Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello friends.
[00:00:01] Speaker B: If you have been blessed by the.
[00:00:02] Speaker A: 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 unfamed 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.
Hello friends. Welcome back to Unfamed Christianity. This is a podcast where we flesh out what it looks like to follow Jesus faithfully in our current cultural moment.
Today, we're going to continue our progression through the eight lessons of how to approach the Bible as story, and specifically some paradigm shifts that we may need to make in order to approach the Bible in a healthy, proper way. We're going to dive in today at looking at the fact that the Bible is written by a variety of authors over a long period of time. Specifically, one of the things we're going to interact with is, first of all, what the implications are that it was written by human people and the different dynamics of their authorial style, the context.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: They'Re writing from, the people they're writing.
[00:02:28] Speaker A: To, but then also how we actually see the divine through the fact that the Bible was written by human authors.
[00:02:42] Speaker B: One of the questions that I've gotten.
[00:02:44] Speaker A: Is when there's such an emphasis on understanding who wrote a particular book and the context that it was written in, aren't we kind of pulling away from the work of the Holy Spirit? And shouldn't studying scripture just be about the Holy Spirit opening up our minds and our hearts? And first of all, I would just say, absolutely the Holy Spirit has inspired and directed these authors to write we need the Holy Spirit to understand God's word.
[00:03:13] Speaker B: And as we're filled more with the.
[00:03:15] Speaker A: Holy Spirit, we're going to understand the word of God even more fully and more completely. But the Holy Spirit manifests himself through humans. When God shows up on earth, he comes in the form of the Holy Spirit, into human form. We see that in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. We see that through the fact that he chose human authors to put together.
[00:03:43] Speaker B: The word of God.
[00:03:45] Speaker A: And so there's actually something beautiful that we begin to see as we recognize the humanness of the text. We also see the divinity of the.
[00:03:54] Speaker B: Text and the fact that this is.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: A divine narrative being set forth. And so this isn't juxtaposing the work of the Spirit with good, thoughtful understanding of the dynamics of human art and form that are put into literature and so forth.
Rather, it's fully understanding the medium through which God chose to reveal himself. This is God's choosing. It's not my choosing. God chose to reveal himself through human people, and he does through human authors, but he also chooses through human individuals.
[00:04:32] Speaker B: Like you and I.
[00:04:33] Speaker A: We reveal God to the world, and we do it in imperfect ways at times. So, anyways, I'm excited to get into that. I'm not going to hold you up a lot longer, but kind of a tradition, I guess. I've done it a week or so here, but I've been doing a lot of reading this year as I start the year, and I just thought, well, maybe I should, on the podcast, just start sharing some of the books that I'm reading and recommending if you're looking for things to read. And today I thought I would share. This is for those of you who aren't readers out there, this is a very thin book. I think there's 147 pages total.
[00:05:14] Speaker B: It's a story.
[00:05:15] Speaker A: The author's name is Luke Chance.
[00:05:18] Speaker B: It's a pseudonym.
[00:05:19] Speaker A: But this is a story of someone who went to prison, met Christ behind bars, and then just a redemptive, transforming work that Christ did in his life behind bars. And I think one of the things that stood out to me is, yes, there's this dynamic of, like, God takes a sinner, someone who's maybe sinned more egregiously, at least to other people, than I have, and he transforms him to be a mouthpiece for the gospel. That's amazing. That's a beautiful story. But one of the things that stands out to me through reading this book is the way that God orchestrates our lives different times throughout Luke Chance's journey.
He would be doing well in a particular situation. He has a good chaplain, a good connection, and then he'd get moved or the chaplain would be removed or something, like the friend that he met behind bars, who's also Christian would be removed or something. And at first it looks like, well, how can he continue to go?
All this good stuff was happening, and then eventually he would see, well, actually, it opened up a whole new door for God to take him even further and even deeper. That was really encouraging to read. Reminder, largely because I have my own stories of young men that I have walked with for part of their journey and seeing either myself being removed or removing. There's been, most recently, just the fact that my wife and I felt God was leading us to move and the separation that that brings to people who are growing in faith and they're doing well and just, I guess, the fear that can crop up either with them or with me that like, okay, what's going to happen now in the future? And just being reminded that God keeps us, our responsibility is to follow God, and God will keep his people and that discipleship can happen even at a distance. It takes a little more intentionality, but it can happen even at a distance. Anyways, it's an easy read. Now, in full transparency, the book isn't written just the best. It's readable, but you can tell it's written for the testimony and the story. But it's a short book, and it's easy to read. You could probably read it in one sitting. I actually started it last year and then put it on the shelf. I think I was in the middle of school before I knew it. I was at the end of the year and hadn't finished it, so I just finished it up here a couple of weeks. But God doesn't waste a thing. Meeting Christ behind bars by Luke Chan. So I recommend it. If you're listening to this and you're like, hey, I would like to read more, but I can't handle big books. Then here's a good book, just your size. There's a tidbit for you. I'd love to hear your thoughts. What books are you guys reading? And hope you enjoy lesson number two on how to approach the Bible.
[00:08:56] Speaker B: All right, welcome back to finding my place in God's story. This is the second lesson of module one. There's going to be eight lessons in the first module. We are walking through some paradigm shifts that we need to perhaps make. Maybe these aren't new to you. Maybe they are, but these are some shifts in how we approach the Bible in order to see what it means that the Bible is story, that there is a particular story being communicated through the message of the Bible. So the first lesson was on the fact that the Bible is story as opposed to the Bible is a reference book. It's not wrong to see facts in the Bible and glean them like we might a dictionary. It's not wrong to come to the Bible looking for moral ethics. The Bible wants to communicate things about God, wants to communicate things about creation, about life, about humanity. The Bible wants to do something in its readers. There is an agenda. The Holy Spirit is trying to work something as a person reads the Bible and reads the story. And it's also a place of inspiration. It's full. Obviously, a lot of its authors wrote in times of meditation, in times of devotion with God. I think of the psalms and proverbs and lamentations, like those are books born out of a sense of feeling inspired. It wasn't just recording down events, historical events. So there is theology, there is morality, and there is inspiration that we get from it. The big paradigm shift, though, is that it's not intended for us to just come. I need to know certain facts, and so I come and get them. Or I need to know what is the ethics of whether or not I should watch movies or how I should date, or even how we should do church.
It's not even a book that's intended to be studied for the sole purpose of feeling some sort of inspiration or only being studied when we need something for a sermon or a Sunday school lesson or something. It is a book that is intended to be read and meditated on and studied over and over again. The whole thing, from beginning to end, because its story wants to show us something about God, about morality, about theology. And the whole story inspires us. And there are a bunch of sub messages throughout that are also inspiring. Right now, my wife and I, we're sitting in psalms 31 and 32.
And these passages mean a lot to us. Right now, we're not reading much more than just reflecting on what God is communicating through these passages, because it really speaks to some things we're going through right now. So it's not that the Bible doesn't do that, but that I ought to know also how psalms. I keep wanting to say Romans, how psalms 31 and 32 and 33. We're also sitting in how that fits into the whole message, the whole story that Genesis to revelation is communicating. And that's actually part of what makes it so meaningful to us is when we step back and get that overarching message and see how it's working to push forward that narrative, and then we can glean the little bit that's right there that's really meaningful for us right now. There are passages in Romans or passages in other parts of the Bible that don't have the same meaning.
We read it and it feels like life is being breathed into us because it speaks to a specific thing we're going through. So all that to say the Bible being story is not. We're not saying that it doesn't provide us with theological facts and information. We're not saying that it doesn't give moral guidance or inspiration, but we're saying that we ought to approach it as a story and read it, meditate on it, study it as a story, not just hopping into it as a reference book where we don't necessarily have to start at the beginning and read the whole way through in order to understand exactly what it's saying. So here in paradigm lesson number two, the idea is that the Bible is a collection of writings by various authors. The Bible was written over about a 1300 year period. So not only does it span different people, but it spans different period of history. And we can even see, we're not going to get into it in depth here, but we can see, as you study throughout the scriptures, that cultural elements change, even though it's still the same people group. Right. And so this whole concept of the Bible being a collection of writings by various authors, so each word is intentional, it's a collection of writings. So we're not trying to say that the Bible was written. Moses sat down and wrote Genesis knowing that it was going to end in revelation.
There is a terminology, kind of a theological term that is called progressive revelation. I don't know if you've heard it before or not, but that's the idea that as you move from Genesis to revelation, God is progressively revealing himself to creation. So Abraham does not know when he is looking up at the stars. And God has said, I'm going to bless you to be a blessing to all the nations. He doesn't know that that's actually Jesus who's going to be the blessing. Paul in Ephesians one and two, bring out that this blessing, we are blessed from the before the creation, we are blessed through in the anointed one, which is language from the Old Testament that builds on after Abraham's time. He connects and New Testament authors connect that blessing to Jesus. So we know because we're reading after New Testament authors, we know that Jesus is the blessing. We also know that Jesus is the serpent crusher. Again, something Paul brings out, that through the resurrection, through his death on the cross, and then the resurrection, he has crushed the serpent's head. Actually, Paul, I think it's in corinthians, I did not look this up, but somewhere PAul is referencing, and it seems to indicate that the church is also a part of crushing the serpent's head. So it's not just Jesus, but the new humanity that Jesus is creating in himself. Again, we learn about this new humanity in EphesianS two and thRee, and that the church is crushing the serpent's head. Paul says in Ephesians three talks about how through the church, the manifold wisdom of God is being displayed to the powers of the cosmos, the powers in the heavenly places. And so there's all kinds of language harking back to Genesis three, where the curse happened, and then God gives this promise that someone's going to come through the woman's seed and crush the serpent's head and creation will be liberated. Paul talks in Romans eight about the groaning of creation, waiting for the day of liberation or the day of redemption.
But Abraham did not know that that was going to be Jesus. Adam and Eve did not know that that was going to be Jesus. In fact, they probably thought that was going to be Cain. You have the story in Genesis three where God says, from your seeds going to come someone who crushes a serpent. And then Genesis four starts by the woman having a seed, the woman having a son, and it happens to be Cain. But as the story goes on, we realize, oh, Cain is not a serpent crusher. Right? And so throughout the story of the Bible, God is progressively revealing himself more and more. This is a collection of writings. Moses wrote a bunch of books. In the Old Testament, we see prophets like Jeremiah wrote a number of the books. In the Old Testament, we see in the New Testament, you have Luke and Paul obviously wrote a lot of letters, a lot of works, fleshing out what it looks like to be a Jesus follower. And so these are all a collection of writings. And when they came to the canonization of scripture, part a significant piece that was critiqued for whether or not a letter or a certain book should be included in the canon, is, is it consistent with the theological message that is displayed through Jesus Christ? And there's a big conversation to canonicity. And how were the books chosen, especially when it comes to the New Testament? The Old Testament was pretty much just adapted really quickly because it was what the jewish people went through. But recognizing that these are a collection of writings and that they're organized in a particular way to tell a story is a part of understanding the story that the Bible is revealing over time. Now, the fact that the Bible has human authors, I think we tend to think that in order for the Bible to be divine, then somehow you got to take the human elements out of it, or you got to somehow make sense of the human elements. And so whether or not we intentionally communicate this, we might give the impression that inspiration is that somebody was just writing and they were kind of overcome by the Holy Spirit, and they just started writing. There was no planning put in place to their organization of writing. They're just writing. It's not even their hand or their words. It's just the Holy Spirit coming through. What do we make of the fact that the Bible is a very human book? You have different genres, different. Paul writes in a way distinctly different from Peter. We see Mark. The Book of Mark is written in a drastically different way than the Book of Matthew. And both Mark and Matthew are written very different from Luke and acts. Luke and acts have a very. The author, Luke, has a very little more eloquent, detailed, and prose style of writing. And you have John, who uses a lot of metaphor. And he's definitely encapsulating more the essence of Jesus than just the particulars of what he did and what he said.
And this is all throughout scripture. Even. We understand that Moses wrote the first five books of the Old Testament, but the text of Genesis is drastically different. It's a different style than the text of Exodus. Genesis covers, I think it's like 15 to 20 generations. Exodus only covers three. And Exodus is very linear like, event happens, and then this event happens. This event happens. Genesis goes back and forth. It looks like, technically, I believe it's Genesis ten should have is probably actually written before Genesis nine, but it's organized in a way in order to push forward a particular message. And so how do we reconcile that? And I would just like to leave a few things here as we try to wind down this lesson for us.
The Bible is both divine and human.
And I would suggest that many of us, including myself, this is something that I'm still learning so much in. But I would suggest we have a deficient understanding of God's work and creation through the person of the spirit, other than the first page of the Bible, where the spirit of God is hovering over the face of the deep, and there's no humans yet in that story. But throughout the rest of the story, after humans are created, even in the creation of humans, God breathes into Adam, the breath of life. That's the same word that was hovering around the face of the deep.
When the spirit of God is manifested in creation, it's through human form. If we want to just jump ahead to the New Testament, you think of Jesus ultimately God coming to earth in human flesh, the dove descends on him, and this picture of the spirit of God descending on this man, we also see that Paul writes in Ephesians and throughout a lot of his writings that the church, the collection of the body of human people being in community with one another, that is the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit.
And so when we see men being inspired, moved by God, as Peter and Paul reference, they are manifesting the divine word of God, even though it's still through their taste, their personality, their knowledge. And even you look at Paul, who does a lot of this. But even in the Old Testament, some of the prophets do this and so forth. They're pulling on cultural elements that they know and their readers know, and they're going to make an illustration, kind of explain something about God based on what they know in their culture. That's all a part of the spirit of God being manifest in human form. We should not go looking for an origin story of the Bible that cannot be explained without humans or that cannot be demonstrated in history.
First of all, we can't find it. But secondly, that actually mirrors the cults, a lot of false religions. You think of Islam. Muhammad had this weird encounter. He actually himself thought he had seen demons, and his wife convinced him that he was seeing an angel and that this was divine. That's kind of a simplistic retelling of the story.
But I think of Joseph Smith and Mormonism in this garden, this park, someplace where supposedly an angel of God came and gave him this revelation. There's no origin story like that of the Bible.
Rather, it's literally history being retold, being documented. There was incredible precision to the transcribing these texts throughout history, making sure it stays the same, stays consistent. Obviously there are variations, but when you consider how old this text is, it's incredible how consistent it is with itself.
I think of people who come at the Bible with the impression that it is divine, primarily spend their time and their energy looking for how it's divine.
And then when they bump into things that show its humanity, it feels scandalous. It feels like you're demeaning the Bible or undermining the Bible. And I think of guys like Bart, Ehrman, he still likes the Bible, but he does not think it's a divine word. It's just good human teaching, and it's a good model for thinking. But he ultimately rejected its divinity because he did not have an understanding, a paradigm through which to understand how the divine word of God is being made manifest through human form.
In the collection of writings, I think of myself, for me personally, I started going to Bible College in 2018, and one of the first classes that I took was Old Testament survey. And then right along with that, taking Old Testament backgrounds and in Old Testament backgrounds, we're studying about historical cultural background of the ancient Near east. And I'm discovering, as I'm going through these classes that, wow, there's a lot of stories of origin that resemble Genesis. There are other stories of a flood. They don't look exactly like how it's told in Genesis, but there's other stories of a flood. There's other seven day creation accounts. Obviously, the creation, the elements, the particulars that are being created are different, but it's told in a very similar way as the seven day creation account in Genesis is. And so for some of my classmates, that was really startling to them. And actually, to my knowledge, it did not ruin their faith, but it led them to, like, they had to really dig in and almost caused a little bit of a disillusionment for a period of time. For me, it wasn't necessarily new to me. I think whether it's my parents or just other schooling that I had had, I had kind of known some of this existed. But what was really neat was reading those other epic stories of origin and seeing how different the story of Genesis is. So, yes, there's a lot of similarities, but it's also different. And one of the things that's different is that the other stories sound so human. The gods get humanity to serve them. Everything's born out of a war, a conflict, and it's out of ripping apart a God that lost the war. That that's how you create earth, and that's how you create humanity. And there's a lot of violence, and it seems self serving, and that just sounds like something I would make up, a man made story.
Whereas this notion that somehow a God creates, and then he creates little images of himself, and not only that, but he gives him his spirit and his life to go live that out in the creation I just made.
But then they rebel against him, and they walk away, and they abuse what was bestowed to them, and they begin to take advantage and abuse the creation. This good beautiful creation. And instead of just wiping them out and destroying them, this God continues to pursue them and tries to bring them back, sends them prophets, sends them ultimately his very self, to bring them back.
He wants to restore the epic of all epic images is the prodigal father who so graciously brings back the son that squandered all the wealth. And that is a depiction of Yahweh, this compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in faithful love. It's so different.
And for me, the more I acknowledge the human elements, the more the divinity of the Bible also just kind of came to the surface and it wasn't so much of a struggle. I would love to hear how this lands on you. If you have questions about this or what do I mean, even if you're not sure, like, what am I talking about by human elements.
My whole point isn't so much to go over the particular conundrums that we face as we go throughout the biblical story right now. Rather, my point is to just present the idea that the Bible is a collection of writings written by various authors. And so we need to see that God is manifesting his word through human form over thousands of years.
And then this collection of writings was brought together to communicate this cohesive message that Jesus sees himself as being fulfilled in the fulfillment of. And we'll get to that in the next paradigm, actually, the next lesson.
I think there is something holy and beautiful that we experience as we come to know the story of the Bible deeper and deeper. The divinity of it is that there is an agency and an agenda trying to move you and I toward a very specific view of humanity, creation, reality at large.
And just as you read scripture, take note of what that view of humanity and creation reality at large is. It's not a pleasant view of humanity. It's harsh. We are selfish, we've rebelled, we're broken.
So we're probably not the heroes of the story. If I wrote the Bible, I'd probably make myself or make a man the hero of the story.
But God is actually, we're going to get into this in another lesson, but God is the hero of the story. As you go throughout scripture, God is the protagonist.
That shows that this is a divine work. And the fact that humans wrote this divine work is just more proof in my mind that the spirit really did breathe on these men and move them to right. And as two Timothy three says, all scripture is breathed out by God, the Holy Spirit. I'm going to link in the description here to a podcast episode put out by the Bible project where they talk about this thing as well as editors. And there's also some articles that I've written why I believe the Bible, some more specific kind of apologetic approaches, although I would say that the biggest apologetic for me is the story that it tells. Like it's the one of hope and redemption.
But I will let you guys peruse those as you see fit. That is not a part of the course. It's not a part of your assignment right now. I would rather just like you to spend some time thinking about that and processing what is going on in your own heart and mind as you think about the Bible being written by humans, being brought together, orchestrated by humans, to tell a specific story. Ultimately, Jesus is God in human form. He's an example of how the divine works through humans. And I think that this frees us up to appreciate the Bible as literary art without feeling threatened that we're saying it's not divine. It is divine. It's also literary art. And we can spend time to take notice of repeated words, the structure of the writing, the themes that are communicated. It's a work of art that invites us to read it meditatively, not just quickly. Although reading large chunks quickly can help us see the overarching message, but read it meditatively. And in doing so, it shapes us. It shapes the ethics that the story is communicating. It shapes us into the morals, ultimately into the image of the one that its message is about. I'd love to hear your thoughts, how this is landing on you, any questions you have. And in our next lesson, we're going to discuss the New Testament and how did that come to be, and how it is the climax of the story. Now, maybe that's not new to you. You think, well, yeah, Jesus is the climax, right? But we're particularly going to look at how Jesus sees himself as embedded within the story. So Jesus doesn't show up and think, oh, it's all about me. But his teaching is the continuation of the story from the hebrew scriptures. So we'll dig into that more in the next lesson. Till then, grace and peace.
