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BONUS (11b): Going Deeper With Dr. Stephen Burnhope
190 Plays4 years ago
In this bonus episode, Jill Devine asks Dr. Stephen Burnhope the questions she had while listening to Episodes 10 and 11.
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Transcript
Perceptions of Christianity
00:00:00
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,
Jill Devine's Faith Journey
00:00:18
Speaker
a former radio personality with three tattoos, a love for a good tequila, and who's never read the entire Bible.
00:00:24
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.
00:00:39
Speaker
Welcome to
How to Read the Bible - Dr. Steven Bernhope
00:00:40
Speaker
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
00:00:59
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
Making the Bible Approachable
00:01:13
Speaker
all, Dr. Bernhope, thank you for joining us today and for taking on
00:01:18
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
00:01:48
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,
00:02:05
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
00:02:21
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.
00:02:48
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.
00:03:04
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.
Interpreting the Bible
00:03:22
Speaker
And I don't know if that makes sense when I say that because
00:03:28
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
00:03:53
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.
00:04:08
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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?
00:04:30
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
00:04:59
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.
00:05:21
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
00:05:39
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.
00:06:02
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
00:06:31
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.
00:06:53
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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
00:07:09
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.
00:07:38
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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.
00:08:06
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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?
00:08:31
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,
00:08:54
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To start with,
Cultural and Historical Context of the Bible
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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.
00:09:24
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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.
00:09:32
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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
00:10:02
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my, I don't know if it's disbelief or my frustration when I was reading the part about the Samaritan woman and how
00:10:11
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.
00:10:34
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.
00:10:55
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
00:11:13
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.
00:11:30
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.
00:11:53
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
00:12:17
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
00:12:45
Speaker
People today, their commentary, their opinion can be helpful and it can also be destructive.
00:12:54
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.
00:13:19
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.
00:13:46
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
00:14:10
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,
00:14:35
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.
00:15:05
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
00:15:27
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
00:15:41
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,
00:16:00
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.
00:16:13
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
00:16:40
Speaker
their theology
Lifelong Faith Learning
00:16:41
Speaker
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
00:16:57
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.
00:17:22
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.
00:17:43
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
00:18:08
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?
00:18:36
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.
00:18:48
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
00:19:14
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,
00:19:36
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,
00:20:03
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.
00:20:27
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.
00:20:56
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.
00:21:19
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
00:21:36
Speaker
where their
Deconstructing and Reconstructing Faith
00:21:37
Speaker
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.
00:22:05
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
00:22:33
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
00:22:58
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.
00:23:26
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.
00:23:50
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.
00:24:07
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
Support in Faith Journeys
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Speaker
couple of questions, just don't hesitate to reach out. That's what we're here for.