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12: Unwrapping The Bible With Dr. Meghan Larissa Good
348 Plays4 years ago
The topic of the Bible continues in this week’s episode with Laura Fleetwood and Dr. Meghan Larissa Good.
Dr. Meghan Larissa Good is the Teaching Pastor at Trinity Mennonite Church (Glendale, AZ) and author of The Bible Unwrapped: Making Sense of Scripture Today. She is a graduate of Portland Seminary, Duke Divinity School and Gordon College. Meghan is a frequent preacher and lecturer at churches and universities across the country, speaking on subjects such as biblical hermeneutics, emerging Anabaptism, and contemporary preaching. She lives in Phoenix, AZ with a prized dinosaur bone and a ridiculously large book collection.
A description of The Bible Unwrapped: Making Sense of Scripture Today.:
Many people have questions about Scripture they are too afraid to ask. Are all the stories of the Bible true? What about all the books that got left out? What do we make of all that violence? What do we do when biblical authors seem to disagree? And what if we encounter situations the Bible doesn’t address? Drawing from the best of contemporary biblical scholarship and the ancient well of Christian tradition, scholar and preacher Meghan Larissa Good helps readers consider why the Bible matters. Known for presenting complex theological ideas in accessible, engaging ways, Good delves into issues like biblical authority, literary genre, and Christ-centered hermeneutics, and calls readers beyond either knee-jerk biblicism, on the one hand, or skeptical disregard on the other. Instead, The Bible Unwrapped invites readers to faithful reading, communal discernment, and deep and transformative wonder about Scripture.
Join an honest conversation about the Bible that is spiritually alive and intellectually credible. Read the ancient story of God in the world. You may even learn to love it.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
The following podcast is a Jill Devine Media production.
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:04
Speaker
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
Jill's Podcast Journey
00:00:27
Speaker
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.
00:00:41
Speaker
This is episode 12 of Normal Goes a Long Way.
Episode Introduction: Bible Focus
00:00:44
Speaker
I'm your host Jill Devine and the conversation continues about the Bible. This week, Laura Fleetwood will talk to Dr. Megan Larissa Goode. Dr. Goode is the teaching pastor at Trinity Midnight Church in Arizona and the author of The Bible Unwrapped Making Sense of Scripture Today.
00:01:05
Speaker
Welcome to the podcast today. I am interviewing Megan Good about her book, The Bible Unwrapped Making Sense of Scripture Today. Before I introduce Megan, I just wanted to read the back of the book because I think it does a great job of explaining what we're going to be talking about today.
Exploring Bible Questions
00:01:25
Speaker
Many people have questions about Scripture they are too afraid to ask. Are all the stories of the Bible true? What about the books that got left out? What do we make of all that violence? And what if we encounter situations the Bible doesn't address? Drawing from the best of contemporary biblical scholarship and the ancient well of Christian tradition, scholar and preacher Megan Larissa Goode helps readers consider why the Bible matters.
00:01:52
Speaker
Good delves into issues like biblical authority, literary genre, and Christ-centered hermeneutics and calls readers beyond
00:02:00
Speaker
knee-jerk biblicism, on one hand, or skeptical disregard on the other. Instead, the Bible Unwrapped invites readers to faithful reading, communal discernment, and deep and transformative wonder about Scripture. Join an honest conversation about the Bible that is spiritually alive and intellectually credible. Read the ancient story of God in the world. You may even learn to love it. Wow.
00:02:27
Speaker
That is awesome. Megan, welcome to the Normal Goes a Long Way podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here because we've been talking a lot about the Bible and scripture lately. And I think that your viewpoint is going to be of great interest to our
Megan Goode's Ministry Path
00:02:44
Speaker
audience. So tell us about yourself, Megan, and maybe why you decided to write this book.
00:02:51
Speaker
Yeah, well, I am currently serving as the teaching pastor of a church in Phoenix, Arizona. This is my 13th year, I guess, of full-time pastoral ministry. And, you know, I originally, when I went to graduate school and seminary, I was not intending to be a pastor. I was intending to be a teacher of Bible at the university. And in the midst of kind of preparing for that vocation, I just developed a real heart for the church and
00:03:20
Speaker
you know, that there are conversations that scholars can have in the halls of academia. But I really have a passion for bringing scripture and just reviving interest in the story of God in the church itself. And one of the things I found when I started pastoring is that so many people as I began traveling around the country kind of talking about the Bible with people of different denominations and traditions and
00:03:47
Speaker
What I found out was that so many Christians were in a place of feeling alienated from the Bible.
Understanding the Bible's Disconnect
00:03:54
Speaker
Even church leaders, they might be regular churchgoers, they might have learned to swallow all their questions, but when I would kind of pull people aside in the back room, people would begin to admit to me they'd stopped reading the Bible years ago because they didn't know how to put the pieces together and they were too troubled by the violent texts.
00:04:11
Speaker
And it became just really clear to me that we needed to kind of go back to the ground and ask some really fundamental questions about what kind of book is this and how do we actually read it and engage it for meaning? What do we do with the difficult parts? So I wrote this book kind of out of all of those conversations. That's amazing because those are the same questions and conversations we've been having here on the podcast. And I'm curious, what do you tell people now kind of when you think
Rethinking the Bible's Role
00:04:40
Speaker
about
00:04:40
Speaker
the Bible, what would you say to a Christian about what role the Bible can play in our life of faith? Yeah, well, let me start with maybe what I think is one of the most common kind of misconceptions that gets repeated a lot. When I was growing up, there was a kind of banner at the front of a church I used to attend that said, Bible basic instructions before leaving earth.
00:05:06
Speaker
And if you come to the Bible with the assumption that primarily what you're getting is just a list of instructions, you're going to be really baffled when you start reading it by what you find there. Almost half of the Bible is narrative. There is about a third of the Bible's poetry. So the vast majority of the Bible isn't even written in the tone of a clear and direct instruction, which I think suggests to me not that the Bible doesn't have instruction to give us, but that the purpose of
00:05:36
Speaker
what we've been given in the Bible is bigger than just a list of commands. God could have given us a book that was just cover to cover rules and regulations, but that's not actually what we have. So what kind of understanding of the Bible includes both story and poetry as a major part of its purpose? And to, I guess, sum up my view of that broadly,
00:06:00
Speaker
I think what the Bible is intending to do is form imagination for the God-shaped possibilities of the world. It's not just about a simple section of instructions that you can follow, but it's about painting a kind of vision of the world, shaping an entire worldview of a world where God is involved, engaged, has an investment, has desires, and shaping for imagination for what could it look like to join God in a world full of these kinds of possibilities.
00:06:31
Speaker
So that's why stories and poetry are important to that imagination-forming process. They move our emotions. They capture our imagination. They help us play out the instructions that are there in a lot of different scenarios. So this book is fundamentally, when you read it, the point is not just to take away a quicky line, but the point is to be shaped for a new vision of what the world is and what it can be.
00:06:56
Speaker
I loved at the very start of the book the metaphor that you shared about the cabin. That left a lasting impression on me. Would you mind sharing that with the audience?
00:07:08
Speaker
Sure. Well, in the opening of the book, I kind of cast a metaphor, a picture that has been sticking in my mind as I've studied and read about the early church and how they viewed scripture. It's sort of like all of us are living inside this cabin in the woods. That's life in the world as we know it. And outside that cabin deep in the woods is like the whole wild world of God, everything that God is and all of the possibilities.
00:07:35
Speaker
And what the Bible is within that cabin is like a window that helps us see out into the wider world around us to know what we see immediately and the interior of the cabin isn't all there is. And what I find happens with many people is, you know, they see something, well, I guess one thing that happens is rather than realizing there's a world outside the cabin, people think the window is the thing in itself, right? We begin to turn the window into like a painting and freeze it.
00:08:05
Speaker
and don't realize that the Bible is, if you want to use the word portal, it's a portal into something bigger that you're meant to go out and join. It's not the end game. It's the means that gets you out there.
00:08:18
Speaker
And sometimes people get kind of obsessed with the dust on the windows and, you know, this is ancient and it looks weird and I'm not sure what to do with it and kind of turn their back on the window. But when you do that, you end up just looking at the walls of the room. You end up kind of cut off from the broader vision of what you could go out and join.
00:08:38
Speaker
So the whole point of that metaphor is just really to really understand the Bible, not as the end. It's not the one we worship, it's not the one we encounter, but it's the window through which we see and maybe exit and meet that one. Yeah, that's so good. There's so many
00:08:56
Speaker
Oh, just situations from my own life where I can reflect and say, yeah, either I was focusing too much on the window or I was focusing too much on the inside of the cabin that I forgot about the vastness of who God is and what he wants to do in my life. So thank you for sharing that. I think it's really good. And I'd encourage you all to buy the book and read it for yourself.
Formation of the Scriptures
00:09:25
Speaker
I wonder if we could start at the beginning and you could tell our audience a little bit about how the Bible came to be. So the book that we go out to the store and we purchase, we know it's made up of different books written by different peoples. Who decided what should go in that Bible? Can you kind of walk us through that process? You have a whole chapter about that in your book.
00:09:52
Speaker
Yeah, well, let's start by talking a little about how the words got on the page, and then we'll talk about which pages got in there and how that was decided. In terms of the Old Testament, what we are dealing with in the Old Testament is, in many cases, very ancient oral stories that many of these stories date back from a time before most people could write and were writing. And stories like Genesis and Exodus, these are family stories that are being passed down orally.
00:10:19
Speaker
through the family of Israel. You can imagine people around a campfire talking about old grandfather Abraham and what he experienced of God and saw of God. So a point as history kind of progresses and these stories are passed down, a point comes when people become more literate and begin to write down these kind of stories. With the prophets, the prophets were primarily, you could think of them as preachers. Most of the prophets were primarily oral
00:10:48
Speaker
orally bringing messages from God and they had students who would listen to them preaching and giving these messages and who would study them, write them down, wrestle with them and as decades and even centuries came along, students of these prophets would write.
00:11:05
Speaker
write their preaching down and also ask, what did these words from God mean for a new circumstance? So those are some of the pieces of what we have in the Old Testament. But the Old Testament as we have it now was primarily already gathered as a collection at the time of Jesus' ministry. And the early Christians basically accepted these books as they were as a collection because Jesus did, because they were kind of the scripture that was presumed and gathered
00:11:34
Speaker
and that Jesus taught from as authoritative. The New Testament has a little bit different process. The earliest books of the New Testament are largely the letters. So, you know, after Jesus died and was resurrected,
00:11:49
Speaker
You had a lot of Christian missionaries traveling around, orally telling people the story of Jesus for a while. Nobody immediately was like, we should sit down and write. It was initially a preaching exercise. But the letters began to be written by Christian leaders who were writing communities that had particular questions about, so we believe that Jesus died and rose and that he taught these things, but what does it mean for the situation that we're encountering in our community or in our city?
00:12:16
Speaker
Christian leaders would write these letters trying to show people how Jesus applied to the questions they were asking. As the first generation of eyewitnesses to Jesus began to die out, people began to ask the obvious question, how are we going to be sure once the eyewitnesses are gone, be sure that we know what Jesus really said, that his teachings are recorded accurately. That's the point you begin to see more writing down of the stories of Jesus and
00:12:44
Speaker
someone like Luke says he undertook this big research project to draw together reliable accounts from people who were witness to Jesus so that that record could be preserved for people in the future. At a certain point you have this kind of, you have letters circulating, you've got these stories of Jesus being gathered into collections called Gospels and
00:13:05
Speaker
And there's a lot of them, right? There's a lot of letters. There's a lot of stories. And the church says, okay, well, again, we're beginning to get more distant from the initial events that began this story. So we better kind of come to a consensus about which of these books we think truly reflect
00:13:23
Speaker
reflect what our closest witnesses have told us about Jesus, so that they can be a kind of measuring stick going forward for everything else that Christians might see and hear as they listen to the Spirit of God. So the books that ended up in the New Testament, it wasn't so much that they kind of started with a giant pool and just voted in some dark rooms in a secret process, but they began to look at what are the books and the letters that
00:13:50
Speaker
you know, across the Christian world at this point are being passed around that people find useful, that we know came from a reliable place, that offer something helpful going forward. So it was more like recognizing what books were functioning authoritatively than it was like picking them. It was very obvious pretty quickly, the vast majority of the books that were rising to the surface, the four gospel started traveling as a collection very quickly.
00:14:20
Speaker
So the church just at a certain point kind of certified and said, we're going to use this as the measuring stick going forward. God's still going to talk and we're still going to listen, but this is how we're going to make sure that what we hear in the future conforms to the kind of fundamentals of the story of Jesus.
00:14:36
Speaker
Okay, so that was a very helpful understanding of how the Bible came to be together.
Engaging with the Bible: A Guide
00:14:43
Speaker
And on page 82, you wrote, the Bible is not a mathematics textbook, but a guide to the oceans of God. If you truly want to understand what it is teaching about God, about the world, about the shape,
00:14:58
Speaker
Of the fully human life, there is only one way to do it, by getting wet. You begin simply gathering up the bits of knowledge that you have and heading out into the water. You act, you practice the strokes as the Bible outlines them. You swim out as far as you dare, you come back to shore, read the book's pages again, and this time with salt on your skin, hear them a little bit differently. Then you head back to the water and swim some more.
00:15:27
Speaker
Sometimes it's only after deep-sea diving a dozen times that the descriptions begin to make sense. Sometimes the activity leads and then the comprehension follows. That to me was so poignant and so reflective of my own experience in reading the Bible in that
00:15:50
Speaker
When I first started studying the Bible, it was so much about head knowledge, right? Like just wanting to understand. And it's not really until you start trusting God and living out,
00:16:06
Speaker
this way of life, the way of following Jesus, that much of it even begins to make sense. And so I wonder if you could speak to somebody who hasn't really gotten into God's Word before and give them some wisdom about where to start reading and then
00:16:28
Speaker
how that can look in the life of a Christian to both study and read the Bible and put it into practice.
00:16:37
Speaker
Yeah, well, if I was talking to someone who's kind of coming into the Bible fresh for the first time, one of the things I think it's really important to say, the Bible is a strange kind of book in that most books you read cover to cover.
Approaches to Bible Reading
00:16:49
Speaker
But for most people, starting your Bible reading from the front cover ends up being a mistake, because almost everybody gets stuck in the same spot about 100 pages in. There's a lot, you know, the Old Testament, we're dealing with
00:17:03
Speaker
very ancient stories and there's a lot to kind of interpret and untangle and it's easy to kind of get lost in the weeds. But if you were reading the Bible because you are either a follower of Jesus or interested in learning about what Jesus taught, I think it makes total sense to begin with Jesus. So that would be beginning with one of the gospels. I'd recommend Matthew, Mark, or Luke. Matthew is the first gospel in the Bible because he talks a lot about the
00:17:34
Speaker
between Jesus and the Old Testament. So it's kind of like the hinge point between the first part of the book and the second. But if you haven't read the Old Testament much, that might not be a striking to you. So I think Mark or Luke are a good place to start. Mark was the first gospel written. It kind of goes straight to the action. And Luke is an amazing storyteller. So those are two really good places to begin. I think from a starting point, it's useful to just
00:18:01
Speaker
sit in the teachings of Jesus and see what you notice about the major, not the like, don't get yourself stuck on if there's a line or a story you're not sure what to make of, but what are the major themes of Jesus' teachings? What are the things that Jesus seems most concerned about? You'll probably find that there are a few things that really rise above the others to the surface really quickly. Jesus has a lot to say about money, for example.
00:18:28
Speaker
So what is Jesus saying? What do I hear him kind of, what picture is he casting about how God thinks of money? Another one is prayer. What does Jesus say about the kind of access we have to God and what we can do with it? And so just identifying some of those key themes and the basic things we think we clearly hear Jesus saying about those, and then beginning to practice, kind of stretch ourselves in those directions.
00:18:56
Speaker
And I think the reason I wrote in that page that you read that the practice is essential is sometimes it's only after you do the practice that you know what the questions are. And once you know the questions, you can go back to the stories and begin to hear where Jesus is answering and nuancing some of those. So I heard a quote recently, and I can't remember who gave it, but that just the answers don't stick until we have a question box to put them in.
00:19:25
Speaker
So that's part of the virtue of practicing is only after you're actually trying to live out, Jesus's teachings on money begin to understand what some of the questions are. And then you hear new things in Jesus's teachings that you might not have heard the first time. Do you have, I'm just curious from your perspective as a pastor, what does your practice of reading the Bible look like?
00:19:51
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think there are parts that have stayed the same through me for over time and there are parts that change. But I would say one of the most consistent parts of my own practice of reading is rather than just reading like a set amount, some people kind of follow a plan and try to read a certain chunk every day. But I have found when I do that, it makes me in too much of a hurry.
00:20:17
Speaker
And the point of reading the Bible is not to cover volume. The point is to be changed by what you hear. So my rule of Bible reading is that I will read until I feel a little tug. I just feel for this small tug of interest or curiosity, a question the text raises for me, a word or a verse that jumps out. And as soon as I feel that tug, I stop immediately and take time to reflect.
00:20:42
Speaker
What question is rising? Why did this word call my attention? Why is this phrase here? What is God trying to say to me through this? For me, it's often easiest to ask those kinds of questions in writing. So this is why I'm a big Bible journaler. Often I'll just start with a verse and I'll write what it is or what word caught my attention. And then I'll start kind of turning it around and looking for what's there. What am I meant to hear or see through this? And then at the end of that time of reflection,
00:21:12
Speaker
I pretty much always use that verse, that tug, that whatever my reflection is about as a springboard into prayer. Because again, the point of reading the Bible is not just to gain information, but it's to come into encounter with God. So that topic and that reflection becomes a point of conversation in which, you know, kind of like looking through that window again, in which I'm invited out to an encounter with God. And this provides a kind of fresh center point for
00:21:42
Speaker
for conversation within that encounter. Yeah, the Bible is not just about information, it's about transformation, right? I think so often we can get stuck on the habit of just reading the Bible and checking it off our list and miss out on what God wants to do
00:22:06
Speaker
through us spending that time with him. It should be a conversation, right? Not just a one-way street of us absorbing information. Absolutely. Given that transformation goal too, that's why even if you have a choice between covering a lot of territory but not reflecting or taking one verse and chewing on it, you might often be better in taking a little bit and chewing and absorbing. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
00:22:31
Speaker
What advice do you have about all of the different translations of Bibles? There's the NIV, there's the ESV, there's the message. And for somebody who's new to studying scripture, it can be a little bit confusing and overwhelming. What advice do you give people who are trying to choose which Bible to study from?
00:22:55
Speaker
Well, first I would say don't get hung up on it and don't panic. There's no wrong or terrible choice to make here. We have so many translations. We're blessed enough to have this many in English because in some ways translation is always a work of interpretation when you're moving from one language to another. And different people who translate the Bible have different philosophies of how to do that. Some people want to go very kind of literal word for word, even if it doesn't sound like actual
00:23:23
Speaker
the ways that people speak in English because they're just kind of interested in preserving the
00:23:30
Speaker
as closely as possible, the kind of direct word-by-word translation and grammar. Other people say, you know, no, it's more useful to get the main idea across so that as a reader, you can understand it as we would kind of articulate that idea in English. So you have a whole kind of spectrum between those two. Some translations are kind of in the middle and some go really far on one side or the other.
00:23:58
Speaker
If you are a Bible reader just starting out, my own kind of favorite translation right now is the Common English Bible, the C-E-B. This translation is relatively new. It was done by a team of people that I really respect and trust as translators. And I think it does a good job of striking the balance of talking in language that is comprehensible, that sounds like normal English, but also really does respect the original kind of intent of the text.
00:24:28
Speaker
So that's a translation that's kind of in the middle, leaning slightly toward the capturing the idea end of that spectrum, but not too far down. But for people who are longtime Bible readers, it can also be really helpful from time to time to read in a fresh translation. I'm always shocked about how I hear things I never heard before when I read on something on a different end of the spectrum than I have been reading in the past. So every once in a while, it's really nice to kind of shake it up and hear things anew.
00:24:57
Speaker
How do you personally deal with different
Navigating Interpretations
00:25:01
Speaker
interpretations of scripture. I have a question about, what does the Bible say about XYZ? And so I go to do research and I find that one scholar interprets it this way and another scholar interprets it in an entirely different way. And that's really confusing because then to the normal reader of the Bible, it's like, who do I believe? Do you have
00:25:29
Speaker
a strategy or a technique that you use when you find that there are multiple ways to read the same passage from Scripture? Yeah. Well, if you find yourself confused on this point, take comfort that you're not alone. During the Protestant Reformation, the Protestant Reformers that had this real passion to get the Bible back into the hands of normal people and see it translated in the language everybody spoke,
00:25:53
Speaker
kind of thought that when they did that, everybody would read the Bible and come to the exact same conclusions about what it said. And it was a surprise to them, too, that people could hear the same text and take it so differently. And, you know, part of the reason that happens is because when we're reading the Bible, we're reading a book where God is speaking, but also where many different people are speaking.
00:26:15
Speaker
So you have voices of people who are in different situations, who see those situations somewhat differently. And in addition to those differences, the kind of dialogue that is sometimes going on in the Bible, we bring our own experiences and assumptions to the text when we read. And reading from different angles with different assumptions can cause us to see the same sentence quite differently. So I think when you encounter that, there are a couple things to keep in mind.
00:26:44
Speaker
One is always major on the majors, put the greatest weight on the things that are clearest. There are some verses, there are some topics that are very complex, and maybe there are different voices within the Bible that we're going to have to kind of balance and hold together and ask, like, these things seem to be pulling against each other, what do we do?
00:27:08
Speaker
And there are other themes in the Bible that are just so clear and so uniform across them. So we put our greatest kind of weight first on what's clearest and use that to help interpret the rest. It's really important that we are reading the Bible, not just alone, because all of us are kind of prone in these. The real problem I think is not that something can be interpreted multiple ways, but
00:27:32
Speaker
If we're only reading by ourselves, we might not even know that because we're just reading our own experience and assumptions into a verse or a passage. So reading with others whose experience of the world is different than ours is a really important part because then we can each, when we find our interpretations differ, we can hold them together and ask like, what am I, what assumptions am I bringing to the table? Like how did, how did our interpretations get to be so different?
00:27:57
Speaker
maybe one more principle this might be leaping ahead of where we are in our conversation. But as Christians, I believe we read and we interpret through the lens of Jesus. So when interpretations, when we're looking at a topic and it feels like different verses are diverging from each other or interpretations are diverging from each other, the first question we ask to kind of mediate between them is like, what did Jesus say or do in relation to this topic?
00:28:24
Speaker
And we try as much as possible to let Jesus be the arbiter, the one who kind of sifts in ways, the different kind of perspectives or parts of scripture that might speak to this topic in ways that we're not sure how to navigate. So letting Jesus be the kind of lead interpreter is a key part of it. Yes, and I had bookmarked your chapter 24 about that, about how you go into how Jesus
00:28:51
Speaker
read. And I had never really thought to ask the question, what was Jesus' perspective on Scripture? Because first of all, he didn't have the New Testament because it hadn't happened yet. But he did have the Hebrew Scripture, right? The Old Testament. So how did
00:29:11
Speaker
How did Jesus study it? How did he live it out? And I thought it was fascinating how you go into that and talk about, you know, even some of the ways that he says, well, here's what the law says. Here's what the Hebrew text says. But this is what I'm saying, right? And so talk a little bit about that, because I think that's something that we don't think about very often.
00:29:38
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think a lot of us were just, if we grew up with the Bible at all, we maybe were exposed to what we often call like a flat Bible approach, where if you want to know what God thinks on any question, you just kind of take all of the verses on that topic and you add them up and average them out.
00:29:56
Speaker
And you're like, this is what God thinks. If I want to know what God thinks of violence, Jesus says, love your enemies, but Joshua slaughtered the whole cities. So this spectrum of right must be somewhere in that vast kind of spectrum. But there's actually, the New Testament is very clear that that's not a Christian way of reading, that the Bible is not flat in that way, that Jesus himself and his teachings very clearly asserted his own authority over the rest of scripture.
00:30:24
Speaker
He felt very free to say, like you've heard it was said, it's written in Genesis or Exodus, but I'm telling you that what is written there perhaps did not capture the fullness of God's intent. And I'm going to turn this thing around and cause you to see and hear it differently. Moses said this, but I say this. So one thing that's very clear in the New Testament's teaching is that the authority, the center of the authority of the Bible is in Jesus.
00:30:53
Speaker
and the center of interpretation is how and how he says we should understand something. And from there, we can go further to say like, how was Jesus reading? One of the things that seems very clear, Jesus is actually asked, you know, there's 613 laws in the Old Testament, Jesus, which is the most important? And Jesus doesn't say, hey, they're all equally important. He says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind and love your neighbors yourself. So he says, there is a most important command.
00:31:22
Speaker
They're kind of two, but really those are one. And he says all the law and prophets are summed up in this, like everything else is commentary. This is the center, the rest is the commentary. And that's the kind of lens that Jesus then takes to everything that he teaches as he himself interprets the Bible, is how is this rule, how is this law helping us love God and neighbor?
00:31:49
Speaker
And that is a very radical lens. Like sometimes it's very disruptive. For example, this is why Jesus gets into lots of fights with people about the Sabbath. Because the rules of Sabbath were very clear. You know, don't work on the Sabbath. And there was a long list that was kind of developed of here's all the things that you shouldn't do in order to not work. Like don't sow and don't walk too far and don't cook and all of these things. And Jesus says, you've got the rule, but you missed the forest for the trees.
00:32:19
Speaker
Like the rule was never about the rule. It's about loving God and neighbor. So how do we practice Sabbath in a way that allows us to love God and neighbor? It's not about what we don't do. It's about what Sabbath practice allows us to do. So that's the kind of lens that Jesus is clearly reading through. It's so interesting because based on our conversation, you know, I'm really just taking away
00:32:42
Speaker
a couple key thoughts. One is to come to the Bible with open hands, with open hands, open heart, open mind, each and every time. Because so much of how we interpret what we read can be based on what we're going through at the moment or what we've heard taught on before by a pastor or a teacher.
00:33:11
Speaker
And kind of like to go back to your metaphor, how clean or dirty that window was at the time that we were looking through it. And so I just have this picture in my mind of opening my Bible and also opening my hands to say, okay, Lord, let me see this fresh and let me see it new. And how do you want me to see it today?
00:33:35
Speaker
And then the second thing is what you said about not studying it alone. Because so much I think of what we call our time with the Lord or our scripture time is alone. And then we just end it there. Like we don't continue the thoughts, the conversation with other safe people, especially maybe people that don't,
00:33:59
Speaker
think exactly like we do. So what is your advice for finding a safe place and a people that you can have these delicate yet super important conversations with about God's word? That's a good question that I don't get asked very often, how to find those people. I feel like sometimes in my life at least it feels like just maybe it's the Holy Spirit or lack just stumbling on them. But I do think that just
00:34:30
Speaker
as a deliberate practice, you can undertake a lot of us don't kind of make time or prioritize having conversations with anyone. So as a first step, even, you know, ask yourself who is in your life who might have some kind of difference than you, whether that's, that's age, whether that's race, whether that's class, whether that's gender. I find people who are
00:34:51
Speaker
in some way coming from a significantly different angle than me in any of those categories can cause me to see and hear differently. And you might just ask if they're open to meeting.
00:35:03
Speaker
I guess you see what works for you once a week, once a month and just, you know, read a gospel like Luke together and just come together, do your own kind of private practice and open listening and then come together and ask, what did you notice? Like what, what stood out to you? Um, and, and listen for what, what is in common, but also what is indifferent to ask each other questions. So I don't think it has to be more complicated than that as a beginning point.
00:35:28
Speaker
Yeah, that's good advice. And I think, too, just opening yourself up to the possibility that you don't have to do a formal Bible study where, you know, some other author has written, you know, their understanding and then has reflection questions. Those are great. I think those definitely have their time in place. But there's something about just purely reading Scripture.
00:35:51
Speaker
and then talking about it with someone else that I think just helps us go a level deeper. And I'd encourage people to, if you haven't tried that before, to do that. And that's kind of what Jill and I are doing on this podcast, too. You know, she is new in her faith journey.
00:36:09
Speaker
And she asks me all kinds of questions and we talk about it. And most of the time I'm like, well, I don't know the answer, but let's just talk and see what happens. And that's how God works a lot of times. He works through his spirit and through other people as we have these challenging conversations. Absolutely. And if I can make one more suggestion that people might not have tried, I find many people are reluctant to write in their Bibles.
00:36:39
Speaker
So something that I like to do sometimes when I'm reading with somebody else is actually, you know, on a website like Bible Gateway or some way where you can just get the biblical text. I like to actually print off the text of a book like Luke and just on like normal coffee paper that I don't worry about writing on. And then I write all over it when I'm reading. And if a word jumps out at me, I circle it, I draw lines of connection, I put question marks and
00:37:03
Speaker
I find just being able to kind of write and scribble and doodle that way as I'm reading somehow just opens my mind. I found that often more powerful than reading anything written by scholars on it, just causing me to slow down and pay attention. And when you do that with others, you can both bring your scribblings together and kind of look together at the text visually as you have experienced it. I love that idea. Well, as we wrap up, what other
00:37:33
Speaker
pieces of your book would you like to talk about or other maybe common questions that you get about the Bible that you'd like to address? I'll just kind of leave it up to you to wrap up this conversation.
Understanding Biblical Violence
00:37:45
Speaker
Well, maybe we can just talk very briefly about violence because that is the single most common question I get about the Bible.
00:37:52
Speaker
I talk to people all the time that have walked away, not just from the Bible, but from Christian faith itself, because they're so unsettled and disturbed by some of the stories of violence in the Old Testament. And people will tell me, I don't want to worship a God who is like this. I don't know what to do with these kinds of stories. So if that is a question that has ever occurred to you, or if anyone listening here has really been stuck in that place, let me just give you a brief framework for thinking about that.
00:38:19
Speaker
I've already talked a little about that Christians are people who interpret through the lens of Jesus, that the Bible's not flat. The book of Hebrew is one of my favorite verses. The book of Hebrews opens by saying, in the past, God spoke to our ancestors many times and in many ways. But in these days, God has spoken to us through a son who is the light of God's glory and the exact representation of God's being.
00:38:44
Speaker
And in that opening, what the author of Hebrews is really saying is like, hey, God has spoken to people many times through history. We have many ancient records of God interacting. But what came before did not have the clarity of what we have seen of God and Jesus.
00:39:02
Speaker
It's sort of like prior to Jesus, the whole world was viewing God in the dark. And if you've ever navigated your house in the dark, you know that even in the middle of the night, you can see some things. You might be able to avoid running into the bookshelf on the way to the bathroom. But sometimes in the dark, it's hard to see perfectly what you're looking at. I got a call one night from my mother who was screaming in the phone who had
00:39:29
Speaker
reached down in her bedroom floor to grab what she thought was one of my dad's socks, and it turned out there was a snake in her bedroom. And, you know, that's the thing about the dark, right? Like, you can think you're dealing with one thing, but it turns out you saw the outline, but you misinterpreted the shape. And that's basically what the author of Hebrews is kind of proposing that, you know, prior to Jesus, we were looking at God in the dark, and we are seeing many true things, but also there are things we perhaps weren't putting the pieces together quite correctly on.
00:39:57
Speaker
And this is why Jesus came, not just to die to save us from our sins, but to live and save us from our misconceptions of who God is and what God desires. So in Jesus, it's like the light suddenly pops on in the room. And for the first time, we're equipped to really see clearly who God is and what God desires. So there is, Colossians says Jesus is the, all the fullness of God dwells in Jesus.
00:40:21
Speaker
Jesus isn't God's nice side or God's softer side. There is nothing that is true of God that isn't true of Jesus. So when we go back to these kind of violent portraits and acts of genocide, we do those understanding that these stories are kind of written and developed in a time when people were interacting with God, but also when the lights weren't on.
00:40:42
Speaker
And we ask with Jesus turning the lights on about who God is, about how God's heart beats for people. What did the people before see clearly in the dark? And perhaps where did they misunderstand what God might have been drawing them toward? So that's what it means to read in light of Jesus, in light of the lights turning on. That is so helpful. So helpful. I have never heard that analogy before, but it makes so much sense.
00:41:12
Speaker
Well, Megan, thank you for being here today. How can people find your book and find out more ways to learn from you?
Accessing Resources
00:41:22
Speaker
Well, my book is pretty easy to find. It's on, on Amazon and kind of anywhere you, anywhere you buy books, it tends to be there. I have a website that I am not doing a very good job of keeping updated, but you can go to meganlorisagood.com and I am going to endeavor to do better about keeping speaking engagements and things up there.
00:41:41
Speaker
And obviously I teach every week as well, so I'm pretty easy to find on YouTube. My church is Trinity Mennonite.
00:41:49
Speaker
Thank you so much for your honest conversation and your wisdom. I know I learned a lot and Jill has been listening in. I've been watching her take notes here. So she's got some follow-up questions that we will cover in the next episode. But thanks again, Megan, for being here. You are a delight to talk to and very wise. So I appreciate all of the wisdom that you have shared with us today. Take care. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
00:42:18
Speaker
Thank you for your support of this podcast and for your support of my faith journey.
Listener Engagement
00:42:23
Speaker
Lots of questions that I have and I know that I'm not alone in that. So if you have some questions or there's a topic that you want to get involved in or there's a question that you have, please reach out. You can follow us online, normalgozalongway.com. You can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram at normalgozalongway. I would love to be able to help you
00:42:48
Speaker
If you're struggling or maybe it's not a struggle, maybe it's something great that's happened to you and you want to share, please let me know. And I would be happy to address that on this podcast. Lots of good stuff happening in our next episode, including this.
00:43:07
Speaker
You talk about getting stuck on certain passages and what they mean. And you had said, don't get stuck on those, but focus on what Jesus is saying. Interpreting the Bible is kind of like doing a crossword puzzle. Nobody does crosswords exactly in order. You go in and you kind of fill in the easy answers first.
00:43:24
Speaker
And I think no matter what stage you are, you know, I've been studying the Bible personally and professionally for decades and there are still things that puzzle me more than others. But you work your way backwards over time by starting with the clearer and working toward the more puzzling.