Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello friends. If you have been blessed by the work of unfained Christianity, whether through the blog or the podcast, and you would like to support the work, or you'd like to go deeper, then I invite you to consider becoming a member of Unfamed Christianity on Patreon. What the membership gives you access to is monthly Q A episodes. It gives you access to deep dive essays where we take a particular issue and open it up even further and dive in with some of the nuance and complexities it gives you access to guided studies this first quarter of 2024, we'll be doing a guided study at what it looks like to become a healthy disciple of Christ, how to overcome habitual sin, how to interact with scripture in our spiritual formation journeys, how to deal with baggage from our past and what it looks like to value and pursue emotional and mental well being. All of that is made available through the unfained Christianity membership. There are five different tiers of membership and if you're interested and would like to learn more, just click the link in our description or go to asherwhitmer.com member and you'll see the different tiers and everything you get with each one. Thank you for listening and thank you for being a part of this work.
Hey friends, welcome back to unseen Christianity, where we flesh out what it looks like to follow Jesus faithfully in our current cultural moment. Happy New year. Welcome to 2024. My last episode was reflecting on 2023 and sharing my favorite reads of the year. This episode starts a new year, a new thing, a new season even, of unfained Christianity. One of the things that we are going to be doing this year in our membership program is we're going to be going through guided studies. Quarterly guided studies. So the first quarter we are looking at how to become a healthy disciple of Christ.
And as a part of that, the crucial place to start, in my opinion, is understanding scripture. Understanding how to approach scripture, understanding how to read scripture that has radically transformed my own life. It's helped shape me into a, I believe, a healthier disciple of Christ. There's still a lot of growth to do right, and we'll get into much more than just how we look at scripture. We're going to address overcoming habitual sins, sorting through issues of our past and emotional and mental wellbeing. We're going to get into a number of different things in these first few months of 2024. But where we're going to start is how do we interact with scripture? It is my experience that a lot of us in the west we interact with scripture almost as though it's a reference book. It's topical, and we look at it for inspiration, for guidance on specific issues, when really it's actually a story. And what happens then is when we are navigating through life and when we are sorting through a variety of different issues, whether it's personal, whether it's relevant issues that we're facing in our world today, we then interact with scripture as though it's this reference book and we kind of misapply it sometimes because we misunderstand what particular texts are intended to be communicated. And so as a groundwork of that, as a part of that, I am going to be sharing. Over the next eight, nine weeks, I'm going to be sharing module one of our finding my place in God's story course. Now, the course is a paid product that you would have to purchase to get access to all five modules. But for the sake of just helping lay groundwork for all of us, whether you're going through the guided study or not, I'm going to be releasing module one, which specifically looks at the Bible as story. And what does it mean today? In this episode, I'm going to be sharing the introduction, which is quite simply, God gave us his message by telling us a story. And so that's what scripture is. God has given us his word through story. What does that mean? It requires some paradigm shifts for us, particularly if we have tended to view the Bible as a reference book. It's almost as though we go shopping with a cookbook. And I'll get into that analogy a little bit as well. But it's a frustrating experience when we go into a store with a cookbook. I think most of us would realize that's kind of crazy, right? But imagine with me for a moment what it would be like to go into a store with a cookbook and try to get all the ingredients that you're going to need for the next week based off of a cookbook. It would be frustrating. It'd be incomplete. The amounts suggested in the cookbook aren't going to match up with the amounts that you purchase ingredients with. There's going to be random quotes and suggestions for things, pictures, even in the cookbook, that are going to feel irrelevant and feel like it messes up the flow of being able to just efficiently gather your ingredients. And sometimes we approach the Bible as though we think it's intended to do something for us. And there are aspects of the text that feel like it's disrupting the flow of what I think the Bible should be doing for me, and that's because we're looking at it through a wrong paradigm. We ought to be looking at it through the paradigm of story. And so over the next several weeks, we're going to be laying out what that looks like to interact with the Bible as story. The first paradigm shift we're going to look at is the Bible as story as opposed to reference book. Now, sometimes there's confusion around that, as though I'm saying you should never reference the Bible. That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying the Bible is not written as a reference book. So I reference a lot of stories in my life. I love stories. I love reading stories. And as I am talking with other people, I will reference back to those stories. But what I learned, the lessons I learned from those stories, I learned them through a different medium, through the medium of storytelling, as opposed to just an easily categorized reference book where, oh, you want to learn how to deal with temptation? Well, look up how Christian dealt with going through vanity Fair or whatever. Like, that's not how we interact with Pilgrim's progress, right? We remember what all went, how the story unfolded as Christian navigated through Vanity Fair.
And so we reference, and we learn lessons from the story that we'll talk about even in snapshots, in other conversations. But the way we learn those lessons isn't through just a quick cheat sheet of a reference book.
[00:07:24] Speaker B: Rather, we absorb the story.
[00:07:26] Speaker A: We saw the context. We saw the different moving pieces and even some different pieces within the story that may at first appear to add conflict or contradict to what we think the overall message is. That's actually a crucial piece of drawing the deeper lesson out of that particular passage or section of the story. So we're going to dive into that, and that'll come next week. In the first paradigm shift, the Bible has story. The second paradigm shift is the Bible is a collection of writings by various authors. So there's kind of two aspects. First, it's a collection of writings, right? Bible is written as many different collections, and then it's also written by many different authors. And so we're going to dive into that. And what does that look like, and how does it change the way we approach the text? The third paradigm shift is the New Testament tells the climax of the story. So sometimes the way the Bible is taught divides Old and New Testament almost as though they're two different texts, two different gods inspiring the text. And the reality is, they aren't different texts. Right, like the Hebrew Bible was canonized and in the common rhythm of jewish lifestyle and practice long ago, long before the New Testament. But they're both telling a cohesive story. And actually, all the Old Testament is pointing to the New Testament, specifically the Messiah. That arises in the New Testament we know as Jesus the Messiah. Paradigm shift number four is the Bible is about God. Sometimes we approach the Bible as though it's about me and about kind of helping me get through life. And while that works sometimes, because there's a lot in the Bible that tells us about how to navigate through life, there's actually going to be a lot of the Bible that doesn't make sense to us, because the Bible is primarily about God and what he's doing in creation and his intention, even his partnership with humanity. So we are working with God, but it's about God. It's God's story. It's not centered around Asher Whitmer of the 21st century. Paradigm shift number five is the Bible is meditation literature.
You can read it quickly. You can read through it in 90 days or whatever. I think the fastest I ever read through the Bible is the Torah. I read through the Torah in three months, which is 90 days. But that's a huge section of it. And I read it twice, some passages three times. That was a part of Bible college, and that's the most. I've never read the Bible in 90 days. I've read the Torah in 90 days, twice, parts of it three times. And that is helpful. It can help me see kind of the cohesiveness to a degree, however, and that's part of understanding the Bible as story is. It is cohesive. You need to see the whole thing in order to understand the parts. However, the Bible, written in Hebrew, is also meditation literature. It's intended to be thought upon and meditated on. You read sections of it and you mull over it. You think about it throughout your day as you're going through life, as you encounter real life examples, and even more so, you read it many times and you uncover deeper and deeper layers of truth and meaning. So we're going to dig into that as well. The Bible has wisdom literature. It's an extension of that. So the Bible doesn't tell us specifically what to do in every circumstance. There's all kinds of circumstances the Bible never addresses. Right. The biblical authors didn't even envision the problems that we might be facing today, at least the specific problems. However, the Bible gives us the wisdom that we need to navigate all of these problems. The wisdom that we need to understand Jesus to understand God's design to be saved. Paradigm shift number seven is that the Bible wasn't written in English. So this is talking about all the implications of the fact that the Bible wasn't written in English. So first of all, it's at least on its second or third translation when it comes to English, right, that we are working with words that may not quite 100% depict what the original language communicated, but then also the fact that it was originally written in a different language means there's different cultural dynamics, there's different worldviews at play. It looks at life differently than we might be used to in our modern western english mindset. And the last paradigm shift that we will look at is the Bible is meant to be studied in community. And it's not just meant to be a personal study, although it most certainly can be that. And it's good and right and healthy for us to study the Bible individually, but that's just part of the larger process of studying the Bible in community. So we're going to take each week and go over a paradigm, several things.
My biggest passion is that each of us can discover our place in God's story. I developed this course. It rose out of a lot of what I was learning in Bible college. But this summer, and if you're on my email list, you will have noticed this summer, typically the sales for the course, when I open enrollment, it's slowly increasing. It started, I think, at about ten or twelve, and then the next round was 1516. The next round, 20 people this summer crashed and burned. I think there were two people that signed up total. And I was like, oh, I wonder why that is. And I don't know why all that is. It may have been economics, it may have been. Nobody was feeling like starting a course in the summer, kind of, right. Heading into school, the fall, I don't know, maybe. I also think there's somewhat of a content fatigue that we might be going through, that there's so many different things, and how do I know this course is going to be worth it? But this really lays the groundwork for my approach in almost all my work. And so while this is just a taste, the whole course dives in even deeper into studying and interpreting the Bible. And we'll probably get into different aspects of that as we go throughout the year in just the regular blog and podcast content. But I really wanted to lay the foundation with this first module. These paradigm shifts, what it looks like to approach the Bible as story and how that might affect the way we interact with scripture as it pertains to the current issues we are dealing with. So I'm going to take some time.
If you include this week and then starting with paradigm one next week, it's going to be a total of nine weeks probably, but without any further ado. By the way, just for your information, these aren't super long.
I think the Bible as story is probably the longest. I think that one was split into two parts, 20 minutes each, so that episode may get to the 1 hour mark. However, most of these are going to be 1520 less than 30 minutes.
It all depends how much intro I add each week, but try not to burden you down too much. But that's just kind of just to give a bit of a rundown what we're doing, where we're going, and what.
[00:15:07] Speaker B: To look forward to.
[00:15:08] Speaker A: I'd love to hear your feedback. Any questions you have.
If there's a number of questions or just kind of conversation that develops from these, I may take an episode or so at the end and respond to some of the questions or engage, maybe even bring some people on to discuss these things further. If you followed the podcast and the blog for much, you will know I've discussed these things with my professor, Ernesto Duke. He was my Old Testament professor. I've talked with Dwight Gingrich about these things. I've talked with Drew Latin, Ricky Miller, and Christy mast. And yeah, this is not a foreign conversation, but I did want to just dive in a little deeper to each of these different paradigm shifts and unpack what that means practically as we're interacting with scripture and hope you find it helpful.
[00:15:56] Speaker B: Welcome to finding my place in God's story. This is an introductory video 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 struggle to get anything out of it. Maybe what you read never made much sense to you, or maybe you struggled to know what to do with what you read 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 whatever? Is that the word of God? Is it the specific statutes, instructions, decrees, laws that David talks about in psalms 119? Is it Jesus? I'm thinking of John. One says, the word became flesh and dwelt among us. Or is it, as we see more specifically in acts and Thessalonians, 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? 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. 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 think negatively, like something happens and they wonder what's wrong with them. Other people see something happen, and they find rational reasons, or like, oh, everything's okay, 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, we're either a pessimist or we're an optimist. Those are paradigms that 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 Teresa and I parent them. And we're developing paradigms for them to see the world through. And when they grow up and leave and start interacting with other people, they're going to discover that, boy, 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 navigate that paradigm, challenge well, and allow their paradigms to be expanded and grown. 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 20s, we bump 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 gnawing 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? Is scripture designed to be a reference book, a theological dictionary, a moral handbook? Or, as the guys at Bible projects 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 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 truths, 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 trying to figure out how to tell somebody about God, the place to start is biblical theology. Biblical 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 write, 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 most certainly includes the direct words of prophecy, the instructions, statutes, and it is definitely culminated fully in Jesus. We see that obviously in John one, also in Colossians, in 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, 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. Feels like a complete left turn here for a moment. But 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. 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 cup 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. 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 lists and you think you're accomplishing this cookbook really well. You're applying it really well to your life. And you're missing the fact that, no, there's 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. 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 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. 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 talk about explaining the gospel or just teach the gospel, we're thinking of like one or two specific things and we can say it in this shorthand phrase.
And I've discovered that as I immerse myself in scripture, you don't ever find those shorthand phrases really in scripture. There's one place, and we'll get into that in the third module. But even that one place is embedded within a narrative of everything that God is doing. In the fourth module, we're going to get to know the story of the Bible. This is where we dig into some text. 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, the story basically has five acts to it. I think it's nt. Wright that frames it as acts, like a five act play. There are five acts. The first act is creation. The second is the fall. The third is Israel. The fourth is Jesus. And the fifth and final one is creational restoration. N. T. Wright talks about how we are living in the creational restoration right now. So 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, making sense of God, what he has in store for you. 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 helpful insight. Until next time. Grace and peace.
