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10: (Part 1) How To Read The Bible Well With Dr. Stephen Burnhope
204 Plays4 years ago
The Bible is the next topic the Normal Goes A Long Way team has chosen to discuss as part of Jill Devine’s faith journey. Laura Fleetwood asked Dr. Stephen Burnhope to share his knowledge about the Bible. Dr. Burnhope received a Master of Arts degree in biblical interpretation from The London School of Theology before completing a PhD in systematic theology at King's College London. He was formerly Senior Pastor of Aylesbury Vineyard Church in the UK and is currently a writer, speaker and church consultant, especially within the Vineyard movement. Dr. Burnhope is the author of “How to Read the Bible Well: What It Is, What It Isn't, and How To Love It (Again)”:
“How to Read the Bible Well” takes on the big questions about the Bible that we've always wanted to ask. What do people mean when they say it's the Word of God? In what way, exactly? How can an ancient world text be offering supposedly timeless truths? Can we really take what "the Bible says" as authoritative for life today? Isn't it obviously sexist and outdated? Do we have to believe in Adam and Eve, and the world being made in six days? Why did God command genocide in the Old Testament? Are people really going to burn in hell for eternity? Why is there evil and suffering in the world? And, how can we explain the Big Story of the Bible, from cover to cover, in ways that will make sense to people today? Stephen Burnhope suggests there are very good answers to all of these questions and more--once we know how to read the Bible well!
In this episode, Laura and Dr. Burnhope begin the conversation about how to read the Bible.
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Transcript
Introduction: Faith and Inclusivity
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, 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.
00:00:40
Speaker
This is episode 10 of Normal Goes a Long Way. I'm your host Jill Devine. We will be spending the next few episodes covering the topic of the Bible.
Focus on the Bible Series
00:00:53
Speaker
Laura Fleetwood bringing in some experts to discuss this and up first, Dr. Burnhope.
00:00:59
Speaker
Welcome to Normal Goes a Long Way. This is Laura Fleetwood, and I am in the studio today virtually with Dr. Steven Bernhope. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Bernhope. Thank you so much. It's great to be with you.
00:01:15
Speaker
This is a highly anticipated episode I want you to know. As we've been starting this podcast journey, Jill has started at the beginning with her faith journey asking the basic questions.
Dr. Bernhope's Faith Journey
00:01:29
Speaker
Who is God?
00:01:30
Speaker
How do I become a Christian? What does it mean to live out my Christian faith? So we have had guests on the podcast to talk about these things in normal language to people that don't really have a faith background. And as you can imagine, the topic of the Bible
00:01:49
Speaker
comes up so often and brings with it so many questions. So I'm so just happy that you're here today to give us, I think, a brilliant overview of the Bible based on what I've read in your book, which is called How to Read the Bible Well. So would you take a moment to kind of introduce yourself to our audience a little bit about what your work is and maybe how this
00:02:17
Speaker
particular book that we're going to talk about today came to be. Yes, certainly. Happy to do that. So I guess my personal journey as a Christian began about 40 something years ago when I was a young teenager.
00:02:36
Speaker
And I guess I didn't really particularly understand very much about Christianity at that point any more than anyone else does if they don't come from a Christian kind of family background as I didn't. But as I got involved with charismatic Christianity over the years and in church and so on and met and married my wife and so on, I guess over the years and probably this was
00:03:01
Speaker
10, 20 years in, from then onwards, I began to have a lot of questions about faith. And in particular, it seemed that questions weren't really welcomed or even allowed. It was almost as if there was some contradiction between having faith and trusting God and having questions, which seemed to me to be a little odd, but I lived with it for a while until it became really quite pervasive.
00:03:31
Speaker
I realized that I had to get some answers to some of these questions.
00:03:36
Speaker
The result of that was my wife was actually doing a theology degree at the time, and I thought, I must get into this for myself. And so I ended up, long story short, doing a master's degree in biblical interpretation, and then subsequently a PhD in systematic theology, because I believed when I started that journey that the answers that I wanted for some of these questions that I had were out there somewhere,
00:04:02
Speaker
within the world of academia, but they just weren't very clear from the point of view of the evangelical world that I was part of. That's amazing. And so that journey has culminated in more studies, right? And now, are you teaching? Are you a pastor at a church? What is your current role?
00:04:24
Speaker
Yes, well Lynn, my wife and I were pastors of a large vineyard church in the UK in a place called Aylesbury, which is roughly halfway between
Normalizing Faith Questions
00:04:34
Speaker
London and Oxford. And we did that for about seven or eight years and we retired from that last year. So now I'm doing church consulting, doing some speaking and writing and so on and having lots of fun doing that. Good for you. Well, I for one am glad that you
00:04:53
Speaker
took that journey those years ago and pursued those questions. That actually is what this podcast is all about, about making it normal to ask the questions about faith that we all have because faith is, you know, it's complicated and it wouldn't be faith if it didn't have some mysteriousness to it as well. So how about
Understanding the Bible's Complexity
00:05:16
Speaker
it? We start like this. Let's pretend that you are on airplane and you sit down next to somebody
00:05:23
Speaker
And you don't know their background, if they're Christian or not, if they know about God or not. And you are asked to tell them, what is the Bible?
00:05:36
Speaker
What a great question. How long a journey do we have at London to San Francisco or something like that? Because it's actually not an easy question. I guess if I was better at answering it, I could probably simplify it a little bit. But one of the problems is
00:05:57
Speaker
Firstly, there's the problem that everyone comes to that question with some kind of idea in their head already about whether they're Christian or not in terms of background. But also the way that Christians often present what the Bible is tends to make it harder to grasp rather than easier to grasp. For example, the most common way the Bible is spoken of by Christians is as the word of God.
00:06:26
Speaker
very often that's with a capital W. So there are certain implications in that phrase that are not necessarily terribly helpful when it comes to what the Bible is. I mean, I guess I would start with the idea that it is a significant, important foundational communication from God to us.
00:06:52
Speaker
which he delivered to us through human writers and human stories. So in a sense, it is a combination of the story of people and the story of God, all kind of intertwined together. But that Bible was, of course, written and came about in a particular historical context and circumstances, which requires that when we read it, we have to understand a little something about those circumstances
00:07:20
Speaker
in order to be able to grasp not just what it was saying then, but what it may also be saying to us today. And that, of course, is the challenge of biblical interpretation and biblical application.
00:07:32
Speaker
Yes, and I'd love to just read to our audience the back of your book because I think it summarizes so well what the book is about and also verbalizes the questions that so many of us have. So it says, how to read the Bible well takes on the big questions about the Bible that we've always wanted to ask. What do people mean when they say it's the Word of God? In what way exactly?
00:07:59
Speaker
How can an ancient world text be offering supposedly timeless truths? Can we really take what the Bible says, in quotations, as authoritative for today's life? Isn't it obviously sexist and outdated? Do we have to believe in Adam and Eve and the world being made in six days? Why did God command genocide in the Old Testament? Are people really going to burn in hell for eternity?
00:08:25
Speaker
Why is there evil and suffering in the world? And how can we explain the big story of the Bible from cover to cover in ways that will make sense to people today? Stephen Bernhope suggests that there are very good answers to all of these questions and more once we know how to read the Bible well.
00:08:45
Speaker
Well, if that doesn't make you want to read this book, I don't know what would. But what I loved about reading it is that you really did tackle every single one of those questions, starting with this whole concept of what do we mean when it says that the Bible is the word of God. And I loved how you related the Bible being both divine and human.
00:09:15
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to the life of Jesus because Jesus was both divine and human.
00:09:23
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And so I wonder if you can tell our audience a little bit about how that can help us make sense of the Bible when we think of it in terms of being both human and divine. So I guess one of the challenges we have with the Bible and a challenge we also have with Jesus and which many Christians really struggle with is how we relate the divine aspect of Jesus being the Son of God
00:09:53
Speaker
with Jesus being fully and completely human like us. Scripture makes that clear. Our doctrine of Jesus, our framework for understanding Jesus, if you will, makes clear that he was both fully human and fully God, which is very difficult for us to get our heads around.
Cultural Context and Interpretation
00:10:13
Speaker
What tends to happen with Christians is that we, I think, default towards more God and less human.
00:10:23
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I think we feel that with our friends, the job is to be able to persuade them that Jesus is not just an ordinary human being. Jesus was the Son of God. And the same thing really happens, I think, with the Bible. We think that we need to big it up as being God's Word, emphasis on God.
00:10:46
Speaker
rather than just human words. So we end up pitching the two as if they're in competition with each other.
00:10:54
Speaker
And although there's a sense of mystery involved in relation to both Jesus and the Bible as both words of God or word of God and of man, we've got to somehow deal with that tension. We've got to actually take an interest in that tension. And we have to ask ourselves how the humanity in the text, and indeed the humanity in Jesus,
00:11:20
Speaker
contributes to our understanding of the Bible and of Jesus. So we've got to figure out, and this isn't maybe as simple as it sounds, figure out in what ways the humanity and the divinity are both fully present. Now that doesn't mean that we start dividing Jesus up into divine bits and human bits, nor do we do that with the Bible.
00:11:45
Speaker
But we have to understand that the Bible was given to us within that particular historical and cultural context that I was speaking about earlier. And to understand what it meant then to the original authors and the original audience is critical.
00:12:05
Speaker
to understand before we start thinking about how we apply that to ourselves now because the Bible has timeless elements in it but it also has time-bound cultural elements in it which we need to be aware of.
00:12:18
Speaker
And that is I think the crux of it right there is that so often we pick up the Bible, especially the Old Testament. And it's confusing because there's all these rules and there's all these stories and you go into some of the
00:12:36
Speaker
The times when it sounds like God is ordering genocide of an entire population of people, men, women, and children. And I hadn't really thought before about the fact that the person who was writing those stories were the people who collected them over the years.
00:13:00
Speaker
They said that God said this, right? But in the book, you go into how really when we understand what God says to us, it's not an audible voice. It's a personal thing.
00:13:18
Speaker
we understand that through our own lens, through our own perspective. So can you talk a little bit in that time about how the people of the Old Testament thought about God and how that played into some of those references about God saying to do this and to do that in ways that we think that is not the God I know?
00:13:43
Speaker
Yes, certainly. Let me say one thing just to begin with. One of the difficulties in terms of how we think about what the Bible is, is that because of this phrase, the Word of God, which is very similar to the words of God,
00:13:59
Speaker
And of course, the Bible includes some of the words of God, sometimes quoted, sometimes not. There's a tendency to think of it as if it is just a series of facts or statements or technical term propositions about God and human life and the way things are that have come to us directly from God with no cultural filter or no cultural context through which they've come.
00:14:30
Speaker
And so that tendency to think that it's all God speaking is an assumption about the nature of the Bible.
00:14:39
Speaker
which, of course, is true and not true in the sense that, for example, the vast majority of the Bible is narrative, what we would call stories. And we have to ask ourselves, well, how are those supposed to teach? Because if there aren't propositions or factual statements or commandments in those stories, then what is the point of the story in terms of teaching us?
00:15:06
Speaker
So we have to actually think about how stories teach as a separate question to this idea of the Word of God. So when it comes down to then these difficult texts and the context in which people were hearing from God,
00:15:24
Speaker
We need to, and I'd really encourage people to read the book on this point because it's very, very hard to grasp just with a few sentences conversationally. We have to understand how people would have heard God or the gods.
00:15:42
Speaker
In the ancient world, the assumption was the opposite of our world today. So the assumption was that God or the gods, depending on who you were, which kind of group you were, whether you were Israel or one of the pagan nations, you would see God or the gods as intrinsically involved in everything that happened. You would be giving them credit or blame and that
00:16:09
Speaker
is both good and bad. In our world, we give God or the gods virtually no credit for anything.
00:16:15
Speaker
We might blame them occasionally if we're Richard Dawkins, but we're a bit inconsistent in that. So the supernatural worldview is permeated throughout the Bible in a way that just doesn't exist today. So that's the first thing that inevitably the people of the ancient world would see as obvious, in quotes, obvious that God or the gods were behind everything.
00:16:45
Speaker
And therefore, they would also believe that their God or gods was with them when it came to fighting their enemies, that their God or gods wanted them to do to conquered peoples the stuff that obviously all victors would do within their world. And therefore, for us to be evaluating the way they were hearing God, in inverted commas and understanding God,
00:17:13
Speaker
the way that people do today is to be anachronistic, is putting modern ideas back into the text and judging the text as if it was something that it is not.
00:17:27
Speaker
One sentence that I have underlined here from this chapter that you're talking about, the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament, it says, we worship a timeless God, but the biblical characters had a time-bound relationship with Him, rooted in the times in which they lived.
00:17:47
Speaker
That stood out to me as a very important way to filter our understanding of the Bible. God hasn't changed, right?
00:18:01
Speaker
but the way in which he could communicate with people throughout time has changed because we have learned so much, we have evolved so much. And you talk about the similarity of how God interacted with his people throughout time almost as how it's different for us when we communicate with a child versus when we communicate with an adult. Can you explain a little bit more about
00:18:29
Speaker
about that, that might help us understand the ways that God has interacted with humanity throughout time. Yes, sure. So if we go back to the earliest Bible times, the early part of the Old Testament, what we're seeing through those stories and through that timeline as it develops,
00:18:49
Speaker
is an emerging understanding of what God is like, starting with virtually no idea about what God is like with Abraham and Moses. And when Moses first encounters God, he says, paraphrasing, excuse me, but which God are you? Can you tell me your name so that I can go and tell the people of Israel which God is sending me?
00:19:14
Speaker
And that's quite amusing when you think about it because we tend to think that the understanding that Moses had or Abraham had or King David had or Isaiah had or whomever is basically the same understanding of God that we have today.
Reinterpreting Through Jesus' Life
00:19:29
Speaker
or even that the disciples had or that the Apostle Paul had. So we tend to read in because we think of it as one whole story and we have the whole Bible, we can look to things in the New Testament to help us to understand the God of the Old Testament. They didn't have that. They only had what was in front of them at the time. And so we see this emerging story and we see people through that story getting God right sometimes and getting God wrong sometimes.
00:19:58
Speaker
getting what he's like right at times. So some of the Psalms, for example, beautifully accurate in terms of what God is like. And then there's other statements, including in the Psalms, that are a bit embarrassing. You say, no, our God isn't like that. No, you got that wrong. But if we think of it as essentially as the Bible,
00:20:19
Speaker
being propositional truth, then we'll somehow want to try and get our heads around saying, well, it must all be true as stated rather than engaging with it and having a conversation with it and indeed at times even challenging it.
00:20:34
Speaker
Now what I'm saying here is not about disbelieving the Bible or rubbishing the Bible or saying that it's just a human production or anything disparaging like that. I'm an evangelical and I'm speaking with evangelical understandings of the Bible as the Word of God.
00:20:55
Speaker
What I'm saying is it is a question of how it is the Word of God and how we are supposed to engage with it, what it's there to teach us, what God wants us to do in terms of having a conversation with that Bible.
00:21:09
Speaker
It's interesting to me how toward the end of your book, you talk about, okay, we seem to have these different perspectives of God from the Old Testament and the New Testament. You know, in Jesus, he is
00:21:28
Speaker
loving and kind and he says there are just mainly two commandments that matter most and that is to love God and love one another, right? And then we have this God in the Old Testament that is portrayed oftentimes in war and you know people saying that the wiping out of a nation or whatever was from God and you kind of wrap it up
00:21:55
Speaker
at the end by using those two commandments from Jesus as a filter to help us have this conversation with the Bible, to kind of put these lenses on through which to see everything that we read. Can you speak a little bit to that? Because I think that could be really helpful for people. Yes, certainly. And this brings me back to just to that last point where I was saying that
00:22:22
Speaker
We're not saying that the Bible and in particular the Old Testament is just human words and human ideas and all that sort of thing. We're not diminishing it. What we're saying is that it's there for us to have a conversation with the text about
00:22:39
Speaker
what God is like and where people are getting him right and getting him wrong. And our lens for that, the basis upon which I say that, is Jesus. Because Jesus said, if anyone has seen me, then they've seen the Father. Jesus is what God is like, and because God doesn't change, Jesus is what God was always like.
00:23:04
Speaker
So any earlier understandings of what that God was like have to be rethought or questioned or reworked in the light of what we now know God to be like in the person of Jesus. So it's a very Jesus centric way of looking at the Old Testament.
00:23:24
Speaker
And it's on the basis of that that I say we need to engage with the texts too and the stories and so on and see where people were getting that God right and where they were getting him wrong on that journey of understanding. And then in terms of the great commandment as it's called, when Jesus was asked which is the most important commandment and he chose maybe slightly naughtily to give two instead of one.
00:23:51
Speaker
love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength. And, but he didn't stop there. He carried on and said, and the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself. So what he was really saying there was that, um, you can't say you love God unless you're loving your neighbor or put another way, God would define loving God to be, it would be loving our neighbor.
00:24:18
Speaker
And we see that in some of the parables, some of the stories Jesus tells where he basically says, look, don't say you love me if you're not loving my people, if you're not loving each other, because for him it was basically the same thing you defined the one through doing the other.
00:24:37
Speaker
And finally, just to say on that great commandment, I wasn't saying in the book that that was the only commandment that mattered. What I was saying is taking Jesus' words, which is to say that all of the other commandments, everything else God asks of us, depends on that one or two. And therefore they are, everything else is summed up in that. And in shorthand terms, one could say,
00:25:05
Speaker
The important thing is to focus on that commandment, on those commandments, and then the rest kind of takes care of itself if you're doing those fully and properly.
Next Episode Teaser
00:25:16
Speaker
Now is a really good stopping point in this conversation, but it will pick back up in episode 11. And here's a little tease of what you will hear in two weeks with Dr. Burnhope and Laura Fleetwood.
00:25:30
Speaker
And you kind of used this interesting metaphor for the Bible in the book where you talk about it kind of being like a video set, a box set. Basically, I've suggested that we think of it as like something on Netflix or whatever, where the first season is the Old Testament. The second season is the New Testament. And the third season is the time that we're in now as we're continuing to
00:25:57
Speaker
to write that story and be involved as the characters in that story.