Speaker 1 00:00:20 Welcome to Unsane Christianity, where we seek to reconcile our human experiences with God. And so we can love your heart, a good conscience and sincere faith. It's going to be back with you all is it mentioned in the last episode, we are beginning a mini series on how to read the Bible. It's going to be an introduction to our flagship course, finding my place in guts. If you are not already subscribed, please subscribe to this podcast or our YouTube channel, but also to our email list. So you can keep up with the latest articles, resources that are available. This podcast is made possible through our members at on-scene Christianity, atrium paid subscribers, receive expanded versions of all our interviews and deep dive essays into human experiences. We may find uniquely difficult to reconcile with guidance. If you become a member, is it www.asherwhitmer.com forward slash member? And if you are just playing new to this podcast and you're not even sure who in the world, I am feel free to look up me, a bio about me and the work that I
[email protected]. Without any further ado, let's get into our four-part mini series on how to read the Bible.
Speaker 1 00:02:02 Welcome to finding my place in God's story. This isn't an introductory to our flagship course on how to read the Bible as story, discover what God is doing in this world and see how you and I fit into it all. I'm excited to have you along with me on this journey, the goal of this course is to take a deep dive, into learning how to better understand God's message and therefore better know Jesus. We have designed each lesson to be simple, practical, and digestible. I'm confident you will come away with a lot, but not feel too overwhelmed. If at any time you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask me about them. Have you ever felt discouraged by how difficult it was to muster up interest in God's word? Maybe you would read your Bible regularly, but struggled to get anything out of it. Maybe what you read never made much sense to you, or maybe you struggled to know how, what to do with what you read.
Speaker 1 00:02:56 We're going to get into all of this and more throughout this course, but first let's take a step back. What is the word of God? Have you ever thought about that? When you hear someone talk about the word of God, what do you think about? Is it direct words of prophecy, such as thus says the Lord quotation mark, you shall not, you know, whatever, is that the word of God? Is it the specific statutes instructions, decrees laws that David talks about in Psalms one 19? Is it Jesus? I'm thinking of John one, it says the word became flesh and dwelt among us, or is it as we see more specifically in acts and testimonials referring to the gospel message as a whole, what do people mean when they say the word of God? Now that's kind of a different question. I'm not sure what all people mean, but what should we understand when the Bible talks about the word of God?
Speaker 1 00:03:51 What should we understand it to be? This addresses the paradigms from which we think about scripture. A paradigm is a framework for understanding reality that you take for granted. And you think within it's difficult to step back from our paradigms and tinker with them. We don't really think about the paradigm we are working from. You have to be exposed to other views of reality and understand them before you begin to recognize your own and how it differs from this one. You've just been exposed to, you can have a framework for understanding how the world works, which makes you anticipate problems and then get deflated by problems or anticipate them and want to solve them. Practically a set of expectations that I bring to life that have helped me make sense of reality. This is what a paradigm is, but sometimes our paradigms don't make sense.
Speaker 1 00:04:43 Things happen that don't fit my understanding of how the world works or how relationships work. I either then find a way to explain it within my existing paradigm or I'm going to let it crack my paradigm and force me to see the world in a new way. Maybe you're wondering, okay, give me some examples. Think about how we talk about people. Some people are optimists, some are pessimists, nobody's born and it's declared that person is an optimist. Nobody identifies like, Hey, I'm going to be an optimist or I'm going to be a pessimist in life. It's just, we've noticed as we look at human beings that some people think positively about life. Other people will think negatively, like something happens and they wonder what what's wrong with them. Other people, I see something happen. And, and they, they find rational reasons or like, oh, it's, you know, not everything's okay.
Speaker 1 00:05:36 Right. Everything will be fine. And so we begin to try to analyze that. And what we've come up with is that there are people who live from two different paradigms. Like all of us live within one of these in general. Like obviously that's not universal, but for the most part where either a pessimist or we're an optimist, those are paradigms. We're looking at the world through children, develop models for relationships, paradigms from their family of origin. My children are learning how to respond or not respond based on how Theresa and I parent them. And we're developing paradigms for them to see the world through. And when they, when they grow up and leave and start interacting with other people that are going to discover that boy, there's, there's other paradigms through which to look at and see humans and see the world and problems. And hopefully we are setting them up well to, to navigate that paradigm challenge well and, and allow their paradigms to be expanded and grown.
Speaker 1 00:06:36 That's an example of paradigms. We all develop our own ways of dealing with grief conflict, but as our circles of relationship widen say in our teens and twenties, we bumped into the reality that our way of doing things doesn't always work with other people or other situations many or most of us first came to the Bible because of questions. We had something was nodding at us, we're looking for answers. And so we came to the Bible, this isn't wrong. It's natural. It's what scripture is designed to help us with. The question is how is scripture designed to help us find answers to our questions? The scripture designed to be a reference book, a theological dictionary, a moral handbook. Whereas the guys at Bible project say a devotional grab-bag scripture is designed to be a story. One cohesive message. It is designed to bring to surface wisdom and insights for life that we can apply to any situation, but may not see right away.
Speaker 1 00:07:34 If we're approaching scripture as a sort of reference book, scripture is deep and full of complex truths. Systematic theology helps us dissect what we find in scripture. Systematic theology is kind of a big term, but it's a term that helps us kind of categorize issues of theology into topics. So we might learn about God and his attributes and who God is. And what parts of scripture do we go to see who God is? Scripture is deep and full of complex trues and systematic theology helps us organize all of it in a logical manner that is easily digestible, but it's important that we make sure we are being faithful to the narrative of scripture. As we reorganize it for systematic theology, the place to start, whether we're doing systematic theology or just reading our Bibles or just, you know, trying to figure out how to tell somebody about God, the place to start is biblical theology.
Speaker 1 00:08:29 It, local theology is acknowledging questions we have, but then just setting them on the shelf and then digging in to the text of scripture, seeking to understand it, as it was intended to be understood, biblical theology understands the Bible tells one cohesive message, a story about God. And then biblical theology works to ask the questions. The biblical authors are inviting us to ask of the text instead of bringing our own questions to it. If we're not careful, we can bump into problems by just bringing our own questions because the biblical authors didn't necessarily think of the questions that we have when they were writing. And so if we're looking for direct answers to that, we'll probably miss the wisdom and the insight that they did, right? They did think about that can shape and inform us about the particular question we're needing help with the word of God in the Bible.
Speaker 1 00:09:24 Most certainly includes the direct words of prophecy, the instruction statutes, and it is definitely culminated fully in Jesus. We see that obviously in John one also in Colassians and Hebrews. But when we talk about the word of God, we ought to think message, not Bible. Think about that for a moment. When you hear the word of God, think message, not Bible. The Bible is a collection of writings that are organized in such a way to tell a story that communicates the whole message of the gospel. One can take quotations from the Bible and present a message that is contrary to the gospel. Then those specific quotations are no longer the word of God. It's somebody else's word. It's something else. It's communicating a message that is different than what God is trying to communicate through the Bible. So it's not the word of God because the word of God is a message.
Speaker 1 00:10:18 It's a particular message. Does that make sense? Feel free to respond with any questions you have. I know we're getting a little technical here, but it is important for us to recognize this. If we're going to understand what our expectations should be, as we approach this ancient holy text, we know of as the Bible, when you read a cookbook, do you think you are seeing a shopping list? Maybe it feels like a complete left turn here for a moment, but just, just to help us grasp this a little bit more, there are some paradigm shifts that might need to happen in order for us to fully understand scripture. If you view a cookbook as a shopping list, you're going to do at least these three things. First of all, you're not going to understand what all the other instructions written in and around the list have to do with anything.
Speaker 1 00:11:04 You're going to see inspirational quotes or pictures, or just random tidbits, depending on what cookbook you're looking at. It's going to be full of a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with the ingredients you need for what you're about to make. The second thing is you're not going to get enough groceries for the week. If you look at the cookbook and you're seeing the groceries, you're going to be standing in the aisle, trying to figure out how in the world, you get a half cup of flour, like flour. Doesn't come in a half coupling, and you're not going to get what you need for the whole week. Because cookbook isn't designed to provide stock. A cookbook is designed to help you make something specific. And that leads us to the third thing. You're not ever going to experience the transformation intended for you.
Speaker 1 00:11:52 There's going to be no baked goods because you're not doing anything. You're just looking for the lists. And then you go to the store and you get the list and you think you're, you're accomplishing this cookbook really well. You're applying it really well to your life. And you're missing the fact that no they're supposed to be these creations that come out of the way you interact with this cookbook. You're supposed to see bread come forth. You're supposed to see cookies. You're supposed to see a jello or whatever you're making. This is what it's like to approach the Bible as a reference book, when it's actually a story through the rest of this course, we're going to take a deeper dive into what it means that the Bible is one cohesive story. One cohesive message that fully culminates in Jesus, and then how to find our place in this cosmic story module.
Speaker 1 00:12:41 One of this course specifically focuses on how to read the Bible. There are eight specific aspects to critiquing. Whether we are approaching the Bible from a proper paradigm, we will go through all eight of them in the first module, after establishing a proper pair paradigm for coming to the Bible with in the second module, we will take a step even deeper and see how to figure out what the Bible means as we read it. So first we need the right lens through which to see the scriptures and then begin reading it. Well, then in the second module, we're going to look at how we figure out what it means as we're reading it. We need to find out what the scriptures meant to their original audiences, figure out what all the differences are between us and the original audiences. We need to observe the universal principles that are applicable to all people in all times and all places, and then flesh out what it looks like to apply those principles in our specific situations.
Speaker 1 00:13:37 Then the third module helps us understand the gospel, according to how the Bible frames. It I'll give you a hint. If you can explain the gospel in a sentence or two, you're probably missing significant parts of the gospel. I don't know how that lands on you, but a lot of times, especially here in the west, when we, when we talk about explaining the gospel, we're just teach the gospel. We're thinking of like one or two specific things, and we can say it in the shorthand phrase. And I've discovered that as I immersed myself in scripture, you don't ever find those shorthand phrase phrases really in scripture, there's one place. And we'll get into that in the, in the third module. But even that one place is embedded within a narrative of everything that God is doing. And the fourth module we're going to get to know the story of the Bible.
Speaker 1 00:14:31 This is where we dig into some texts. We, we will not have time to read through the whole scripture and to talk about everything in it. So the point is less about doing like a systematic Bible study through the scriptures. And it's more about catching the overarching story and seeing for yourself in the scriptures that, oh, these themes are here. So that then you can begin and go do your own Bible study and begin not just seeing these themes, but then diving in deeper into the specific books and the specific letters and wrestle through the interpretive challenges in light of the overarching story. And just to give a rundown here, that the story basically has five acts to it. I think it's empty, right? That frames it as acts like a five act play. There are five acts. The first act is creation. The second is the fall.
Speaker 1 00:15:23 The third is Israel. The fourth is Jesus and the fifth and final one is creational restoration. And he right talks about how we are living in the creation restoration right now. So what we'll get into that more in the fourth module, then in the fifth and final module, we will see how the Bible relates to our life today. Where specifically do we fit into the biblical story? We will reflect on our own stories, the positive and negative turns they've taken. We'll reflect on where God has shown up in our stories and what our experience has been like with his people, the church, and then to close everything out. We will look at the great invitation to be a part of this great cosmic story of redemption and some of the challenges or questions that come with it. I'm excited to take this journey with you, and I hope you find it helpful in making sense of life, God, what he has in store. I'd love to hear your thoughts, leave a comment in the thread below and let me know what questions you have, what stood out to you as a helpful insight until next time recent piece
Speaker 1 00:17:13 Christianity is brought to you by our members at Patriot. If you would like to receive in-depth essays as Christians face and how to sort through them in a way that helps us love God and others with a pure heart, good conscience and sincere faith, then consider becoming a member of that Patriot. Along with these deep dive essays, you will receive expanded versions of all our podcasts interviews still learn more about becoming a paid subscriber to Christianity, visit www.asherwhitmer.com forward slash member. And if you'd like to learn more about me, maybe you're not very familiar with who I am and what I do. Just go ahead and visit my website, Asher weber.com. That has everything that has my book that has a blog articles, various other resources available to check out as well, including two networks. I am currently a part of the first is called the restorative faith collective, where we have conversations around race perspectives and relationships in about this context at restorative faith, collective.org, as well as the kingdom outposts, where we look at, how do we live as Jesus's nation in the world today, visit www dot kingdom, outpost.org. Thanks for listening.
