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The Apologetics Problem
84 Plays1 month ago
Apologetics are important, reading the Bible well is important, but we can make a big mistake when we read our Bible with apologetics-driven questions in mind. The history of the church is full of strange (and sometimes troubling) interpretations arising from apologetics-driven interpretations. Nick and Matt discuss the difference between reading Scripture for answers, and reading scripture for wisdom, looking at God’s purpose for Israel’s law, modern creation debates, and the church’s interpretation of scripture on slavery.
Resource Referenced: The Troublesome Nature of Apologetics by Patrick Henry Reardon, St Augustine: From the Literal Meaning of Genesis by Mark J Joshua, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity by Mark Noll, Reclaiming the Atonement: An Orthodox Theology of Redemption by Patrick Henry Reardon, Wisdom for Faithful Reading by John H. Walton, The Lost World of the Torah by John H. Walton and J. Harvey Walton
Interlude Music: The Softer Side by Wave Saver
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Transcript
Introduction to Christian Apologetics
00:00:01
Speaker
It's the Repair Dime Podcast, and today we're having a conversation about Christian apologetics and some of the mistakes that we make when we engage in them. If you're someone like me who likes to go on YouTube and enjoy a good debate and likes to consume other apologetics content, think this conversation is important and I'd encourage you to listen in.
00:00:19
Speaker
Enjoy the conversation about Christian apologetics and how it affects Bible interpretation.
Common Mistakes in Apologetics
00:00:28
Speaker
Christianity faces lots of questions and criticism from outside sometimes. The practice of responding to these criticisms and defending the Christian faith is called apologetics. It's a great thing. And as Christians, we also have the Bible. This is a gift from God.
00:00:42
Speaker
Also ah great thing. Let me know if you're finding any of this contentious here yet, Nick. No, no, not contentious. I agree. However, there's a huge mistake I think that Christians can make when we start using the Bible as a tool for apologetics.
00:00:56
Speaker
It's a mistake that we can see made through Christian history, and it's mistake that we're sometimes even encouraged to make. The mistake we can make is taking our apologetics questions into Scripture and expecting to get direct answers.
00:01:09
Speaker
When we take the words of Scripture as direct answers to our questions, it's easy to miss the questions and concerns that the authors of the Bible were actually addressing. We can start to read the Bible and expect it to provide us direct answers to those questions that we came in with already.
00:01:24
Speaker
Yeah. And then we can start to make it say almost anything we want it to. If we really want to respect scripture, I think we need to start with trying to understand the concerns and questions that the authors of scripture had, then read the text looking for the answers to those concerns and questions.
00:01:41
Speaker
It's the obvious thing to do, but it's a little bit less appealing because it doesn't satisfy my curiosities necessarily. We have this impulse to want the Bible to tell us about everything.
00:01:52
Speaker
We say it's inspired, it's from God, so it must therefore tell us about everything. While we do affirm that it's inspired, it's from God, it just doesn't tell us about everything. And maybe that's a little bit frustrating for us.
00:02:05
Speaker
So then out of our zealousness, we just start to imagine that it tells us about everything and ask it questions it's not trying to answer. And then proof text in such a way that provides answers to questions we're asking, but it's not really a faithful or legitimate way to interpret those texts.
00:02:22
Speaker
we're not the first Christians to deal with that struggle or that tension, neither. ah Christian history shows us how different questions and concerns that have been brought to Scripture have yielded a wide variety of interpretations.
00:02:34
Speaker
In his book, Turning Points, Mark Knoll addresses this history of biblical interpretation. He says, From the distance supplied by time, it is often quite easy to see that some biblical interpretations that once seemed utterly persuasive were in fact distortions of Scripture.
Historical Misinterpretations and Errors
00:02:49
Speaker
When we find out, for example, that some believers once thought the Bible clearly taught that the Roman Empire was to usher in the millennium, or that Christ would return in 1538, or that Africans were an inherently inferior form of humanity, then we can see the role that specific thought patterns or intellectual conventions of an age have played on interpretations of the Bible.
00:03:09
Speaker
Yeah, we can see too how not only can we misunderstand and just misuse the Bible, but we can use it to abuse human beings made in the image of God. Yeah, looking back, you can see these sorts of decisions to not respect the Bible in its own context can lead you into really strange places and sometimes into really problematic places.
00:03:30
Speaker
Which isn't surprising. Humans are very good at using all the tools at their disposal, including religion, to legitimate the powers that be, those with power and social standing.
00:03:41
Speaker
Yeah. And I think when we look back in history, it's kind of easier to identify those places where Christians really went wrong, where bad interpretations were driven by selfish desires and greed.
00:03:51
Speaker
or where interpretations were made popular because they permitted one group to benefit from the subjugation of another. However, when we look back in Christian history, we'll also find that many of the mistaken interpretations came from people working with good intentions, from Christians who were defending and explaining the Christian faith to outsiders, Christians who were simply practicing apologetics.
00:04:12
Speaker
Hmm. Patrick Henry Reardon gives this caution for apologetics. Although it is an essential component of the church's mission, apologetics is sometimes troublesome or worse to theology.
00:04:22
Speaker
Indeed, as I reflect on the matter, I'm not sure I can name a single heresy in Christian history that did not have some apologetic concern near its root. Obviously, heresy is a relative term, but the general point is taken.
00:04:35
Speaker
I think it's interesting looking at bad ideas throughout Christian history and seeing that they often begin with an attempt to interpret scripture in light of the cultural questions and concerns of their day. They're trying to practice apologetics.
00:04:48
Speaker
The Bible can sometimes feel very foreign, and we can see that Christians throughout history have felt the desire to read Scripture in a way that makes it more relevant. And they often do that by reading Scripture as if it's an answer to the pressing questions of their own context.
00:05:04
Speaker
So early movements like Gnosticism and Docetism sought to present a version of Christianity that would have made more sense to someone who was accustomed to Greek philosophy. Later, the Christian belief in purgatory became normal biblical interpretation within a culture where platonic afterlife journeys were a popular topic.
Interpreting Biblical Prophecy and Genesis
00:05:24
Speaker
More recently, dispensationalist eschatology has become very popular, a system that took the strange symbols of revelation and connected them to specific geopolitical actors and events.
00:05:35
Speaker
What dispensationalism did so well was to make the apocalyptic vision feel very relevant to a Cold War era America. It's way easier to get people in the 1970s to pay attention to the Bible when you're telling them it predicts the destruction of the earth in 1978, maybe or maybe just any day now.
00:05:54
Speaker
Yeah, it's more interesting, it's more engaging if we imagine that the author is talking about my place and my time, not his time and his place, which is way in the past.
00:06:05
Speaker
It's even more interesting when it has my country's national interests in mind. yeah if I get the cipher that allows me to find out exactly which symbols are most relevant to me and to my concerns.
00:06:17
Speaker
Good biblical interpretation is important, and doing good apologetics is also important. But we've got to be careful that we don't start letting those apologetic questions and concerns drive the way that we interpret and read scripture.
00:06:30
Speaker
So when interpretation begins with these apologetically driven concerns, or with any other questions that we have before we start studying the text, the interpretations we come up with are going to be limited and guided but those very questions that we bring to the text.
00:06:45
Speaker
Right. This is sometimes called motivated or interested readings, where what we see in the Bible conveniently aligns with what we want to see going into it. Proof texting tends to do this a lot.
00:06:56
Speaker
And if we're serious about finding the places where maybe we today are guilty of doing that, it can be helpful to start with looking at the major apologetics questions that we're facing today and say, have these motivated our interpretations of Scripture?
00:07:10
Speaker
I think one of the major topics in apologetics for many evangelical Christians today concerns the age of the earth. Scientific understanding of cosmology has shifted a lot in the last few centuries, and it's a shift that's opened up debate in our culture around the age of the earth and the timeline of its development.
00:07:28
Speaker
Many Christians now read the creation account in Genesis in light of this debate that's going on in our culture. So they come into the Bible with the question, what does the Bible teach us about the time span of creation?
00:07:40
Speaker
And they go looking for answers in Genesis. and often end up with the interpretation that the earth was created in six 24-hour periods. Genesis 1 can seem like a pretty clear and direct answer to that question.
00:07:52
Speaker
but You read the days in Genesis 1 as each being 24 hours, you take creation in a day in Genesis 2 as figurative, and you've found your biblical answer to your question. But what if you brought a very different question into the text?
00:08:05
Speaker
What if you lived in the Roman Empire, in a culture and time where the popular belief included a pantheon of limited gods who were all pretty limited in their powers? So in this world, the controversial claim of Christianity would be that God is all-powerful.
00:08:21
Speaker
So what if you take that question, can God really be all-powerful, into Genesis? Some early Christians who've posed this question to Genesis have actually found it troubling that an omnipotent creator didn't simply fill the heavens and the earth instantly.
00:08:35
Speaker
He took too long. Yeah, he was way too slow about it. It's this concern that has caused many Christians in history, like Augustine, to conclude that the six days described in Genesis are clearly figurative.
00:08:46
Speaker
Of course an all-powerful God would accomplish creation in an instant. Yeah, he wouldn't have to take a full six days to do it. Yeah, he wasted a lot of time there. Yeah, that's ridiculous. One could ask, how can it possibly have taken God longer to create these things than it takes us to say them?
00:09:03
Speaker
Yeah. If it takes me four seconds to say, let there be lights in the sky, how can I possibly think it took God a full day to make it real? It's a matter of faithfulness to not believe God took six 24-hour days. Yeah. If you step back and look at all of scripture, you'll see that it's exceedingly clear throughout that God is all-powerful.
00:09:22
Speaker
So clearly, it would be wrong to read this creation account as if it's limiting God's power. So the days described in Genesis 1 must be a literary device, a notion that's also supported by kind of this poetic formatting and patterning of the Genesis 1 account.
00:09:35
Speaker
So one person from our context... who's concerned about the historical timeline described, can come into Genesis and see, oh, it's six 24-hour periods. Whereas other Christians with very different questions can come into this text, Genesis 1, and come out with a completely different answer.
00:09:52
Speaker
and sort of funny, like clearly in his day, Augustine was concerned by other apologetics concerns than we have. And so his
Wisdom vs. Literal Interpretation of Scripture
00:10:01
Speaker
interpretation was motivated to solve for those concerns.
00:10:04
Speaker
So also like the the young earth creationist today is concerned by a different set of apologetic concerns. So their interpretations tend to be motivated to solve for those concerns.
00:10:15
Speaker
And on and on we go. It'll be something different in a thousand years. I wonder if somebody today who reads Genesis 1 and argues that this is teaching creation in six 24-hour periods, if they can imagine themselves in a different context, one where rather than a debate around the age of the earth, they're constantly facing ah questions and criticism about whether or not this creator God that we're teaching can actually be all-powerful.
00:10:40
Speaker
In that context, would you still be the one saying, no, clearly this teaches creation in six 24-hour periods? You'd have other Christians criticizing you, telling you, why are you admitting that God seems to not be all powerful in this creation? Yeah. Why are you giving ground to those who are criticizing Christianity? Right. Right.
00:10:58
Speaker
Yeah, if the Assyrian gods can create the earth quicker than that, then it kind of looks bad on Yahweh if it takes him a full week to do it. So if different questions yield different interpretations of this passage, how do we know the right questions to bring to the text?
00:11:14
Speaker
Well, the right questions to bring to the text are the ones the authors were addressing. I can propose a dozen different questions to the creation account and get a dozen different interpretations. yep But thankfully, this doesn't demand that we give up in despair. All is not lost.
00:11:29
Speaker
As John Walton has noted, the only context that cannot be imposed on the text is its original context. We have to seek to ask the questions of Scripture... that were asked in its original context.
00:11:42
Speaker
Otherwise, the answers we get tell us more about our context than they tell us about what the author of the scripture intended. They may be of use for our apologetic and rhetorical aims, but they're of little use for understanding the wisdom that the scriptures are attempting to actually provide us.
00:11:59
Speaker
They're of little use, in other words, for hearing God's voice, if you will. It's this need to understand scripture in its original context that makes contextual studies of scripture so important.
00:12:11
Speaker
If we're serious about learning which questions we're supposed to have in our minds when reading Genesis or any other piece of scripture, we need to study its context carefully. When we compare Genesis to other ancient Near Eastern creation accounts, there are a lot of similarities. yeah But the differences become obvious really quickly.
00:12:27
Speaker
Genesis has a very unique perspective regarding the pre-existence of the supreme god. His carefully established design for creation, which was brought about without any sort of conflict, and humanity's important purpose within that creation. yeah There are so many other questions that we can bring into the text.
00:12:46
Speaker
And often it's easy to look at the questions that other Christians have taken to the text and allowed to guide their interpretations and think, oh, that's so silly. What were they thinking? What's really hard to do is take the questions and concerns of our own modern culture and learn to set those aside and start with biblical interpretation in the right context.
00:13:03
Speaker
If you were sit down and read Genesis with Jewish or Christian thinkers from the vast majority of history, and you started your discussion by saying, so, I think the key takeaway from this text is that we read it for its historical timeline, and it's teaching that the planet Earth was created around 4000 BC in six 24-hour periods, and therefore evolutionary theory is bogus, they'd likely find your concerns kind of silly.
00:13:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's true. I think this example that you give demonstrates an interpretation that is clearly motivated, meaning that the interpretation is rather conveniently set in opposition to something I already didn't like or I already didn't want to be true, namely modern scientific discoveries that make me uncomfortable with my previous paradigm.
00:13:46
Speaker
Motivated interpretations like these are a dime a dozen, I feel like. and They don't stand the test of time either. That's kind of the problem. I think it's interesting, and in church history we find the same sort of apologetic readings employed like in the 1600s-ish, when Copernicus's model of the solar system was new and uncomfortable for many Christian paradigms.
00:14:06
Speaker
And so they fought against it and they thought it was a matter of faithfulness to believe that everything revolved around the earth and the universe wasn't nearly as large as Copernicus was saying it was.
00:14:18
Speaker
And those Christians who were interpreting the Bible as pushing back against this heliocentrism, those are not teachings that I see studied and promoted a lot by Christians today. No, they're they're gone. It's done. We've all accepted the modern scientific cosmology and we've moved on to other issues that we're now like debating about. And this is not just to ridicule people who have kind of this approach, but it is to try to correct. i think there's something wrong here.
00:14:44
Speaker
when every couple hundred years or sometimes every 50 years, we have to vastly revise the way we read the Bible. And there's a way to fix all this, and it's just to not ask the Bible to solve for modern questions that we have.
00:14:58
Speaker
That's the problem. When we do that, our biblical interpretations will be changing every generation. we'll have these needless debates for years and years that kind of missed the point of what the scriptures are trying to do for us and what kind of community they're trying to form us into.
00:15:29
Speaker
So scripture isn't useful because it provides easy, direct answers to the questions of our culture today. How can it be of any meaningful use for us? Well, think instead of reading scripture in search of answers to our questions, we'd be better served learning to read scripture as a source of wisdom.
00:15:46
Speaker
Wisdom in scripture is far more than simply knowing facts. It's the ability to live in a way that's in accord with God's design. So although scripture doesn't directly answer all the questions that we have... It doesn't give us all the facts, in other words. It doesn't give us all the facts.
00:16:01
Speaker
But if we grow in the wisdom it provides, that will help us to know what to do in the face of all of the questions and situations we may face. what kind of people to be while we navigate our growing knowledge base, our growing body of facts.
00:16:16
Speaker
Which I think actually puts us in a position to answer the changing questions of the world around us much better. Yeah, for sure. This is an ever-changing world and an acceleratedly changing world post-industrial revolution, especially in the last century or the start of this century. It's almost insane and overwhelming how fast the world is changing.
00:16:37
Speaker
It's a pressing and existential matter for the future of our faith to not read the Bible, asking it to answer all of our questions about the changing world, because it won't.
00:16:49
Speaker
And if we act like it does, then literally next year, all of our interpretations will have to be revised when more technologies come out. and We just can't put ourselves in that position or our faith is just going to be useless.
00:17:01
Speaker
And it won't survive, I don't think, if that's the type of interpretation it's built off of. It's interesting. It's kind of easier to get away with sort of responsive interpretation when the world isn't changing quite as quickly. You know, if you can go a few hundred years at a time, kind of dealing with the same questions and concerns, it's easier to develop a version of Christianity that feels meaningful in response to those questions.
00:17:22
Speaker
Yeah, because generations could live with the same sorts of interpretations without having to vastly revise them. Exactly. But if you get a world where that changeover and that shift is happening way faster, it suddenly starts to expose that approach, I think, a lot more. It becomes less useful.
00:17:39
Speaker
If my interpretation of the Bible that I find useful in my culture ends up having to be really different from the interpretations that my father or my grandfather... Or that had 10 years ago. that I had 10 years ago.
Challenges of Modern Contextualization
00:17:51
Speaker
Suddenly, it becomes really obvious that, well, actually, the Bible's not providing any sort of consistency here. It's just being used in response to whatever's going on in culture today. That's just inevitable. That is the place that people will get to immediately.
00:18:05
Speaker
And so then the obvious question is, was the Bible just not useful? Can we just do away with it or what we're proposing is don't ask the Bible to answer all of your questions.
00:18:18
Speaker
Mind the Bible for answers to the questions that it poses, because it is trying to give us as a community of humans wisdom for navigating this world and for redeeming this world by the power of God's spirit.
00:18:29
Speaker
I think it's important to simply use Paul's language here. That the Hebrew Bible, and we'd say by extension perhaps the New Testament too, is sourced from God in some way, and it's beneficial for teaching, for correction and instruction so that its readers can be mature.
00:18:46
Speaker
it doesn't say that the scriptures are a catalogued encyclopedia that answers all of our questions. You know, our scientific questions, our ethical questions, our theological questions. I think it's a major mistake when our respect for the Bible leads us to think the Bible teaches us everything about everything.
00:19:04
Speaker
I could provide countless examples, but one example is in church contexts where like psychology and therapy is sometimes downplayed because of an assumption that the Bible has all the answers.
00:19:16
Speaker
Well, it's cool to see that we hold the Bible in such high regard, right? But it's not cool to misinterpret it to be giving us psychological advice at every turn. it simply doesn't have much to offer in the realm of understanding brain science and hormones, for example.
00:19:32
Speaker
If we start looking for those answers in the Bible, I'm confident we'll find something. But at the expense of finding things that are legitimately found there. We have an amazing example of wisdom literature in Scripture in the Torah.
00:19:46
Speaker
Torah usually gets translated law. And think it may be easy to imagine that this must have functioned like a simple list of legal rules and punishments. However, when we look at the way the Torah was meant to be used and lived out, we see it's definitely not that simple.
00:19:59
Speaker
Torah wasn't meant to answer every legal question that ancient Israelites would have faced. Here in our context, here in America today, when we think of law, we're usually thinking of something called statutory law. yeah So in statutory law, for any behavior to be criminal, it needs to be described and organized so that when someone is convicted in our criminal system, they're convicted of a specific documented infraction of legal code.
00:20:20
Speaker
So everything from parking tickets to felonies, infractions are of specific listed laws with assigned penalties or maybe penalty ranges. However, that's not how Torah was meant to function.
00:20:31
Speaker
Ancient law codes were never intended to be comprehensive, covering every legal question that could arise. Ancient law codes were intended more as like a collection of model rulings.
00:20:42
Speaker
Basically, it's a list of examples of wise decisions that a judge could make. ah So Exodus 21, 33 through 34 says... says If anyone uncovers a pit or digs one and fails to cover it and an ox or a donkey falls into it, the one who opened the pit must pay the owner for the loss and take the dead animal in exchange.
00:21:02
Speaker
Now, the Torah doesn't give instructions for what to do if a person's sheep or camel or even child fell into an uncovered pit and was injured or killed. Good point. These laws weren't intended to be comprehensive. It's a model ruling.
00:21:15
Speaker
So the intention of ancient law codes was to serve as a sort of study guide so that usually it was like a king or judge could study these model rulings and develop the wisdom that they needed for issuing judgment in all of the occurrences of life, ones that aren't going to match the laws given.
00:21:31
Speaker
So for an ancient Israelite, that means they're going to develop wisdom to be able to make rulings in cases that don't neatly match one of the 613 laws given in the Hebrew Bible. Or depending on how you count.
00:21:45
Speaker
next episode Being able to grow wisdom through studying scripture makes studying it far more valuable than simply memorizing a set of legal statutes. Yeah, because it can then be applicable to all kinds of contexts.
00:21:58
Speaker
In far more than just 613 specific cases, yeah there's a wisdom to be developed so that you can act in accordance with God's desires in everything that you do in life.
00:22:10
Speaker
Psalm 1, says, Blessed is the one whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night. This isn't really foreign to us, actually. Like, not only do we have statutory law, but we also have judicial rulings, like case law, that set precedents for our society.
00:22:30
Speaker
They aren't by any means comprehensive, but when situations arise, courts will tend to defer to a previous ruling on a similar sort of case. Though punishments in proportion to the crime aren't clearly articulated as with statutory law, these judicial rulings still do have a binding effect and they do guide the entire culture or the entire community because to act in discordance with the judicial rulings could result in like a lawsuit or something like that. And usually people want to avoid those.
00:23:01
Speaker
Yeah, they kind of act to provide some means of consistency for application of the law. When you look at ancient law codes outside of Israel, we have law codes that have been discovered, like Hammurabi's Code.
00:23:13
Speaker
And these were meant for a select individual a group. So usually it was the king or a few select appointed people who were going to need wisdom so they could act as judges on the king's behalf.
00:23:25
Speaker
One of the really unique things about the Torah is that it was to be read to the full assembly of the people. This law code for the Israelites was meant to help all the people develop the wisdom to know how to think and live according to God's design.
00:23:40
Speaker
Deuteronomy 4, 6-8 says this about the law. Observe them carefully, for this will show your wisdom and understanding to the nations, who will hear about all these decrees and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.
00:23:54
Speaker
What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near us whenever we pray to him? And what other nation is so great has to have such righteous decrees and laws as this body of laws I am setting before you today?
00:24:08
Speaker
So we can see the Torah was meant to help all Israel, all of its people live in a wise way so that other nations would see their wisdom and recognize the greatness of Yahweh. Mm-hmm.
00:24:19
Speaker
Wisdom is about learning to live according to God's design within ah specific context. And the 613 laws given to Israel are clearly intended to help them learn wisdom in an ancient Near Eastern context. Yeah, yeah. They don't talk much about a modern world. They give them wisdom in their context. Exactly. Exactly.
00:24:40
Speaker
So when we read in Exodus 23, 19, do not cook a young goat in its mother's milk. The instructions of passages like these are for wisdom in an ancient Near Eastern context. Somehow, the wisdom of that commandment was intended to help develop wisdom in the ancient Israelite people that would make their Moabite and Edomite neighbors recognize the greatness of Yahweh.
00:25:01
Speaker
I don't fully understand how or why that works, but I trust that it did. Yeah. If we try to read the Torah as like prescriptive legislation to all of God's followers, we quickly start running into issues.
00:25:15
Speaker
Much of the law pertains to sacrificial and temple functions that require a temple with a sacrificial system. A lot of the law is clearly specific to ancient Near Eastern context. I've refrained from cooking a goat in its mother's milk, but that hasn't caused any of my neighbors to start coming to church with me.
00:25:31
Speaker
Dang it. To treat the Torah as prescriptive legislation for us, you've got to start doing some funky moves. You've got to start dividing the law into the parts that were for everyone and the parts that were just for Israel.
00:25:44
Speaker
There's a division of the law, sometimes, into ceremonial, civil, and moral components. This is a division that was developed in the 13th century, and it's not a division that's described in Scripture.
00:25:55
Speaker
It requires a very complicated and convoluted way of understanding each of these laws that I think largely misses the purpose of the law. The purpose was wisdom for the ancient Israelites for God's glory.
00:26:07
Speaker
This desire that I think is a good desire, but the desire to make the Torah more applicable and relevant can actually impede our ability to read and understand it well. Yeah, absolutely. It can force us to start using it for things it was not intended for and maybe miss out on the things that it was intended for. Yeah, it continues to shock me how often I hear people, even my friends, refer to the moral law, civil law and ceremonial law as if this division of the Torah is real.
00:26:37
Speaker
It's not real. It's made up. It often gets used just to justify why some commands are dogmatized for a community while others can be disregarded.
00:26:48
Speaker
And this is damaging not only to the text, obviously, but also to the community under whose thumb these commands are arbitrarily enforced. A community's esteemed leader will end up being the arbitrator of what commands are moral and which ones are ceremonial and which ones are civil. And therefore,
00:27:07
Speaker
which ones his followers need to obey in alignment with his personal preferences. Usually ah can't believe how influential this division has become amongst Protestants in our country, at least.
00:27:18
Speaker
It really bothers me. Maybe it's a pet peeve. Just slicing the law up and throwing it in three baskets and deciding which ones we want to keep which ones we want to disregard. It just bothers me how that methodology, even beyond this specific way of slicing up the Torah, how this methodology ends up just abusing people.
00:27:38
Speaker
And people with power or relevance will just use these sort of divisions to choose what type of behaviors are fine and which ones aren't. It's kind of funny, but it also can be abusive to people. And I've seen it abuse people. So I guess that's why it bothers me so much.
00:27:56
Speaker
Yeah. It also definitely strips the Torah of that ability it has to, I think, speak wisdom into our lives today. When we understand the purpose of the Torah, developing wisdom for God's glory, i think that actually allows it to be way more applicable to us today.
00:28:12
Speaker
we can actually use it for the very same purpose it was given to the Israelites, for developing wisdom. Now, sitting here in the United States in 2025, we've got some extra work to do to understand its context and the way that it challenged some of the cultural norms and expectations of its day.
00:28:27
Speaker
But if we're willing to do that bit, we can use the law to develop the wisdom that's applicable to everything we do today. This is actually very much the way the Pharisees of Jesus' day and in rabbinic tradition use the Torah.
00:28:42
Speaker
Studying and debating the Torah, adapting interpretations to new contexts, is very much considered the proper ongoing use of the Torah. Yeah, yeah, this is common, yeah. The Jewish Mishnah and Talmud are largely this recorded wisdom of the discussion around an interpretation of the Torah for the purposes of developing wisdom.
00:29:02
Speaker
<unk> Right. Caitlin Shess noted, The Bible is not a riddle to be solved or a mess of historical stories we need to sift through to find gems of truth underneath. Scripture is given to us as a gift of particularity, a word given to a particular people at a particular place.
00:29:18
Speaker
The miracle is not that we can get rid of that particularity, but that we are grafted into it.
00:29:57
Speaker
When we approach scriptures with a desire to understand them within their own peculiar context, we seek to understand the questions the scriptural authors wanted to ask that we can understand the answers they give, it can start to feel different.
00:30:10
Speaker
In fact, one of the things it can do is make us ask ourselves, why were we so concerned with the questions that we are so accustomed to bringing into the text? Becoming aware of why we try to read the Bible the way we do can be a really uncomfortable and sometimes reflective practice. Yeah, it tells us a lot about our desires.
00:30:28
Speaker
It tells us a lot about what we want to be true so badly and potentially why. it tells us a lot about if there's a lot we've got riding on these questions sociologically, economically, etc. Yeah, it can force us to challenge a lot of the cultural assumptions that we so naturally just take for granted.
00:30:48
Speaker
I think one really useful example of this in church history is looking at the way Christians have approached questions around slavery. If you bring into the text the question, should we have slaves?
00:31:00
Speaker
You'll find it's hard to get a clear, direct, and consistent answer from the Bible. God freed Israel from slavery in Egypt, but there are laws for how the Israelites are to treat their foreign slaves. There systems in place to prevent long-term slavery of Israelites specifically, and in the New Testament, Paul wrote that in Christ there is no slave or free, but when he gave instructions to slave owners, he didn't simply demand, free them!
00:31:22
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the fact that he gives instructions to slave owners and says anything but freedom is concerning, isn't it? Yeah. Christians wrestling with the question, should we have slaves?
00:31:34
Speaker
Would have loved for Paul's letter to Philemon to make a clear rebuttal of all slavery, renouncing it completely. But that's not what he did. So maybe that's not the question we're supposed to take to scripture regarding slavery.
00:31:45
Speaker
Maybe you we're supposed to ask, how should we treat our slaves? Yeah. If that's the question you bring, it's actually easier to get a more consistent and direct answer out of the Bible. Yeah. Though there's a bit of complexity around who should be slaves.
00:31:57
Speaker
Actually, if you take all that freedom in Christ language in the New Testament and platonize that into being about an afterlife, you can get a pretty consistent answer here to that question. The Bible teaches we should generally treat our slaves with respect, limiting how much we beat them, treating them at least slightly better than just property.
00:32:13
Speaker
Unfortunately, this is not just a hypothetical interpretation. right But is that the question the biblical authors were trying to answer? If you look at Paul's writings within his own context, you'll find the question he's focused on when he addresses these churches isn't, should Christians have slaves? Or even, how should a Christian treat their slaves?
00:32:33
Speaker
The question that he answers is, how should Christ transform this relationship between slave and master? Mm-hmm. In the household code sections of his letters, Paul addresses slaves directly.
00:32:46
Speaker
That was a really unusual thing to do in that time yeah day. And rather than ordering Philemon what to do, although Paul reminds him that he has the authority to do so if he wanted, he seeks a non-coercive transformation of the relationship between Philemon and his slave Onesimus.
00:33:02
Speaker
Paul wants Philemon to consider Onesimus a dear brother in Christ. What would that mean for the nature of their relationship going forward? Could Onesimus remain Philemon's slave if he really came to be considered a dear brother? Yeah, brothers aren't seemingly subject to brothers, right?
00:33:19
Speaker
It seems like a transformative thought. But addressing those questions about slavery don't seem to be Paul's main concern. Later Christians, in contexts where they were facing systemic questions around race, understandably wanted clear answers to their questions around slavery.
00:33:35
Speaker
Does Scripture give a simple, direct answer to their questions? No, it usually doesn't. But that doesn't mean that Scripture doesn't provide wisdom for those situations. Paul's posture in dealing with people within the slavery situation is to first look at the way that Christ transforms the relationships, breaking down walls of hostility and subordination within the church community.
00:33:58
Speaker
I suspect that if we could sit down with Paul today and ask him, what do you think is going to happen to slave owner relationships within the church when this shift in attitude that you're prescribing occurs? I think he'd probably tell us, yeah, the slave owner relationships are basically going to dissolve or at least become so transformed that they're unrecognizable to the world around.
00:34:17
Speaker
I think Paul's approach to this is really interesting. It shows us so much more than just some doctrine of slavery. It's an example of Paul working out the transformation of Christ within a specific cultural context.
00:34:30
Speaker
His focus isn't just on what's supposed to happen within this slavery system or within the bigger world, but his focus is on how transformation begins within the relationships in the church. Yeah. And the power of that is it then gives us wisdom for situations beyond the issue of slavery into all different contexts where there potentially oppression and different things like that going on.
00:34:53
Speaker
It's got a word to say about all those things if we, again, follow Paul's line of questions and his line of answers. I think it can be really humbling to consider that a lot of the quote-unquote normal systems that me and you take part in today will probably be universally condemned by followers of Jesus in a thousand years.
Ethical Norms and Cultural Context
00:35:13
Speaker
It doesn't take very much creativity to imagine future Christians being abhorred to our misuse of fossil fuels and irresolved to switch to sustainable and carbon neutral resources.
00:35:26
Speaker
Because they're obviously going to be thinking about these things from the vantage point of having suffered the extreme consequences of our 20th and 21st century environmental degradation that leads to the inevitable mass migration, resource scarcity, and ultimately warfare and large scale casualty events caused by the decisions of everyday Christians like me and you.
00:35:49
Speaker
We gleefully participate in exploitative and unsustainable economic practices. We're all a product of our time and our place. And I think we can all be forgiven a little bit for being somewhat blinded to our ethical judgments simply by that which is normal to us, by the water we swim in.
00:36:10
Speaker
think Paul and the apostles can also be forgiven too for not quite addressing all their issues head on as we would see it. But I think their thought process, having been informed by the life and ministry of Jesus, can still be very powerful and can provide us a transformative sort of wisdom for our issues today.
00:36:32
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's wisdom to be gleaned from the approach Paul takes. I think we today tend to approach the issues in the world almost always from a large systemic viewpoint.
00:36:44
Speaker
Like an abstract one? Yeah. We want to know what sort of systems need to move, what sort of practices need to end, what sort of legislation needs to be implemented or removed to make the kind of changes that we want to make. Yeah.
00:36:58
Speaker
Paul is happy to sit down and write a letter saying, Philemon, this is how you need to treat Onesimus. I think he trusts that when those sorts of changes start to happen relationship by relationship, community by community, that eventually the systemic stuff will work itself out.
00:37:15
Speaker
use uses much more of a bottom-up approach to addressing the issues of the world than attempting to force some kind of a solution top-down. That's clearly true. i just wanted to provide some space to for him not even maybe having the ability to conceptualize the issue as we do today.
00:37:34
Speaker
So whether we want to label it ignorance is the water he was swimming in That's why he didn't address it the way I would like it to be addressed. Or it was an intentional bottom up approach that you're kind of describing or maybe a little bit of both.
00:37:48
Speaker
In any case, the wisdom being offered there can be transformative if we let it be. Yeah, I think this example should convict me to look at the culture I'm in here and now and ask, where does this context make it acceptable and normal for me to take advantage of someone else? yeah but Where do I need to start making the changes and start treating someone like a beloved brother?
00:38:12
Speaker
To your earlier point that Paul seems to be taking issues like at ah at a very practical level first and letting them then play out until it gets to the macro scale. I mean, to use Jesus's language, maybe it's like a mustard seed approach. Like here, the kingdom of God is here, like now. And you guys, like in my 12 disciples, I'm here and you are my people and let it kind of take off from there.
00:38:38
Speaker
If Paul's approach is similar in ethics too, like, oh, how about you fix this relationship? How about be transformed by the power of the freeing gospel of Jesus here? And let's see what that does for not only you and the people you're interacting with, but your family and your community, et cetera, et cetera. Who knows what that seed will grow into?
00:38:59
Speaker
I think it's actually more challenging to take that individuated, bottom-up approach than it is to take a top-down, systematic approach on every ethical issue. Because what ends up happening oftentimes in my life is, because I'm a little bit apologetically inclined, that's just how my mind works. I want answers. I want things to make sense.
00:39:19
Speaker
So if I have things tidied up from a systemic level, if my abstract ideas about God and about ethics are make sense more or less and they're consistent, all of a sudden I feel pretty good about myself.
00:39:32
Speaker
And I actually don't self-examine the million different small things I do or I'm a part of. For example, like, yeah, I'm against slavery. I can feel pretty good about myself for that and just be content with that.
00:39:45
Speaker
I'm not bad like those people in ancient times or those people today that take part in those systems. Now, that's not a conscious thought, but like genuinely that thought pattern precludes me from doing the self-examination that's required of me.
00:40:01
Speaker
I think we might see this sort of thing in culture with like ah cancel culture type stuff. It's not like a partisan phenomenon anymore, meaning it's not like just the left or just the right that does It it seems like everyone does it like purity tests and things like that.
00:40:17
Speaker
That stuff is all just very, very lazy. It's basically just saying, oh, I said the right things or I have the right ideological commitments on this macro scale.
00:40:27
Speaker
Therefore, I'm safe. I'm in the in-group. It doesn't tell you anything about how you need to transform your life, how you need to realign your value systems. It's not challenging at all. You just code correctly and you're safe within that community.
00:40:41
Speaker
Yeah. The sort of top-down solutions to the issues often don't place a whole lot of demand on any of the individuals. No, it's very easy. It bothers me to some degree listening to people in our country claim persecution or whatever and act like they're taking a stand when they're just taking the same approach and spouting the same nonsense as literally 50% of the population is spouting. like It is not courageous to be a right-wing culture warrior.
00:41:09
Speaker
It's not. That's comfortable because a whole lot of people are doing that too. Mm-hmm. You are on the in-group with that group of people. And the same can be said on the other side as well. But like, it is not courageous to engage in the culture wars.
00:41:25
Speaker
It's intellectually lazy, maybe worse.
Personal Transformation vs. Systemic Change
00:41:28
Speaker
Yeah. It doesn't require a whole lot to virtue signal or to vote to support a movement. What does that mean? Besides, oh, yes, if I'm asked, if I support it, I will say yes.
00:41:38
Speaker
yeah All of those things demand so little. When Paul writes these letters to the other churches, he's not giving them a list of the movements they're supposed to support or the ways they're supposed to lobby their local provincial governors to make specific changes.
00:41:53
Speaker
His first demand is always on how are you loving one another? Yeah, he says, Jesus came to disarm the rulers and authorities and the powers that control our societies.
00:42:05
Speaker
How are you going to live in light of that reality? What does that mean for you as a community to not live in the patterns of the world any anymore, but to genuinely treat other image bearers of God as dear family members?
00:42:18
Speaker
And that's that's hard. it It's so much easier to just deal with things on a systemic level sometimes. Yeah. When Christians choose the way they want to read scripture, they often avoid a reading that's going to actually challenge them to live differently.
00:42:31
Speaker
Caitlin Schess again wrote, If there's any universal moral prescription in scripture, it's the one white slaveholders and slavery defenders most often missed. Sin will warp our moral intuition and biblical interpretation.
00:42:45
Speaker
We need the stories of Scripture and the witness of marginalized and oppressed people today to help us see clearly and hear the word of the Lord in our particular time and place.
00:42:56
Speaker
What we'll find when we're seeking the wisdom of Scripture is that it's often going to force us to ask bigger and more uncomfortable questions than we may want to. Right. Yeah. That's the point.
00:43:07
Speaker
Continuing this quote, rather than focusing on literal interpretations of scripture we should examine the hermeneutics we're bringing to the text why do we prioritize this passage over this other one why do we emphasize what we emphasize ultimately the social gospel challenges us to take scripture seriously Does Jesus' ministry confront us with a radically different set of priorities than our own ministries?
00:43:30
Speaker
Does the communal life of Israel or the early church place an obligation on us to shape our lives differently? See, now we're getting into the conversations that we need to be having about the scriptures.
00:43:43
Speaker
Now we're talking not about factoids and like theories about this, that, and the other thing. Now we're talking about how we need to be, how we need to be transformed, how we need to be healed, and how we need to be healing agents in the world as part of God's restored creation.
00:44:03
Speaker
Like that's where the conversation needs to be. It does not and it should not be distracted by debating whether the Copernican model is taught in the scriptures or not.
00:44:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think reading scripture for wisdom really does provide us the best, most robust way of actually using scripture to our advantage when we interact with the world and we seek to live out God's design.
00:44:28
Speaker
I think what we need to learn to do is to just simply be aware of the questions that we're bringing into the Bible. When someone poses their question to take into the text, just take a second and ask yourself, is this a question that the biblical authors were addressing?
00:44:41
Speaker
Yeah. If the question is one being asked in response to the work of scientists or of Copernicus or Darwin or anyone else from recent history, you can be pretty certain that the answer is no If the question is about how to respond to specific technological or cultural phenomena from recent history, you can be pretty certain that the answer is no.
00:45:01
Speaker
Yeah, what does the Bible say about AI sexbots? Well, nothing. But what does the Bible say about human identity and embodiment and teleology?
00:45:12
Speaker
Well, a good bit, actually. but We can take that wisdom to help us form a useful and life-giving ethical philosophy of AI sexbot use or non-use. Often, we're going to find that the Bible is not directly answering the questions we have, so we should be wary of the desire to dig verses out of context that can be read as if they answer those questions.
00:45:33
Speaker
We should be consistently looking to contextualized readings of Scripture and the biblical metanarrative for the wisdom we need to address these questions. The questions that we face in apologetics are important, but we have to be careful that we don't allow those good questions start to frame our Bible reading. yeah Rather, we need to allow our careful reading and study of the Bible to give us the ability to answer those questions wisely.