Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
A Theology of the Compost Pile

A Theology of the Compost Pile

Last updated on: January 11, 2024 at 2:48 pm by Vance Morgan

0 Comments

A Theology of the Compost Pile 2024-01-11T14:48:17-04:00 Vance Morgan

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

In his 2014 book The Bible Tells Me So . . .” and The Sin of Certainty published in 2016, Pete Enns argues that interpreting the Bible should start with completely scrapping the idea that the Bible is a divinely inspired rule book for how to live a life pleasing to God, a rule book that rises above the fray of time, culture, and context.

I was raised to believe that the Bible is inerrant, infallible, non-contradictory, and literally true—Enns was raised within that same interpretive framework. Yet, as he argues with solid scholarship and frequent humor, that is not at all the book that we actually encounter when we read the Bible with fresh eyes. Despite the tendency of many Christians to treat their sacred text as an authoritative rule-book for a God-pleasing life, a text that is both perfect and unchanging as the product of divine dictation to human scribes, in fact—as William James once wrote— “The trail of the human serpent is over everything” in the Bible.

And this should not surprise us. The central, defining belief of Christians is that God became a human being, embedded in time, space, context, and culture as all human beings are. Why would we not expect that God’s communication to us through scripture would also be “incarnational,” embedded in various times and places? As Enns writes,

No one just “follows” the Bible. We interpret it as people with a past and present . . . None of us rises above our place in the human drama and grasps God with pure clarity, without our own baggage coming along for the ride . . . God freely and lovingly entered the human drama uniquely in one member of the human race.

Elsewhere Enns writes that

That is how Christians believe God showed up—in-fleshed in humility, in culture, in the human story, a peasant who fit right into the day-to-day world of the first century and then suffered the humiliation of execution. No entourage, no special treatment, no red carpet, no clout among the power brokers. If Christians are right and this is the ultimate way God showed up, we shouldn’t expect anything else from the Bible . . . The Bible looks the way it does because like Jesus, when God shows up, it’s in the thick of things.

As you might expect, Enns is a rock-star for some Christians and a heretic for others.

If reading theology, even that which is well-written and intended for the intelligent lay person, is not your thing, then I strongly recommend checking out the podcast “The Bible for Normal People” that Peter Enns does with fellow theologian Jared Byas (who was Peter Enns’ student in seminary). In a recent episode titled “How to Read the Bible Now that We’ve Ruined It,” Enns and Byas discuss various metaphors that might be helpful concerning how one might think of and approach reading the Bible once one is convinced that it is neither inerrant nor intended as an infallible and timeless guide for life. The most provocative metaphor was that we might want to image the Bible as a compost pile.

https://thebiblefornormalpeople.com/episode-221-pete-enns-jared-byas-how-to-read-the-bible-now-that-weve-ruined-it/

I am not a composter, but I know enough about compost to know that this metaphor is guaranteed to be offensive to many Christians. “The Bible is garbage??? Get the F out of here!” is likely to be the response from many. But think about it. As is the case with a compost pile, the Bible is not intended to be the primary focus of a person of Christian faith’s attention. Rather, the Bible is what nurtures and supports growth of all sorts of things. To put it in the terms of logic, just as a compost pile is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for growth in the garden, so the Bible is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a healthy and growing faith. Each is necessary for the growth related to it, but neither is enough on its own to sustain that growth.

Just as lots of things get thrown together in a compost pile, the Bible contains material that often seems randomly related at best. The Bible is not a “book” so much as a library of dozens of books written over a number of centuries within a vast array of contexts and cultures. Just try finding a common thread between Ruth and Revelation, for instance, or between Song of Solomon and James. Many Christians insist on finding a seamless message threading its way throughout the library of books—such efforts only are successful if one ignores some passages, raises others to prime importance, and forces a Procrustean straitjacket on whatever doesn’t seem to fit.

At the inaugural Evolving Faith conference in 2018, Jeff Chu—the founder of Evolving Faith along with the late Rachel Held Evans and Sarah Bessey—gave a talk called “The Theology of the Compost,” which can also be heard on the Evolving Faith podcast

https://evolvingfaith.com/podcast/season-1/episode-3

In his first year at Princeton Theological Seminar, Chu was assigned to work at the Farminary, “which is 21 acres where we dig in the dirt and introverts don’t have to talk and it still counts as class.” And his favorite part of the Farminary is the compost pile. He says that

I didn’t know much about compost before. But now I know that it preaches a hundred Sundays of sermons about death becoming new life, about God’s abundance, about how these things that seem useless—moldy fruit, onion skins, eggshells, coffee grounds—these become rich soil . . . And the more time I spend at the compost pile, the more I ask, Isn’t the story of compost really just the story of God? Turning fear to courage, sorrow to joy, death to life.

What might a theology of compost teach us about God and about ourselves? According to Chu, many things including the following:

A robust theology of the compost reminds us that death and the things of death, our sin, our suffering, the ways we hurt each other, the ways we harm ourselves— These things are never the end of God’s story.
A robust theology of the compost reminds us that we are still in the process of becoming, and God has written redemption into the story of creation itself.
A robust theology of the compost reminds us that God has empowered us to turn what is ugly and festering and dying into what is lovely and beautiful and life-giving.
A robust theology of the compost testifies to the fact that we can’t do this alone, but we need others, because a single worm can’t do very much but in community they have such tremendous power.
A robust theology of the compost testifies that those who have been told by society that we are worthless can act in the confidence of the knowledge that they are worthy.
And a robust theology of the compost testifies that God urges those of us who have been shamed not to shame, but instead to love. Because in our acts of love, we participate in preparing the soil in which God’s reign of love and justice can take root.

Chu is from a Reformed Presbyterian tradition and notes that John Calvin, who is the hero of the Reformed tradition, frequently referred to human beings as “but rottenness and a worm”; I’m reminded of a line from a hymn in my Baptist tradition that asked “Would He devote that sacred head for such a worm as I?”

But Calvin and the hymn writer (and Paul in his letters) were wrong about worms. As Chu notes, “Worms can be magic. Worms can be engines of redemption. Worms devour things of death and poop out life. And God gave their poop that power.” There is nothing that is too lowly or humble that God cannot use it. That includes you and me. And compost piles.

Previous Post

January 9, 2024

This I Believe--and that's not a good thing

Next Post

January 14, 2024 How Solitude Can Lead to God

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"Mary did have a choice. And she was able to make it before the Holy ..."

madalyn baumstark

Mary Got To Choose

"i cannot read beyond your recommendations for the books since i like to have a ..."

madalyn baumstark

A Doubting Faith

"AI will never be able to utter with honesty, feeling, or humility, the greeting: "Namaste".It ..."

madalyn baumstark

AI and Human Dignity

"They do. I'm sure you could find discussions of the same topic from any of ..."

Vance Morgan

AI and the Life of Faith

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abortion Advent AI Angels Artificial intelligence atheism attention baptism Baptists beauty belief Benedictines Bible bicycling Big Bird books Bovina Camaldoli hermitage Canada Catholicism cats certainty change Christianity Christmas Collegeville Covid-19 creativity Development of Western Civilization dogs doubt Easter Enneagram Epiphany Episcopal ethics Eucharist evil extroverts Facebook faith family fear flowers forgiveness freedom friends God goodness grace happiness heaven hell history Holy Spirit Holy Week hope human nature humility humor idolatry incarnation introverts irreverence Islam Jeanne Jesus Joe Biden joy Judaism justice Kamala Harris knowledge Lent listen literature liturgy love Marsue Memorial Day miracles movies music mystery mythology NPR Old Testament optimism paradox peace Penguins philosophy piano podcast politics power prayer Protestantism Providence College Religion Rhode Island sabbatical sacrament science seeing silence Simone Weil Socrates soul sports St. John's College stories suffering tattoo teaching technology television theology thinking time tolerance transcendence travel trees trust truth Uncategorized Vermont wisdom wonder writing

Select a Month May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz