, Traveling Lights, which is his two or three Galatians. And at the beginning of each section, he put his little translation for that section that that chapter would be about. A publisher found that book. I don't know what he thought of the actual texts, but he loved the translation. And he cut it out, and pasted it all in a Manila folder, and spent the next month carrying it around with him, meditating on this. Ended up giving Eugene a call and said, "Hey, would you be interested in doing this with the rest of the Bible?" It's a long story as to how that ended up happening. But Eugene, when he was first writing The Message, he was doing that not for a general public; he was doing that for particular people that he knew their names, and knew their struggles, and stories. And, he said he was actually translating the scripture into Hartford County, Maryland. It was that specific.
Darrell Bock:
So this is the relational dimension, of course, that you alluded to earlier, that relationship drives ministry. I find it intriguing that Galatians becomes a significant book. Of course, anyone who knows the story of the Reformation and Martin Luther, knows that Galatians was a very important book, And really, in many ways, launching the Reformation. So, there's an interesting history there. You said he gave you a language to understand the ministry that pastors are engaged in. Can you unpack that a little bit? What is it that he put his finger on that you went, "Ooh, man, I need to pay attention to that"?
Winn Collier:
I think for me, I did not realize how much my understanding of the pastoral life had been overtaken by modern American leadership techniques, corporate mindset. Always certainly finding some Bible verses to attach to it, to make it seem appropriate. But I just hadn't seen how desperate I was for a pastoral life that was actually about God. And, it struck me that I had spent a lot of time talking about God, using God language, desiring, I think, some good God things, but not really having God as the center character in the story. There were other elements, too. He opened me to a world of literature, and poetry, and theological voices that I hadn't been listening to. And, all of it just flowed together in a life that felt true, and human, and holy, all at the same time.
Darrell Bock:
Interesting. Not to get us deflected too much, but I see that you have a PhD from the University of Virginia, and you focused on the relationship between religion and literary fiction. So, that sounds like an offshoot of what you're talking about here. Talk a little bit about what it means for a pastor to be connected. And, I'm going to say it this way, and you can reframe it if I'm off, but being connected to what's going on around them a little bit, being engaged with the way in which people are trying to come to grips with life, which I'm assuming is part of what is the attraction to putting together religion and literary fiction.
Winn Collier:
Sure. Yeah. Well, even specifically, my research topic owes some something of indebtedness to Eugene too, because I did it specifically on Wendell Berry's fiction. And, I was intrigued by Eugene's assertion that whenever he read Wendell, if he inserted a church for farm, and pastor for farmer, it almost always worked. The story told a very true and biblical picture of what it looks like to be in God's world.
Winn Collier:
And I think Eugene, just in a really basic level, just believed that the incarnation tells us that, to become more like God is to become more reared in this world, is to become more human, is to become more aware, more engaged, more open, more curious. And, literature can really help us do that. It seems to me as I'm reading, it's only a modern phenomenon that we separate all these types of learning. And, there's just an ease of flow, back and forth, with our neighbors, with people that we're in the diner with on Tuesday morning, and worship on Sunday morning, and the questions that these things are fueled by, and the stories that we read, the Paris Review or at Wendell Berry, and the poetry that we read. And, how all these things just come together, and that God is telling us something in the midst of all of that.
Darrell Bock:
So, let's unpack that a little bit. If you were to articulate what you think are some of the major themes that Eugene Peterson challenged people with, I'll say it that way, and challenged pastors with, what would you say some of those themes would be?
Winn Collier:
Well, they all come back to that one central fact of God. And, a lot of times I feel like I should have a more clever way to say this, but I really don't. He thought that one of the primary jobs of a pastor was to help people learn how to pray. And, that didn't necessarily mean the techniques of prayer. It meant a life of attention to God. Eugene said that, "A pastor was someone who stood in the midst of a community, and more than any other words, said one thing: God. Pointed one direction: God."
Winn Collier:
One of the times on one of the trips I took up the Bel Air, Maryland, to his former parish at Christ Our King, and I found a bunch of tapes from his years there at Christ Our King, and it was the entire service, it wasn't just the sermon. And these tapes I had found, I didn't even have a tape player anymore. And, I had an old plugin Radio Shack tape player that was on its last leg, whirring and errrr, and I was plugging it into the cigarette lighter in my 2004 Honda Pilot, which makes an awful amount of racket. And, I was driving between Charlottesville, Virginia, and Washington, DC, which is not an enjoyable drive. And, traffic is crazy, and all this noise. And then, I'm sticking in this tape, and this tape is crunchy, and the label is peeling off, and the recording is awful. Who knows what kind of mics they had back then? And it was 20, 30 years old at this point. Everything about this was the opposite of good sound design, and good experience.
Winn Collier:
All the things that we're taught we are supposed to have, if we're going to have a genuine encounter with God in our modern culture, and be relevant, all this sort of thing. And I plugged this in, and there's the whirring noise, and the sound of traffic, and my clunky car. And I hear Eugene's raspy voice, that he said those four words at the beginning of almost every service at Christ Our King. He said, "Let us worship God." And in the moment, I heard those words. I'm sitting here in my Honda Pilot, and I'm tearing up. And, I think it's because those words were resonant with his life. That I had encountered this man in person, and in his writings, and in his life, and his friendships enough to know that those words carried weight, and he meant it. And, there's a lot we can unpack from there. But I really think that those four words, and what I encountered in him, is at the core of what his challenge is to us.
Darrell Bock:
And, what strikes me about the way you've told that story is, we're worshiping God in the midst of the noisiness, and distraction of life. I mean, that's kind of the point, is to prepare people to know how to negotiate life as it is, with God as He is.
Winn Collier:
That's exactly right. In fact, his sort of Magnum Opus was his five-volume Spiritual Theology. And he said, "To call something spiritual theology is simply to insist that everything that's in the scriptures can be lived." And, it's one of the reasons that he loved Barth. He studied Barth his entire life. But the older he got, it was actually very few of the particulars of what Barth actually taught that compelled him. It was actually his posture toward God, in that he was as concerned about getting the truth lived, as he was about getting the truth right. And that was Eugene's conviction, is that it's got to be lived.
Darrell Bock:
And so, again, just to bring out a theme that you mentioned early on. The relational dimension of what's going on is a driving force for understanding what's going on. I often say, about engagement, that the challenge that the Christian faces, because we're aliens in a strange land, and were designed to be counterculture, and all the things that you normally hear. The challenge is, particularly for people who are Bible believing, who are very conservative, is that we're very focused on getting things right. But that means that we may not pay enough attention to the relational dimension of what it means to be engaged with somebody. And, you can be right about what it is that you're thinking about. But, if you're relationally off and wrong, you're still wrong. And, and it strikes me that getting that balance right, reflecting the character of God, the concern of God, the love of God, even in the midst of the pursuit of justice, and righteousness, and orthodoxy, and whatever other terms you want to put around it, is actually a very important part of the portrait.
Darrell Bock:
And the thing that strikes me about Eugene Peterson, in the things that he's known for, is this kind of relational, pastoral dimension. That's why I earlier said, he's a pastor's pastor, because the heart of what he was about clearly comes through, even in the way he handled passages in The Message. There's this dimension, which sometimes people complain about. And it's fun being a New Testament person who has done translation, watching people react to something that someone else does with the text. And, oftentimes, you'd get a pulse to the translation, to his translation, that you wouldn't get in a normal rendering. But that was after something related to the heart. In other words, what was the spirit behind these words that we're reading, et cetera. And I think in some ways, that's the secret sauce of The Message. Am I reading him right? Am I reading The Message right, in that sense?
Winn Collier:
Yeah. I think you are. I mean, he talked a whole lot about, for Christians, the necessity of ways and means. And, it's exactly what you're talking about. His book, The Jesus Way, is all about that. When we say Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life, this idea of The Way is the entire path. It's actually the way that he walked. And, that we cannot separate an abstract ideal from the posture with which we carry that.
Winn Collier:
And so, I think it's why he saw a lot of a lack of congruity between things that are professed, and then attitudes that are carried, postures towards neighbors. And that sometimes what we really believe is revealed in the way that we do it. And certainly, as he's translating The Message, and as an aside I would say, he never actually was very comfortable with The Message as a pulpit Bible. He wasn't trying to say that this was the ultimate and final translation that Christians should be using. It was very much what you're saying. It was attempting to allow a scripture to be heard anew and again, to land in the resonant language of someone's heart and soul. And, there's certainly a lot of debate to be had about particular places where he translated one way or the other. But, most of those questions do miss what he was actually doing, which is more what you're highlighting.
Darrell Bock:
Yeah. I'm very familiar with the story of the Living Bible. I did work on the Living Bible, and in Luke, and Acts when they were moving it from more of a paraphrase, to more of a translation. And, so I heard the story about, how can a tailor put together the Living Bible, as a paraphrase? It's a very similar story, actually, to Peterson's story, with The Message. All he was trying to do was to render the Bible in a way that would enhance family devotions. And so, here's this man commuting from a suburb of Chicago into the city, and he's got this time on the subway to himself from day to day. And, what he's doing is he's creating this paraphrase. Never, ever intending, as you suggested also with The Message, that it replace a pulpit Bible.
Darrell Bock:
But to understand that what a paraphrase is designed to do and to be, is to help people hear the word of God afresh, and to do it in a way that might capture their attention for the direction of what the text is doing, to capture a heart and a soul, not just the mind. And in the midst of doing that, pull people into really seeing what the Word of God is after. That strikes me as being important in the hustle and bustle of life, and in the distractions that life produces. I find myself wanting to ask, and you've alluded to this, so I'd love to hear your development of it. And that is, there's a sense in which I'm hearing a pastor looking at a set of parishioners that he's dealing with, who he feels are struggling with how to engage, how to reflect their Christian life in the midst of a challenging world. And, they're reacting out of fear, they're nervous. And so, and he wants to come along with a pastor's heart and say, "You don't have to fear. You don't have to be so nervous."
Darrell Bock:
So my question is, a terrible way of working up to it, but how would he have viewed what we often call the culture wars, and the way in which we approach engagement in a world that is pushing against much of what we believe?
Winn Collier:
Well, he pastored during some of the early stages of those cultural wars, and we can get a really good picture. He mostly avoided them. Sometimes, I think some people who didn't know him, perceive that to be an act of cowardice. But it wasn't. It was, he distrusted the way. Well, on one hand, I think he did believe that things changed more in the small conversations, and moved out from there, than they did in the large trumpet environments. In other ways, at times he would just say, "That's what he had to give, that's how he was to engage."
Winn Collier:
So for instance, he was often asked to sign these large declarations, a hundred evangelical leaders, or Christian thinkers, would issue some statement that was going to get published in a magazine, or something. And he would get asked inevitably to sign. And, he never did. There were times where he even agreed with it, and he wouldn't sign it. And his reason was, "I'm a pastor, and I don't make broad general statements to an unknown public. I feel called to pastor particular people that I know."
Winn Collier:
Again, I don't think that's necessarily to say that those things should never happen. But it is to say that Eugene felt he had a particular role, and it was as pastor. And, he was also more comfortable with ambiguity than a lot of times we are. And, he didn't have overly idealistic pictures of what a church looked like, as far as who makes it up. He always expected to find sinners and strugglers. And he thought that sometimes, in our rush to pursue a righteous ideal, we might run roughshod over the actual stories and people that God is busy healing. And so, he didn't participate in what we call "cultural wars."
Darrell Bock:
Okay. So, we've said that God was at the center of what he was doing, that there was a strong relational element that he was very conscious of the local nature of ministry, ministry to a particular people. Any other core principles you can think of, that he wanted to teach people how to pray? And, by the way, I meant to say this at the time, and you just reminded me as we're summarizing. A lot of people think when they pray, that what they pray is what I call their lists, Aunt Bessie, and Uncle Fred, and that kind of thing. And yet, what I'm hearing from you is, if I can say it this way, a listening for God in the midst of prayer. Am I reading that right? Is that part of the theme of getting prayer, teaching people how to pray?
Winn Collier:
Yeah. I'm going to guess he was probably asked the question of, "How do you pray?", more than any other question he was asked. People would ask, "How do you pray?" And, he was often reticent to talk too much on specifics, because he feared that people would just try to replicate his discipline. And I love how, oftentimes, when someone would ask, "How do I learn how to pray?" His question would often be, "Well, tell me what you love." And his belief was that, as we learn to pay more and more attention to the way God has put desire and longing into our heart, that we bring what we love to God, and God begins to transform that into a life of prayer.
Winn Collier:
And so, one of my favorite definitions he has of prayer is really simple. It just says, "Prayer is a life lived at attention to God." And that certainly involves words, and talking to God. But it involves quiet and listening. It involves, in this conversation right now. How is God present in this conversation that we're having? And, how can I be attentive to God here? It's a full orbed expression of God being present in each and every moment in breath.
Darrell Bock:
So again, we're back to kind of where we started, which is that the whole relational dimension that undergirds what it means to walk with God. I find it interesting that you use the phrase, The Way. Of course, this is the way that Acts describes the early Christian movement. It's called The Way. The term Christian is introduced as well, but that was a designation coming from outsiders about those who believed in Christ. Luke describes the faith as, "The Way". And, it is. It's thinking about life lived on a different plane, if I can say it that way. And, in thinking about life lived with a presence beyond our own, that leads and guides, it’s life lived in touch with the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, and who directs us, and gives us a sense of our connection to God. And, you sense that in what it is that Eugene was bringing to the conversation. I love the title of the authorized biography that you have, A Burning In My Bones. Describe why that was the title of the book.
Winn Collier:
Well, it's taken from his rendering of words in Jeremiah. And, Jeremiah was a prophet that was really important to Eugene. He wrote a lot about Jeremiah, and it seemed to me that those words really reflected Eugene's own heart, longing for God, longing for a practice of this prayerful life we're talking about, which is a life of attention to God. And yet, that it's very alive. It's very invigorated. It's very rooted in this world. And it seemed to me like that really captured much of what I encountered and experienced in Eugene.
Darrell Bock:
I'm just sitting here thinking about this, and when I hear the word burning, and I think about the Bible, the first thing that I think of is the burning bush, where God is present with Moses, and gets Moses's attention. And then, when you think about a Burning In My Bones, that burning has moved from the outside, if you will, to the inside, which of course is the movement of the Bible. The movement of the Bible is that God has a covenant that he makes with the people. He gives them laws, et cetera. But what we come to see is that, that isn't a good enough way to walk with God. God has got to do work from the inside out. And so, that burning comes to the inside. And, my sense is that part of what Eugene was about, was making sure that people had a sense of what it meant to be indwelt by God, and to draw on that. Fair?
Winn Collier:
Very fair. Yeah.
Darrell Bock:
Winn, I want to thank you for giving us some of your time to talk about Eugene, and what he represents. Before we wrap up, let me ask you one more question. Tell us a little about the center there, and what it's designed to do.
Winn Collier:
Well, there were three groups of people that always found their way to Eugene. One was pastors, we've talked a lot about that. The second was creatives, so writers, musicians, potters, painters, they were always inviting Eugene into their circles. There was something about the vision Eugene had of the Christian life that made sense to them, and made their work noble. And then, there's this third group that I would just think of as hopeful, often befuddled, Christians trying to be faithful, and found in Eugene a witness to God in a way that felt true and human. And so, we hope to continue conversations with all three of those groups. So, we've started two doctor of ministry programs. One is called Holy Presence, Eugene Peterson and the Pastoral Imagination. One is called The Sacred Art Of Writing. We're starting circles of friendship for pastors, and conversations between theologians and pastors, and artists and writers, and number of other efforts like that. So, we're just trying to bear witness to God's presence in the world, in a way that's following in the vein that Eugene set out for us.
Darrell Bock:
And, is The Center new? I mean, was it created with you're coming to the seminary?
Winn Collier:
That's right. It's brand new. Yeah. We're just getting started.
Darrell Bock:
Oh, wow. Well, I have “center” experience, so my thoughts and prayers are with you.
Winn Collier:
Send me your wisdom.
Darrell Bock:
Yeah. Well, great. Thank you for spending time with us, and sharing a little bit. This has just been a snippet, but a little bit about Eugene Peterson, and his heart. And, I think it's appropriate that the first installment of Christian Thinkers involves someone who is deeply committed pastorally to the heart of the church, and to the heart of a walk with God. I just think that's a great fit for us. So, thank you for helping us launch the series. Winn, we wish you all the best there in Michigan, as you work with The Center, and all the challenges that come there in. And, I think I know what that means. And, we really do appreciate you giving us your time.
Winn Collier:
Well, thank you for inviting me. It's been a real joy to chat with you.
Darrell Bock:
Yeah. And, we thank you for joining us on the table today. Please do subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app, leave a review. This helps people to discover who we are, and learn a little bit more about The Table. And we hope you'll join us next time, when we discuss issues of God and culture. We just wish you a blessed day.
About the Contributors
Darrell L. Bock
Dr. Bock has earned recognition as a Humboldt Scholar (Tübingen University in Germany), is the author of over 40 books, including well-regarded commentaries on Luke and Acts and studies of the historical Jesus, and work in cultural engagement as host of the seminary’s Table Podcasts. He was president of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) from 2000–2001, served as a consulting editor for Christianity Today, and serves on the boards of Wheaton College and Chosen People Ministries. His articles appear in leading publications. He is often an expert for the media on NT issues. Dr. Bock has been a New York Times best-selling author in nonfiction and is elder emeritus at Trinity Fellowship Church in Dallas. When traveling overseas, he will tune into the current game involving his favorite teams from Houston—live—even in the wee hours of the morning. Married for over 40 years to Sally, he is a proud father of two daughters and a son and is also a grandfather.
Winn Collier
Winn Collier, a pastor for 26 years, was the founding pastor of All Souls in Charlottesville, Virginia. Winn now serves as Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology & Christian Imagination and director of the Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. Winn has a PhD in religion and fiction from the University of Virginia and is the author of multiple books, including “Love Big, Be Well: Letters to a Smalltown Church” and “A Burning in My Bones,” the biography of Eugene Peterson.