Transcript
Speaker: The following podcast is a Jill Devine media production. Christianity has become known for judgy people, strange words, ancient stories, confusing rules, and a members only mindset. This is why I stayed away from the church for so long, but it's not supposed to be that way. I'm Jill Devine, a former radio personality with three tattoos, a love for a good tequila, and who's never read the entire Bible.
Speaker: Yet here I am hosting a podcast about faith. The Normal Goes Along Way podcast is your home for real conversations with real people using real language about how faith and real life intersect. Welcome to the conversation.
Speaker: Welcome to the bonus episode on how to read the Bible well. We are back here with Dr. Steven Bernhope and Jill Devine is joining us this time to ask her questions. I sat down earlier in the week you heard the interview with Dr. Bernhope about how we can
Speaker: understand the Bible well and fall in love with it again. And Jill, I want to invite you to ask your follow -up questions. I'm so curious to see what questions you have for Dr. Bernhope. Well, first of all, Dr. Bernhope, thank you for joining us today and for taking on
Speaker: questions from me. I will say that in previous episodes the questions have been with guests that I personally know so they kind of understand where I am in my journey and I always get nervous because I'm thinking oh my gosh I'm talking to an expert and my questions are definitely not expert -y or may seem kind of like why would you even think that? But
Speaker: I will say the first thing about the Bible, it is intimidating, but we don't have to make it intimidating. And your book is a good source for that. And one thing I wrote down is if someone was thinking because of your book,
Speaker: that all of these different things you tackle that your book is super long. It's actually not. It's not that long. And that's what I think is so cool too because it can be long and it can be intimidating. But
Speaker: I'm looking at your book right now, and this is a very reasonable book to even dive into the Bible and how to read it well. So I'm excited personally to read your book and excited to have others learn more about it. Well, thank you. That's great. There has been something on my mind that, and I don't even know if I'm going to be able to word it.
Speaker: But you address it and I'm having really a lot of trouble verbalizing this thing that's going on in my head. So I started reading the Bible probably less than a year ago, have always had a Bible.
Speaker: knew about the Bible but never digging into the Word. I've always heard different stories from different preaching and sermon and what I'm trying to verbalize is that it is history. And I don't know if that makes sense when I say that because
Speaker: And maybe it's part of not growing up as a Christian, really. I mean, having a little bit of a background, but there are things that happened in the Bible, well, in the world. It's almost like world history, but we're not maybe presented that way, if that makes sense. Like it is a bunch of stories that you hear, but also
Speaker: setting up things to come. And I don't know why I'm wrestling with that. So when I'm reading it, I'm like, oh, there was a king there. Oh, wait, that king.
Speaker: has led to this next thing that has led to this next thing. And so when I think about the Bible where people can maybe think, oh, these are just all spiritual stories or, you know, do good and love this. But there's accounts of things that happened on ground, on soil. Does that make sense?
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the problem with how we think about the Bible or people generally think about the Bible is we tend to think of it as one book, as a singular item, because it's all bound together in one book nowadays. That, of course, wasn't the case in biblical times. There was no single book bound together like that. There were individual scrolls and some synagogues or some churches
Speaker: in the first century would have some of those writings and not other writings because they were expensive. They had to be hand copied if anyone was to have a copy in another synagogue and so on. So we nowadays tend to think of the Bible as one book.
Speaker: And yet it's really like a library of books, and like any library or any bookstore, it has all kinds of different types of literature in it. So you mentioned, for example, history. So yes, there is some history in it, of course. There's a story which is an historical story that
Speaker: sort of undergirds the whole thing, it's the platform for the whole thing. And yet it's not just history, and it's not just history in the way that we understand it today. Our concept history is a little bit different than the biblical writers in the ancient world. They had different genres or types of literature compared to ours today.
Speaker: And they had some types of literature that we don't even have today. So that makes it very, very difficult for us when it comes to understanding those. The obvious example is something called apocalyptic, which is the revelation of John, the book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament. That's a genre that we just simply don't have. And it's as good as incomprehensible, except in some of its sort of headline
Speaker: headline matters to do at the end times. So the first thing we have to understand with the Bible is that yes, it's a story, and yes, there are stories within that story. And yes, it's useful for you, Jill, to have some coherent narrative in the back of your mind as to where the individual stories fit in this big story.
Speaker: but there is also other kinds of literature involved as well, other genres, and each of those types of literature has its own rules as to how we should interpret it and understand it. Parable, for example, have
Speaker: their own set of rules as to how we should understand them and how we should read them because they were a literary device, if you like, or a way of speaking, a way of teaching in the day that we're not familiar with nowadays. So we need to understand a little bit about how to read those well. So what do you say when someone says, well, the Bible is just a book of stories. It's just a bunch of stories. That's what it is.
Speaker: Well, I guess I would agree with them apart from the word just. So yes, it is stories. But by stories, I mean narratives. I don't mean fiction. I mean narrative stories which have a certain style, a certain type of literature. And something like, don't hold me to precise percentages, but something like 75 % of the whole Bible is narrative.
Speaker: So we've got to understand that that narrative is there to tell us something or to help us to understand how we ought to be engaging with it. And one way is to get ourselves into the stories, to ask questions like, who would I have been in this story? How would I have reacted compared to this character or that character? What did they learn? What should they have learned? What were they supposed to learn?
Speaker: And how can what I'm reading here impact on how I live today? Is it saying something good? Is it saying something that's not so good? And so engaging with the Bible will depend very much on what part of the Bible and what type of literature it is that we're engaging with. And I guess the thing I would always say to someone is,
Speaker: To start with, ignore the Old Testament, start with the Gospels, then go through Paul's letters. But remember that the Gospels are the heart of it. Jesus is the heart of the story. Jesus is the reason for the story. Jesus is the fulcrum or the tipping point for the whole of the story. And those letters, mostly written by Paul, are written to specific churches in specific contexts, specific situations.
Speaker: usually with particular issues or problems that the author of that letter was writing to try and deal with or give them some help in.
Speaker: One thing that I liked that you said with Laura and this has been brought up in a previous episode that we did is the whole understanding of the cultural aspect in the context back then versus now. So one of the things that I wrote down and I believe you said this Laura was sexist kindness and manners. I added that because I had talked about my
Speaker: my, I don't know if it's disbelief or my frustration when I was reading the part about the Samaritan woman and how
Speaker: Jesus said, get me a drink. And I'm like, well, why can't he just say please to that woman? Like, it bothered me. And I've found different things like that when I'm reading. And, and I will, I've been told, like, you're interpreting it one way, but you have to understand, like, he might not have even said, get me a drink.
Speaker: It could have been some different words and we don't know how he said it either. So I do think that that can be a barrier when people are reading the Bible. I know it has been for me and I'm just trying to go back to these different kinds of conversations about that and remembering when this was written and when this all happened.
Speaker: Yeah, and I never thought of that, actually, the question you raise about the way in which Jesus appeared to speak to the woman. It didn't occur to me. I guess we have to remember that we're quite far removed from that original context, not only in terms of the
Speaker: the culture of the day and the way in which men would not even speak to women, let alone have a conversation as Jesus did. But the fact that we're also dealing with either Hebrew or Aramaic in the original and then it's being translated.
Speaker: And you only have to look at any significant verse in the Bible, particularly New Testament, and look at it in all the different English translations that are available to us now on somewhere like BibleGateway .com. And you see how the ways in which some of those original words are translated bear no resemblance to each other.
Speaker: you'd think that sometimes they were talking about completely different subjects or different words. So we have to allow for that. We've got to, I think, cut the Bible a little bit of slack at times like that and maybe cut Jesus a little bit of slack and say, if we work backwards from Jesus' nature and character as a whole, we're probably not going to have a big issue with one
Speaker: a half sentence in one verse in one chapter of a gospel based upon how we think he should have said what he said. Exactly. And the thing that you also said towards the end of the last episode, you were talking about the deconstruction and what you didn't want people to think when you wrote your book. I had wrote down
Speaker: People today, their commentary, their opinion can be helpful and it can also be destructive.
Speaker: That's what hurts me is like I understand when we try to look at some of these stories and say, OK, in this realm of whatever it was, take this into consideration. And then when I just see people trying to destroy that, too, it's it's hard. Like that's just part of it.
Speaker: And I guess maybe I'm, I don't want to say destroy because when I say that, you know, why didn't he say please? It is hard for me, though, to even think about somebody trying to go bad, go evil and go, hey, instead of this, this is what this means. And so that's, I don't know, you brought up a really good point about how that's not what you're trying to do. You're just trying to help us understand it.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean there's a principle in reading the Bible well, which is that we should look to what is plain, what the text mainly says and plainly says, to help us to understand the bits that are not so plain, or not so main, if you like. And in other words, the big themes are
Speaker: what we look to in order to understand the smaller points or the minor points. And so again, I'd say, tell me about how you understand the nature and character of Jesus and how he treated people and how he loved people and the way he dealt with them in general across the whole of scripture. Then when you tell me that, I'll say, now apply that grid, those points of reference,
Speaker: to your concern that he didn't say please to the woman at the well. It suggests to me that if we've understood Jesus correctly, then we can look at the more difficult bits, shall we say, in a light which reflects him overall rather than dissecting those few words, which we don't even understand, you and I, probably, what those were in Greek or more likely Aramaic before that in the first place.
Speaker: We don't know what the cultural implications were of those Aramaic or Greek words or phrases, which may have been actually quite nice. Yeah. And I think part of the other confusion of what I was trying to say to you about looking at this as a history book too is
Speaker: I feel like a lot of times when you go to church, the same passages are read and the same passages are shared from the Bible that
Speaker: are super important, but it's like, man, there's a lot of other stuff. And I don't know if if that's part of it, too, for me. Like, I've only learned these certain things. And now that I'm going into the Bible, I'm like, whoa, that happened. Oh, well,
Speaker: I mean, part of that's probably going to be on the person who's preaching, like, how do I take this little thing and turn it into good? But that's another thought that's been going through my mind as I've been reading the Bible.
Speaker: Yeah. And it's difficult, isn't it? Because different preachers, different ministers have different understandings, different theology, different training, and so on. And the way that life is, we can't expect everyone to have certain understandings. But we should be hoping is that they continue to be lifelong learners, and that when they recognize that they have some weaknesses in their
Speaker: their theology or their training or their understanding of scripture or whatever, they just keep working at it and keep accumulating because there's always something to learn. But I do agree with you that there is a tendency to shrink the Bible down
Speaker: into a set of doctrines or a set of propositions or a set of statements about God, almost like the Bible was only there to enable us to produce a statement of faith through our denomination. It was actually so much richer and so much more colorful and more interesting. And indeed, I think there's so much more to it than that.
Speaker: I only have lots more thoughts, but I'm going to wrap up with two more thoughts. The first is just my faith journey right now that I have said a few times. I am not going the science route. I don't want to do that.
Speaker: maybe in the future, but right now not. The loving God and the loving one another is what is fulfilling me and making me want to continue on this faith journey. It's making me become a better person. And so I loved that you and Laura talked about that a lot. And what I want to wrap up with, and it might end up being a harder question than I realize, is
Speaker: You in your book talked about the different seasons of the book or the different, like think of it as season one, like Netflix and that. And you talked about season three and how we're the cast of season three. But I want to know who's going to write this season. Is there going to be Bible 2 .0?
Speaker: Because that's something else that I think with the Bible. It just like ends. It ends and it's like, well, wait a minute. What about all these other things? I don't.
Speaker: I don't know. I don't want to be picky with language because I know we're just trying to express our thoughts as best we can, but I don't think it's great to say that the Bible just ends. I think the Bible was left open -ended because it foresees at the end of the period, if you like, and the material that it covers, it foresees
Speaker: a completion of God's work through Jesus in a new heaven and a new earth. And that's what we tend to call for short heaven in our common kind of language, common parlance. And the question then is, well, what's supposed to happen in that in between time,
Speaker: between the open -ended way in which the New Testament leaves things and when God's gonna bring it all together at the end of time. And that is what my way of telling the big story calls season three in which we are the cast. But it's very important that we understand that that doesn't mean that we just ignore seasons one and two. In fact, we need to be thoroughly immersed in seasons one and two, thoroughly immersed in the characters,
Speaker: thoroughly immersed in the big themes and what's happened before. Otherwise, season three won't make any sense. Season three won't have any proper relationship to seasons one and two, just as a box set. If season three is completely inconsistent with seasons two and one, then everyone will see that a mile off.
Speaker: So it's really important that we understand seasons one and two, the Old and the New Testament, and understand them well, because we're called to take on those characterisations, take on those themes, take on the same mission of our predecessors in this story of God and humanity, and to make sense of it now in our world in the same way that they were making sense of it in their world.
Speaker: I like that I need to be reminded of seasons one and two, and I am just starting to watch them. I'm a little late to the game, but that's the story of my life. I appreciate your honesty with me and understanding where I'm coming from. Thank you so much. Thanks, Julie. May I say one last thing? Absolutely.
Speaker: OK, so just one thing, it's occurred to me as we've been speaking that, and I may be wrong on this, of course, because I'm not familiar with your audience, but there may well be people who listen to your podcast and are in what people often call a deconstruction phase of life where
Speaker: where their experience of church, of Christianity, of evangelicalism has not been good, where they've been harmed by it and hurt by it. And they're struggling with it because in their hearts they love God, they believe in God, they believe in the God represented by Jesus. But their experience of Christians and church has not always been consistent with that. And so they've been hurt.
Speaker: And you know, is that what they say? The old phrase hurt people hurt people become quite, you know, quite damaging and painful. And I guess what I would say to them is it's okay to deconstruct, but just try to, if you can make, make clear what you're deconstructing or at least what needs to be deconstructed and gotten rid of and what needs to be deconstructed and
Speaker: alongside it at the same time reconstructed. So I'm all for deconstruction as long as we're reconstructing alongside of it. Now, if that's too painful at the moment, that's okay. That's okay. But just try and differentiate between that which rather like when Paul talks about what kind of materials we're building our life with, we're building the church with. And he says, are we building with
Speaker: Wood hay and straw or are we building with precious materials that will last into eternity? And when we deconstruct, we have to call out the wood hay and straw and get rid of that. That shouldn't be part of the fabric of what we're building. But what we do need to do is build with precious stuff of eternal value and do that alongside our deconstructing. And then I think we begin to become healthy or healthier people on our journey with Jesus.
Speaker: And I hope that this book is some kind of help to people in doing that. I agree. And I think it's all about making sure when you are going through that reconstruction that you are putting the right people in your life and turning to the right sources. So we will have a link to this book on our show notes as well so that people can get to it, how to read the Bible well.
Speaker: Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. And I know somebody else is going to appreciate it. And I think maybe you might have to come back in the future on this podcast. Okay, that sounds wonderful. I've enjoyed it so much. Thanks for asking me.
Speaker: Thanks for listening to this episode. And if you would like to follow along online, normal goes a long way .com also on our social media outlets, Facebook and Instagram at normal goes a long way. And if there's any way that we can help you in your faith journey or answer a couple of questions, just don't hesitate to reach out. That's what we're here for.
