Unclean Quotes

“When Jesus talks about conflict with “principalities and powers,” he’s talking about conflict with legal and political authorities.”
― Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

“This is how worship is connected to our ability to love. When we give our ultimate allegiance to any of the principalities and powers, large or small, we find ourselves perennially at war with anyone who places these things at risk. Idolatry breeds perpetual vigilance and violence.”
― Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

“Grace comes to us in the suffering of sin. There is a sermon in the damage we have done to ourselves and to others. Pain becomes the doorway to salvation, and our tears are a bridge for the awful grace of God.”
― Richard Beck, Trains, Jesus, and Murder: The Gospel according to Johnny Cash

“we know that America is a culture driven by fear. And when you explore the roots of that fear you find that they are rooted in concerns about scarcity. Fears that undermine our collective ability to create a fair and hospitable social contract. Fearing that jobs and opportunities are scarce we fret about immigration, fearing that the immigrant will take a job or opportunity away from us. Fearing that money is scarce we fret about wasteful government spending, especially spending upon those we consider to be undeserving. And fearing that safety is scarce we demand that walls be built along our borders and that our military police the entire world for threats. Just turn on cable TV and you’ll see the whole dynamic play out on a nightly basis. Fears rooted in a culture of scarcity undermine our ability to love each other.”
― Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

“these are the sorts of experiences in life that make us feel most vulnerable: Standing over my children while they are sleeping. Acknowledging how much I love my husband/ wife. Knowing how good I’ve got it. Loving my job. Spending time with my parents. Getting engaged. Going into remission. Having a baby. Being happy. Falling in love.[ 2] Joy and a fear of loss go hand in hand.”
― Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

“The trouble with the Devil is that we see him in the faces of those we hate, justifying our violence toward them.”
― Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

“It’s the same problem we struggle with when it comes to marginalizing our privilege, power, or position as we focus on the voices and concerns of those who have been marginalized and oppressed. Even our social justice efforts become contaminated by our desire to be the center of attention as we fail to place weaker and less powerful voices at the center of our concerns.”
― Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

“The kingdom of God is the hard, intimate, and sweaty work of simply getting along with people.”
― Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

“In short, the Lord's Supper was the realization of new social and political arrangements, the embodiment of the social leveling seen in Jesus' ministry, most profoundly in his acts of table fellowship. Importantly, as we have seen, these new social arrangements could only be achieved if the emotions of social stratification were confronted, eliminated, or reinterpreted. In his body metaphor, Paul dramatically reframes these heretical emotions, the emotions of contempt, disgust, honor, and social presentability. Rather, than signaling exclusion and division - the natural expulsive impulse inherent in these emotions - Paul suggests that these emotions should signal just the opposite in the Kingdom of God: honor, care, and embrace.”
― Richard Beck, Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

“As Greg Boyd argues in his book God at War, when doubting and disenchanted Christians lose touch with the warfare worldview of the Bible, we begin to treat the suffering of the world like it’s a logical puzzle to be solved rather than a reality to be resisted.[1] And when we treat suffering as an intellectual problem, all that happens is that our doubts and questions pile up. Our mind starts running in a circle, chasing its own tail.”
― Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

“In sum, when Paul writes in Ephesians 6 that our battle is against the principalities and powers, he’s not just talking about demon possession, he’s also talking about our struggle with political powers.”
― Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

“The Harrowing of Hell is so important to the Eastern Orthodox Church that they reenact it during their Easter liturgy. The priest exits the church with a cross held high, and the congregation remains inside. The church doors are locked and the lights are turned off. The darkened church becomes hell, the Devil’s jail. The priest then pounds on the doors of the church— symbolizing Christ assaulting the gates of Hades—proclaiming “Open the doors to the Lord of the powers, the king of glory!” Inside the church the people make a great noise of rattling chains, the resistance of hell to the coming of Christ. Eventually the doors are opened, the cross enters, and the church is lit and filled with incense. For the Orthodox, Easter is all about how Jesus defeats the power of death.”
― Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

“I use the following scenario in my classes to illustrate the nature of the moral circle. Imagine, I ask my students, that your best friend just got a job waiting tables at a restaurant. To celebrate with her you arrange with friends to go to the restaurant to eat dinner on her first night. You ask to be seated in her section and look forward to surprising her and, later, leaving her a big tip. Soon your friend arrives at your table, sweating and stressed out. She is having a terrible night. Things are going badly and she is behind getting food and drinks out. So, I ask my students, what do you do? Easily and naturally the students respond, “We’d say, ‘Don’t worry about us. Take care of everyone else first.’” I point out to the students that this response is no great moral struggle. It’s a simple and easy response. Like breathing. It is just natural to extend grace to a suffering friend. Why? Because she is inside our moral circle.

But imagine, I continue with the students, that you go out to eat tonight with some friends. And your server, whom you vaguely notice seems stressed out, performs poorly. You don’t get good service. What do you do in that situation? Well, since this stranger is not a part of our moral circle, we get frustrated and angry. The server is a tool and she is not performing properly. She is inconveniencing us. So, we complain to the manager and refuse to tip. In the end, we fail to treat another human being with mercy and dignity. Why? Because in a deep psychological sense, this server wasn’t really “human” to us. She was a part of the “backdrop” of our lives, part of the teeming anonymous masses toward which I feel indifference, fear, or frustration. The server is on the “outside” of my moral circle.”
― Richard Beck, Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

“On the playground, “cooties” seems harmless and innocuous (unless you’ve been on the other end of that game). But sociomoral disgust can quickly scale up in intensity and become the engine behind the very worst of human atrocities. During times of social stress or chaos, those persons or populations already associated with disgust properties will provide the community a location of blame, fear, and paranoia. In short, sociomoral disgust is implicated in the creation of monsters and scapegoats, where outgroup members are demonized and selected for exclusion or elimination. As David Gilmore writes in his book Monsters, a monster is “the demonization of the ‘Other’ in the image of the monster as a political device for scapegoating those whom the rules of society deem impure or unworthy - the transgressors and deviants.” These deviants are considered to be “deformed, amoral, [and] unsocialized to the point of inhumanness.” Take, for an example, the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew, where an early shot in the film showed rats emerging from a sewer juxtaposed with a crowd of Jewish persons in a Polish city. In America, as another example, proponents of anti-gay legislation have circulated pamphlets claiming that gay men eat human feces and drink human blood. In each of these instances, sociomoral disgust is used to demonize and scapegoat populations, creating “monsters” who are threatening to society.”
― Richard Beck, Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

“What are some of the concerns regarding the penal substitutionary metaphors? Some of this debate is theological and exegetical, often centering upon Paul and the proper understanding of his doctrine of justification. Specifically, some suggest that the penal substitutionary metaphors, read too literally, create a problematic view of God: that God is inherently a God of retributive justice who can only be “satisfied” with blood sacrifice. A more missional worry is that the metaphors behind penal substitutionary atonement reduce salvation to a binary status: Justified versus Condemned and Pure versus Impure. The concern is that when salvation reduces to avoiding the judgment of God (Jesus accepting our “death sentence”) and accepting Christ’s righteousness as our own (being “washed” and made “holy” for the presence of God), we can ignore the biblical teachings that suggest that salvation is communal, cosmic in scope, and is an ongoing developmental process. These understandings of atonement - that salvation is an active communal engagement that participates in God’s cosmic mission to restore all things - are vital to efforts aimed at motivating spiritual formation and missional living. As many have noted, by ignoring the communal, cosmic, and developmental facets of salvation penal substitutionary atonement becomes individualistic and pietistic. The central concern of penal substitutionary atonement is standing “washed” and “justified” before God. No doubt there is an individual aspect to salvation - every metaphor has a bit of the truth —but restricting our view to the legal and purity metaphors blinds us to the fact that atonement has developmental, social, political, and ecological implications.”
― Richard Beck, Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

“Disgust is a boundary psychology. Disgust marks objects as exterior and alien. The second the saliva leaves the body and crosses the boundary of selfhood it is foul, it is “exterior,” it is Other. And this, I realized, is the same psychological dynamic at the heart of the conflict in Matthew 9. Specifically, how are we to draw the boundaries of exclusion and inclusion in the life of the church? Sacrifice— the purity impulse— marks off a zone of holiness, admitting the “clean” and expelling the “unclean.” Mercy, by contrast, crosses those purity boundaries. Mercy blurs the distinction, bringing clean and unclean into contact. Thus the tension. One impulse - holiness and purity - erects boundaries, while the other impulse - mercy and hospitality - crosses and ignores those boundaries. And it’s very hard, and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see this, to both erect a boundary and dismantle that boundary at the very same time. One has to choose. And as Jesus and the Pharisees make different choices in Matthew 9 there seems little by way of compromise. They stand on opposite sides of a psychological (clean versus unclean), social (inclusion versus exclusion), and theological (saints versus sinners) boundary.”
― Richard Beck, Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

“Specifically, how are we to draw the boundaries of exclusion and inclusion in the life of the church? Sacrifice—the purity impulse—marks off a zone of holiness, admitting the “clean” and expelling the “unclean.” Mercy, by contrast, crosses those purity boundaries. Mercy blurs the distinction, bringing clean and unclean into contact. Thus the tension. One impulse—holiness and purity—erects boundaries, while the other impulse—mercy and hospitality—crosses and ignores those boundaries.”
― Richard Beck, Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

“We don’t mind swallowing what is on the “inside.” But we are disgusted by swallowing something that is “outside,” even if that something was on the “inside” only a second ago.”
― Richard Beck, Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

“The War of the Lamb—the sacrificial love of Jesus—might not come with a physical cost but it often comes with a social cost. A loss of reputation or social advancement. As Paul noted in 1 Corinthians 1:18, the cross is foolishness to the world. The War of the Lamb is loving in ways that look silly, stupid, and absurd to those observing the decisions we make.”
― Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

“As Thomas Frank writes, “We consume not to fit in, but to prove, on the surface at least, that we are rock ’n’ roll rebels, each one of us as rule-breaking and hierarchy-defying as our heroes of the 60s, who now pitch cars, shoes, and beer.”[3] Here in America, all you need to be a rebel is a credit card.”
― Richard Beck, Trains, Jesus, and Murder: The Gospel according to Johnny Cash

“The goal of resistance wasn’t simply to topple Hitler. Resistance had to be a way of life, the only way to live as an agent of grace and love in a dark and evil world.”
― Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

“Jesus was in a battle with Satan, and if we want to follow Jesus we have to fight the battle that Jesus fought. This seems a rather obvious point, but with all the mental snipping going on, due to our doubts and disenchantment, this point is often missed. Jesus was picking a fight. Followers of Jesus have to pick that same fight.”
― Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

“Satan names that which is working against God and God’s kingdom in the world.”
― Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

“Basically, a satan is more of a relationship than a person. Anything that is facing you in an antagonistic or adversarial way—working against you as an opponent or enemy—is standing before you as ha satan, as an adversary, as a satan. In the Bible, Satan and the Devil are interchangeable names for the personification of all that is adversarial to the kingdom and people of God, the personified Enemy of God.”
― Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

“Power Breeds Satans As Bob Sutton points out, assholes are created because we are all so easily corrupted by hierarchy and asymmetries in power. Even the smallest power differentials can transform us into assholes.”
― Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

“Being a parent is joyful, but it's also haunted by the specter of loss.”
― Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

“Whenever you hear someone say that they love God more than human beings watch out, because that person is about to hurt somebody.”
― Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

“Consider the peculiarities of the Dixie cup test. Few of us feel disgust swallowing the saliva within our mouths. We do it all the time. But the second the saliva is expelled from the body it becomes something foreign and alien. It is no longer saliva—it is spit. Consequently, although there seems to be little physical difference between swallowing the saliva in your mouth versus spiting it out and quickly drinking it, there is a vast psychological difference between the two acts. And disgust regulates the experience, marking the difference. We don’t mind swallowing what is on the “inside.” But we are disgusted by swallowing something that is “outside,” even if that something was on the “inside” only a second ago. In short, disgust is a boundary psychology. Disgust marks objects as exterior and alien. The second the saliva leaves the body and crosses the boundary of selfhood it is foul, it is “exterior,” it is Other. And this, I realized, is the same psychological dynamic at the heart of the conflict in Matthew 9. Specifically, how are we to draw the boundaries of exclusion and inclusion in the life of the church? Sacrifice—the purity impulse—marks off a zone of holiness, admitting the “clean” and expelling the “unclean.” Mercy, by contrast, crosses those purity boundaries. Mercy blurs the distinction, bringing clean and unclean into contact. Thus the tension. One impulse—holiness and purity—erects boundaries, while the other impulse—mercy and hospitality—crosses and ignores those boundaries. And it’s very hard, and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see this, to both erect a boundary and dismantle that boundary at the very same time. One has to choose. And as Jesus and the Pharisees make different choices in Matthew 9 there seems little by way of compromise. They stand on opposite sides of a psychological (clean versus unclean), social (inclusion versus exclusion), and theological (saints versus sinners) boundary.”
― Richard Beck, Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

“The danger of refusing to reflect upon the psychological dynamics of faith and belief is that what we feel to be self evidently true, for psychological reasons, might be, upon inspection, highly questionable, intellectually or morally. Too often, as we all know, the 'feeling of rightness' trumps sober reflection and moral discernment. Further, we are often unwilling to listen to others until we are, to some degree, psychologically open to persuasion. The Parable of the Sower comes to mind.”
― Richard Beck, Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

“These two experiences of scarcity—not having enough and not being enough—affect our ability to love each other, fully, joyfully, and sacrificially.”
― Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted