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11: (Part 2) Understanding Different Scenes Within The Bible With Dr. Stephen Burnhope
205 Plays4 years ago
In Part 2 of the discussion between Laura Fleetwood and Dr. Stephen Burnhope, they continue to discuss the Bible and Dr. Burnhope’s book, “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 Isn't it obviously sexist and outdated?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!
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Transcript
Introduction to Jill Devine Media
00:00:00
Speaker
The following podcast is a Jill Devine media production. Christianity has
Real Conversations on Faith and Life
00:00:05
Speaker
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. This
Dr. Burnhope and Laura Fleetwood's Dialogue Continues
00:00:40
Speaker
is episode 11 of Normal Goes Along Way, and I am your host, Jill Devine. This is a continuation of the conversation between Dr. Burnhope
Creation Story: Theological vs Scientific Truths
00:00:49
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and Laura Fleetwood from episode 10.
00:00:53
Speaker
Before we move on to some questions I have about the New Testament, I wanted to go back because you spend quite a bit of time at the beginning of the book talking about Genesis.
00:01:03
Speaker
Yeah. And the story of creation of Adam and Eve. And I thought that it was fascinating how you said what the Bible is and what it isn't in terms of science and creation theory and all of that. So can you summarize a bit how you see the story of creation tying into the Bible and how you understand it?
00:01:32
Speaker
Sure. So again, it comes down to what the Bible is. And the question is whether the Bible is trying to tell us scientific truths, what we would call scientific truths, or whether it basically has no interest in scientific truths. I would say that the Bible is wanting to tell us theological truths, in other words, truths about us and truths about God.
00:02:02
Speaker
But it's not interested in telling us truths about science. So when it comes to the creation story, the focus of that story for the ancient world, for its original audience in Israel, the focus of that story would have been not how the world was made in a manufacturing sense,
00:02:25
Speaker
but why it was made and who made it and what the implications of that are for us as the people of the God who made it. Those are the questions that they were interested in and if you think about
00:02:41
Speaker
conveying scientific information. Firstly, what's the point? I mean, who cares about the manufacturing process, really? Israel didn't need to know about manufacturing processes when the world was made. And frankly, nor do we. What matters is God and us and our relationship to God and our relationship to his creation. So there's no point looking in Genesis for answers to questions that the text isn't trying to tell us.
Modern Science vs Biblical Text: A Mismatch?
00:03:11
Speaker
And I think that's helpful to know when as a Christian you get into a conversation with someone who is trying to use scientific proof to disprove the Bible, that a response could be as simple as saying, well, that's not why the Bible was written.
00:03:32
Speaker
the Bible wasn't written to explain science to us. So therefore, let's not even look to the Bible for that kind of information.
00:03:43
Speaker
And the reason that we even asked the question in the first place is because we live in an age of science. We live in modernity and moving now into post-modernity. And those are the questions of our age. We're inquisitive to know how things work. That's why we dissect dead frogs and dead rats on laboratory workbenches in college. And we try and figure out how things work by dissecting them up into the smallest possible parts.
Biblical Inerrancy: Modern Concepts and Implications
00:04:13
Speaker
And so the questions that we are interested in, we have a thirst for scientific knowledge, but those aren't the questions that the ancients were interested in, that they weren't relevant to them in the same way that they are to us. So again, if we ask the text the wrong questions, we'll derive the wrong answers from it. And also another problem that comes with this is the fact that because Christians have got kind of caught up with this concern about the Bible being inerrant,
00:04:42
Speaker
which is a very modern word. It's only the last 150 years or so that that idea has even been spoken about within evangelicalism. But because
Bible as a Box Set: A Narrative Model
00:04:53
Speaker
of this concern for the Bible being inerrant, there is now an assumption that it has to be inerrant in matters of science and biology, as well as matters of theology. Can you explain the definition of inerrant in case people aren't familiar with what that means?
00:05:12
Speaker
Yeah, so it means without error. Very simply, inerrant is without error. Then of course you come on to, well, what exactly do you mean by that? So for example, if we assume that the Bible has to be without error in terms of what appear to be scientific statements, then we're gonna have some difficulty dealing with how we understand nowadays the world creation was most likely made.
00:05:41
Speaker
So we've got a conflict immediately between a very simple six days of manufacture, so to speak, compared to what we now understand the scientists are telling us about the many, many millions of years over which creation came about. So is the Bible inherent in maths of science and biology? And the answer is fairly obviously no. And we don't need to look at
00:06:09
Speaker
the creation account for that, we can look at something like Jesus talking about the mustard seed being the smallest seed in the world, which it isn't. It was just the smallest seed that anyone knew about at the time. So it was true in relation to the people he was speaking to in terms of their understanding, but it wasn't a timeless scientific truth.
00:06:30
Speaker
The other problem with this line of thinking of how we think about things in the modern world is the fact that if the Bible was going to be intending to be timeless in relation to matters of science and biology and cosmology and so on, then which understanding in which era should the Bible have reflected?
00:06:55
Speaker
Should it have been the 19th century understandings of science and medicine and so on? Should it have been the 16th century of the reformers? Should it have been the second century? Should it be the 25th century? The point is that God had to communicate to people who lived in a particular period in terms that they could particularly relate to and understand in order for communication to take place.
00:07:23
Speaker
Because if God was somehow able to speak to the biblical writers in the language of the 25th century, with the concepts of the 25th century, then the original audience wouldn't have understood a word that they were talking about, let alone the writer himself. So, so much here comes down to how we understand that nature of the Bible,
00:07:47
Speaker
way in which communication happens and the way in which inevitably what God said had to be within a particular time period and a particular culture where certain ideas and understandings would be able to be related to by the people of that time.
Simplification and Context in Biblical Narratives
00:08:05
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 of videos or stories, right? And you segmented them into three sections.
00:08:24
Speaker
into three seasons. Tell us a little bit about how you came up with that model and what it is, and then I just have a few more questions about the New Testament. Sure. Well, I think one of the problems that people have, Christians have, is trying to figure out how the Bible is one coherent story from cover to cover.
00:08:47
Speaker
And so what generally happens is they simplify the first part in particular. And so they go with God making the world and God making people and Adam and Eve and so on. And then it all goes horribly wrong. There is this event called The Four, which dooms everybody, basically. We're all in trouble from that point onwards. And then, because not much of the rest makes a great deal of sense, they then fast forward or leapfrog
00:09:16
Speaker
from the fall through to the coming of Jesus. So you've got the problem in the Garden of Eden and then Jesus becomes the solution to that problem in first century Israel and the rest, as they say, is history. So they basically don't have very much to do with the Old Testament because they can't see how that is relevant to the whole story.
00:09:40
Speaker
And yet, of course, Jesus came into a concrete situation. He was born into a people of God. He was born into a tribe or a nation who had been trying to understand and trying to follow and trying to relate to this God for some thousands of years.
00:10:02
Speaker
And yet the Christian understanding kind of drops all of that and just goes straight from the Garden of Eden to Bethlehem in the Christmas story and can't really figure out how to make the in-between bit make sense, let alone how things are all going to turn out. So basically what I've been saying in the book is, look, as Christians, each of us should have a way of telling people what that big story is all about.
00:10:31
Speaker
It doesn't particularly matter exactly how you do it, but it should be able to explain a number of things such as
00:10:41
Speaker
where it all began, what went wrong, how Israel fits, how Jesus fits, how the church fits and how it's all going to end. Big questions like that should be developed within our telling of that story. And much as I would like to take all the credit for it, I've begged and borrowed and stolen some ideas from some other theologians who's thinking I like and I've kind of
00:11:04
Speaker
Repackaged and reimagined that and basically I've suggested that we think of it as like a box set like something on Netflix or whatever where the first season is the Old Testament the the second season is the New Testament and the third season is the time that we're in now as we're Continuing to to write that story and be involved as the characters in that story. I love thinking of it that way because I
00:11:33
Speaker
it makes it personal, right? And it is personal, but I think for many Christians, it's easy to think, oh, you know, the Bible was about then, it's what God did then. And then Jesus came and forget that he's still writing the story and that for some reason he wants us to be a part of it.
Why No Gospel of Jesus? Understanding Through Followers' Accounts
00:11:52
Speaker
So that's exciting to me about thinking, you know, you call season three the cast and we're all the cast of season three. All right, New Testament.
00:12:02
Speaker
There's so many things we could tackle here and we just don't have time. But I thought it was interesting how you brought up that there is no gospel of Jesus. And I had never thought of that before. Like we have these gospels of the people who walked with Him or who studied Him, but nowhere and at no time did Jesus sit down and write His story. Why do you think that is?
00:12:28
Speaker
Well, if we work backwards, clearly he intended that the way in which we understand him, the way in which the information that we have about him should be conveyed through his friends, through his followers.
00:12:47
Speaker
And obviously we have the so-called four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But as you say, we don't have an equivalent, the Gospel of Jesus. And I think that tells us a little bit about the Bible actually, that the easiest thing in the world would have been for Jesus to have written or dictated to a scribe in the way that Paul would have done with his letters. Everything that he wanted us to know,
00:13:16
Speaker
about everything and to do so in a way that would most certainly have qualified for the title, the word of God, because it would have been the words of Jesus, the son of God. And yet, for some reason, he didn't want us to think of it in that way or to, yeah, I think to think of it in that way, he wanted to have his followers recollections and memories
00:13:44
Speaker
given to us in the accounts that they gave us, including at times some slight differences in those accounts because that's how human eyewitness testimony works and how recollections work. We recall slightly different things in slightly different ways. We see significance in certain things that one of our friends or family might see different significance in.
00:14:08
Speaker
and so on. So I think it's really telling us something about the nature of the Word of God and how God wants us to relate to the whole of the Bible and indeed to the story of Jesus as well.
00:14:20
Speaker
And
Proof Texting: The Need for Context
00:14:21
Speaker
I think a lot about how people often take one verse from a chapter and they use that one verse to try to prove that something is true or isn't true. And I thought you did a brilliant job of sharing the importance of not doing that because first of all, if you take one sentence out of any kind of
00:14:49
Speaker
book, it can be taken out of context. But second of all, because the words in the Bible were written to a specific group of people who had a specific way of looking at the world and a specific base
00:15:09
Speaker
base of knowledge about what they knew about the world. And so, of course, it wouldn't make sense to just take a sentence and say that that proves that something is or isn't true. And you kind of go through that in several areas, whether women should be allowed to teach in the church, you talk a little bit about homosexuality, about heaven and hell.
00:15:35
Speaker
And I just want to encourage people to read the book because those sections are very, very well written and we don't have time to go in them. But can you just, is there anything I'm missing about that you want to say about that, about taking a verse and using that to try to be your proof that something is or isn't true based on the Bible? Yeah, well, I mean, this is what you've been describing as a practice that is called proof texting.
00:16:04
Speaker
In other words, you take a text, take an individual verse normally out of its context, and you use that to prove some supposed truth. And when Christians are inclined, as they occasionally do, to argue about something doctrinally, if they don't like what they're hearing, they will say, oh, yes, but what about such and such
00:16:30
Speaker
chapter this verse that, and as if, aha, there you go, that proves you're wrong. And of course, this is a really bad practice from the point of view of good biblical interpretation. Once you remove any text from its context, you have potential issues. And that's where bad interpretations come from most of the time. And context in this case doesn't simply mean
00:16:58
Speaker
a word within a sentence, within a verse, within a chapter, within a book. It also means the context within which the biblical writer was living and writing. To know what the context was is very important when it comes to understanding why that writer was writing and what in many cases they were actually writing about.
00:17:23
Speaker
we have to do a bit of historical reconstruction because the principle for applying the Bible today starts with understanding what it meant then. Only when we know what it meant then to the biblical writer and his audience can we begin to say the relevance of that verse, what it was saying then to today, what it is saying now. Does
Community Study for Better Bible Understanding
00:17:51
Speaker
that make sense?
00:17:52
Speaker
It does, it does. And I appreciate how you say that, you know, one of the most effective ways to do this, to interact with the Bible and study it and interpret it, is not to do it alone, but to do it
00:18:07
Speaker
in a group of people, which is lovely because that is what Jesus calls us to do, is to be a community of believers who follow Him and to wrestle with this stuff together. And that is what we're trying to do with this podcast. We're trying to do the wrestling and ask the questions. And as you say, that's what God wants us to do. He made us to have free will and to be curious and to want to
00:18:37
Speaker
know Him better and to do that, it takes work, right? It takes work. So thank you for being here and for just giving us a little glimpse of what you have learned and how you have wrestled with the Word of God. How can our listeners find your book and learn more about what you're doing today?
00:19:03
Speaker
The easiest way of finding it is on Amazon. Very easy to find there, just how to read the Bible well, or Stephen Bernhope, you find it either way. Alternatively, there's the publisher's website, which is Whipf & Stock, and it's available there as well.
00:19:22
Speaker
Amazing. Well, I encourage all of our listeners to get the book and to spend some time in it. Thank you, Dr. Burnhope. Is there anything as we wrap up here that you want to add, anything that you feel like I missed or that you wanted to clarify for our listeners? No, I don't think so, really. I loved your question. Some of them were quite difficult. They really made me think. But I guess maybe the overriding thing that I
Dr. Burnhope's Book: Re-benchmarking Bible Interpretation
00:19:51
Speaker
would like to say is that the place that I'm coming from with this book is not what's often called deconstruction, which is tearing stuff down and destroying years and years of thinking about
00:20:09
Speaker
the Bible or Christian faith or whatever. This is really all about trying to get us to re-benchmark how we understand it. So it's not in any way diminishing the Bible as the Word of God. I made that clear at the beginning. It's trying to understand
00:20:24
Speaker
how exactly, what exactly we mean by the Bible being the Word of God, and not how to ignore it or be selective in what we choose to take from it or whatever, but just how to read it well.
00:20:41
Speaker
and to be consistent in terms of how God would have us treat the whole of scripture taken in the round. So there's no deconstruction going on. There's no negativity towards the Bible. It's all about how we can understand it better. And that's reflected in the subtitle of the book, which is how to read the Bible well, what it is,
The Bible as a Diverse Library
00:21:07
Speaker
what it isn't and how to love it again because for many people they've fallen out of love with the Bible and yet I think that there's no need for that because if we understand it well then we will I think increasingly find ourselves loving it again.
00:21:24
Speaker
And I can attest, having read that, that you did that well. You, if anything, increased my respect for the Bible and got me excited to dive into it in a new way, in a deeper way than I have before. So thank you for that.
00:21:41
Speaker
Wonderful. Thank you. Okay. Well, our host Jill Devine has been taking notes throughout our conversation and in the bonus episode, she is going to ask Dr. Burnhope her questions from the perspective of somebody who hasn't spent a lot of time in the Bible, what she would like to know about how to read the Bible well. So join us for the next time when Jill takes the microphone.
00:22:08
Speaker
When I think about the Bible, where people can maybe think, oh, these are just all spiritual stories, but there's accounts of things that happened on ground, on soil. Does that make sense?
00:22:19
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. 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 because it's all bound together in one book nowadays. 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.