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Unraveling biblical narratives can feel like an arduous task, but imagine having esteemed guest, John Walton guide you through the fascinating intricacies of biblical and hermeneutical literacy.
Don’t know what hermeneutical literacy means? Great! Neither did we…
But here at ATC we are not afraid to admit what we don’t know , and that’s a lot.
Allow John to demystify the key difference between knowing the names, places and trivia - biblical literacy - and understanding how to extract the underlying message from this content - hermeneutical literacy.
In this ATC Episode:
• Find your curiosity piqued as we delve into the profound narrative of Genesis, examining the roles of its characters and the gifted narrator who weaves their stories into a grand narrative that unveils God's message.
• We take a closer look at the challenges faced by Abraham and Sarah, we explore how their experiences add depth to the overarching themes of land, family, and blessing.
• Discern whether we can find God's message within their trials and triumphs.
This intriguing discussion provides fresh perspectives on the role of the narrator, encouraging listeners to approach the Bible as God's story and treat it with respect and integrity.
Tune in as we round out the conversation by discussing the application of biblical authority and how to navigate the Bible's grand narrative. What does it mean to use the grand narrative to understand and participate in God's story?
Are we misinterpreting the Bible by pulling out principles for our own lives, or are we simply on a journey to extract God's truth from the text?
Connect with John:
Buy his new book!
https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Faithful-Reading-Principles-Interpretation/dp/1514004879/ref=asc_df_1514004879?nodl=1&tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=637848221963&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=7666031987637594737&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9010606&hvtargid=pla-1933303025972&psc=1&dplnkId=5a89a299-d014-45bd-a4b7-f461f77365e8
Beliefs espoused by the guests of ATC are not necessarily the beliefs and convictions of ATC.
That said the intent of our podcast is to listen, remain curious and never fear failure In the discovery life giving truth. Many people we ardently disagree with have been our greatest teachers.
Hi, this is Grant Lockridge and Jared Tafta On the Across the Counter podcast, where we create space for real people to have honest conversations. Today we have on the podcast John Walton. And just tell me, john, tell me a little bit about your personal journey and how you got started.
Speaker 2:If anyone could say they were raised Christian, I'd probably be able to say that Everybody makes a decision to own it at some point in their lives, and I made that decision pretty early, but it wasn't like it was a big change of any sort. I was a little kid and I was raised in the faith and I had accepted the faith and was gradually making it my own, and so that was my upbringing. Not only was I raised in the faith, I was raised in the Bible, and that is our home, our church. We were just immersed in the Bible and that meant that I learned Bible early, thoroughly. And when I say learned Bible, we did Bible memory. So certainly I memorized a lot of Bible passages King James, not that helps me much now but also the trivia, the names, the places. All of that was very familiar to me at a very early age, and to such an extent that it made me feel like I was excelling at something, and I think that's partially responsible for my early attraction to the Old Testament. There's so much trivia and I learned it. I learned it as a kid and it became second nature to me. So I realized, of course, as I grew older, that knowing the trivia of the Old Testament wasn't the same as knowing the Old Testament, that knowing the Bible was more than just having a familiarity with names and places, but the idea of trying to get to an understanding of how we find God's message in this treasury of trivia. What is God doing? What's the Old Testament supposed to mean to me? And I went through various periods of experimentation trying to figure that out, work out a methodology, basically. So I found myself in a position where Bible literacy I was right at the top of the pile but hermeneutical literacy what do you do with it? How do you use it? How do you get God's word? I wasn't much further along than anybody else and I think that even today we have to think about that distinction. We talk about the decline in biblical literacy, and it's true, but solving biblical literacy is not necessarily going to solve the problems that we face. There's also, of course, theological literacy, different sorts of literacy, and you can solve biblical literacy and you can solve theological literacy, but if you don't address hermeneutical literacy, the pieces aren't going to come together. People are still not going to be doing the right thing with the text to actually get the message of the text.
Speaker 3:Can I ask you some questions, because I need to play the fool, and it won't be much playing. When you say biblical literacy and hermeneutical literacy, I feel like I hear you saying there is a way to read what is right and then there is a way to embody rightness in action. So, like we get, I would love one. What could you define more, what the difference between biblical literacy and hermeneutical literacy are? And then two it sounds to me like you're talking about the difference between knowledge and then the heart, but maybe I'm just being too simple. Can you help me?
Speaker 1:I'm being childlike here, I was going to ask that question too, by the way just for the record, yeah yeah, I was going to ask that. You're the professor, we're just the guys.
Speaker 2:So when I talk about biblical literacy, I'm talking about the basic content of the Bible and trivia. The trivia, the names, the places where the verses are, even who the Ephesians were and what was the town of Corinth. That's part of biblical literacy. It's the content. When I'm talking about hermeneutical literacy, I'm talking about knowing what to do to feel like you're getting God's message. So it's not a matter of head and heart. It's a matter of content and method. What are you going to do with this story of Abraham that you know so well? Or this story of David or Esther that you know so well? How is that God's word? What are we supposed to get from the book of Genesis? Or for many of these other places? What do we do with narrative? What do we do with prophecy? What do we do with Psalms? And you can know a lot. You can memorize the whole book of Psalms. That doesn't mean you know what to do with it to get God's message. Because God's message is not just anything we happen to grab from the Bible based on how we feel that day. God's message is something that's been put in the text by the Holy Spirit. We call it inspiration, and that message doesn't change. It's always been what it's always been, and that message has authority. That's God's word, and we can't just go in and say, oh, these words mean this to me. Now you're talking about your own authority, not the Bible's authority. We don't want to be there, yet that's what lots of people do. So when I talk about hermeneutical literacy, I'm talking about do people know what to do when they open the Bible and they read the content? Do they then know what to do? To say and here's how I can get God's authoritative word from that and not have that just all mangled together with my own thoughts and ideas?
Speaker 3:That's solid. Could you give me an example of that story of Abraham? When you say what to do and I'm often the last to understand in a room, so I think of like God's message as overall it's about relationship Could you give me an example of what you mean for what to do with that story?
Speaker 2:Sure. So one of the claims that I make is that the authoritative message of the text is not delivered by the characters. It's delivered by the narrator, because that's where the inspiration is. It's the text that's inspired, it's the text that has authority. Therefore, it's the narrator that has the authority of God vested in him by the Spirit and therefore he's the one delivering the message. Therefore, I'm not asking the question why is Abraham doing what he's doing? Is Abraham a good guy or a bad guy? Is Abraham making good decisions or bad decisions? Abraham is not the one delivering the message of the text. The narrator is delivering the message of the text, and I need to know what the narrator is doing with Abraham. That's more important than what Abraham is doing. So when Sarah says to Abraham I'm not having any babies, this ain't happening, and so you need to take my handmaiden Haggar and have a baby by her, and it'll legally be our baby, and that's the way forward, and Abraham says, okay, now, at that point, if you're trying to let the characters give the message, you're saying, oh, they're lacking faith or they should have trusted God more, or even though God didn't tell him what he was doing and how he was going to do it. They shouldn't have taken things into their own hands, or I don't care what their marriage contract said, they shouldn't do that. That's not morally right or whatever. If you're trying to get the message from the characters now, you're trying to analyze them at a level that you don't have information. You're guessing.
Speaker 3:Because you don't know their hearts.
Speaker 2:In contrast, I would say we have to track with the narrator. We have to see what the narrator is doing with them. Okay, instead of trying to penetrate their psyche, psychoanalyze them, figure out where they are on the enneagram. They're not doing that. Okay, we're trying to, yeah, we're trying to understand how the narrator is using this story, alongside of all the other stories that he's also chosen and presented, in order to give us what his message is. And his message spans the scope of the book. Okay, it's not atomized in one story or another. Each story contributes to his purpose and he's chosen it to contribute to his purpose. He's framed it to contribute to his purpose. He's given you the information that he wants you to have in order to develop his purpose. We have no access to Abraham and therefore, whether he made a good choice or a bad choice, when the text tells us, we can have that information. If the text doesn't tell us, we don't know and it doesn't matter. We need to track with the narrator that's what I'm calling hermeneutical literacy To know what we have to do in order to try to get the message that the text is giving us and not get distracted by what we think of the personalities and the characters and the things they get involved in, good or bad.
Speaker 1:So what do you think like the overarching, like what the narrator was trying to do with that particular story, just so that I can walk through how to do that.
Speaker 2:Sure, you have to figure that out based on what the narrator is doing across the whole book, because he hasn't chosen these stories arbitrarily or randomly in any sense, and when you look at the book it's really not hard to figure it out. Once you hit chapter 12, the theme is the covenant, okay, and he's developing how the covenant progressed, even through obstacles of various sorts, and almost every chapter will tell you about the obstacles or the advances or the elements of the covenant. We're introduced to the covenant in chapter 12, and it entails land and family and blessing, and almost every story for the rest of Genesis is about those three things. And so I'll look on and say is this a land story? Is this a family story? Is this a blessing story? Maybe it combines a couple of them and as a land story or as a family story, it is about an obstacle or is it about an advance, resolving an obstacle? It's very clear. That's what the narrator is doing in 12 through 50. And so if I'm going to track with the narrator, then I have to see how each story is making a contribution to that. So I read the story about Sarah and Abraham and Hagar and first of all the question is this land, family or blessing? Very clearly it's a family story, ok, good, so we're tracking in on the family, ok, secondly, is it an obstacle or is it an advance, or is it a resolution of an obstacle? It's again very easy to see they are trying to resolve the obstacles. Clear, she's barren and time is going on and that looks like it's that ship has sailed. That's not going to happen and so they're trying to resolve that. So this is addressing an obstacle and there haven't been any advances to help them address the obstacle. Ok, now, of course, this is in chapter 21. Is that correct? 21? It's at that juncture where they're trying to resolve it. At that point, no, I'm sorry, it's 16. It's 16. So in 16, abraham has already been told in chapter 15 that he's going to be the father of the covenant son. He thought it was just going to be a servant-deleaser, but God says no, it's coming from you. Now it's interesting, in chapter 15, he doesn't say it's coming through Sarah. So at that point Abraham doesn't know. He's only been told it's coming through him and you could even imagine him reasoning. But he didn't say it was coming through Sarah. He said it was going to be my son. Okay, so they have half information right. They don't know. That's 15, 16. That's when Sarah makes a suggestion Okay, you ought to take Hagar. See, they haven't been told that the child is going to be through Sarah. And the marriage contracts of those days often stipulated that a baron wife had to provide a surrogate. So she might have even been required by contract to do this. So it's not quite the shocking thing that it would be today. It fit right in with that culture and so she suggests it. It's commonplace, it may have been contractually necessary and it's a solution. It's not a solution that lacks faith. The lady's post-menstruation, the lady's been baron anyway, twice dead, they would say, and so that hardly seems lacking faith when she's 80-some years old. But we jumped to that conclusion Okay, somehow this was lacking faith. And then we jumped to another conclusion and suggested, since Abraham accepted the solution, that he was lacking faith or that he was some lust crazed, whatever. And again you can see we're making judgments about the characters, as if the characters are the ones delivering the message and that we have to figure them out in order to get the Bible's message. Okay, but the Bible's message has been vested in the human authors that produced it. And so, as a result, we have to say what is the narrator doing with this? Does the narrator treat this as a lack of faith? No, he doesn't condemn them. Obviously, having the slave woman bear the child for the family is going to create some tension. That doesn't mean that it was a stupid choice or faithless or anything of that sort. It has its side effects. Okay, so the narrator at that point is simply reporting. He's not judging, he's not assessing or evaluating, he's not trying to draw a message out of that. So don't be like Abraham, or be like Abraham either way. Or think of that poor girl, hagar. She's a victim in this. He's been forced to do this to bear this child, and it doesn't do us any good to try to think about Hagar's plight From a human standpoint. Of course she had one. We can imagine that, but that's not where you're going to get the Bible's message. The Bible's message is in the narrator, and the narrator really isn't dealing with Hagar's plight in that way. They'll pick up Hagar later on and do some things with Hagar, and you've got to figure that out then. So I hope you get the idea. What I'm trying to say is we can't get the authoritative message of the text unless we've figured out what we're doing, why we're doing it, what we're after, what the Bible does, how it does it. We have to have all those working for us, and if we don't, we can know all the content in the world and it wouldn't help us very much.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a huge concept because I've never even really I've been taught so often to put it in context. That's what everybody says. They're like all right, make sure you're putting it in context, but nobody's. Hey, make sure you're putting in the context of the narrator and not so right. And something.
Speaker 2:Well see, that's the thing. Context works at several levels. We can talk about a cultural context. We can talk about a literary context. Literary context, of course, means reading the whole passage, but it also means what the narrator is doing, the larger, what I call the rhetorical strategy. Okay, but then there's theological context, there's historical context, we have context of various sorts.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 3:So I'm reading on the fly, I can't remember exactly In 16, you have I don't want to go too deep into this, but you have the first representation of Sarah and Abraham and then later in 18, you have God sharing part of the promise that Sarah would be the one who bears the child, and then she laughs. And I think a lot of times that would be an area where we say she did not have faith At that point in time because the words changed. Do you think that even in that scenario we're reading in a lack of faith in Sarah?
Speaker 2:Potentially the. Of course Isaac's name means laughter and the text is going to use it over and over again and sometimes you can see in English that it's doing it other times you can't. Abram laughs also in chapter 17. And again, does the text condemn them for it? We might say that the dialogue in chapter 18 condemns her. Why did you laugh? But even that it could be condemning, possibly. But is that just supposed to draw out something else? That's important here, because then that discussion about I'm going to come back in a year and you're going to have a child, and so that's a way of advancing the narrative that could have a little bit of rebuke in it. But we really don't know the nature of her laughter. Laughter can be scoffing, laughter can be skeptical, laughter can be I can't believe it. Laughter can be all kinds of things. And so again, even the question of why did you laugh? And her, oh, I didn't laugh. She thought she's being called only carpet, because that's the way. I'm certainly willing to consider that as a mild rebuke at least.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the reason I asked that is related to you, what you said about not. I'm hearing you say don't read ourselves into the role of the character. That's part of what I'm hearing to some degree. And then, on the other side of that, like I can't help but be Sarah when I read to some degree, and maybe I'm wrong and this is what I'm getting at. But, like they said to him, where's Sarah, your wife? She is in the tent. The Lord said I'll surely return about this time next year and let's see up before that in the wrong section. That's right. So whenever he says why did Sarah laugh in verse 13? Shall I indeed bear a child where I'm old? Is there anything too hard for the Lord? And at that point, and then Sarah is the one that comes in and denies it and says I didn't laugh, and like part of the way that I realized context as a person is thinking about, like why a person would respond those ways in that scenario, like being caught red handed in a lie or something like that. So do you think, do you think it's completely wrong to read in any type of personal contextualization as a human being, or do you feel that there's a balance? Am I asking a stupid question? No, that's a great question.
Speaker 2:Lots of people would ask it. I wouldn't say it's wrong to do, but the question isn't whether it's a good thing, a helpful thing helps me think about the story. Those aren't the questions, because sure it does. Of course, if you can identify with a character, maybe empathize, sympathize with how they respond, how they're thinking, maybe you can be convicted, maybe you can be encouraged. Great Question Is that what the narrator's trying to do? See, I don't go to the Bible to feel good, to be challenged. Maybe it will challenge me, but I'm going to the Bible to get its message. I want to know what the authoritative message of God is and I can't reduce that to just something that I'm feeling that day. It can't be that subjective. So I would say there's not necessarily anything wrong for you to come at the text that way, but I don't want to make the mistake of thinking that's what the text is doing, trying to impact my feelings for the day. So we've got that difference that I think is important.
Speaker 1:That's something I've never heard explained that way, so I think it's super valuable. Something that just completely different topic, something that I was just curious about you. So you do this thing that's I don't even know how to describe it. I haven't looked into it a lot, but I thought it was really cool. Is it called? It's the thing with Genesis and the creation story and weaving in evolution and creation and stuff like that. What is that called? Again, do you know what I'm talking about?
Speaker 2:There are people that talk about evolutionary creation. Is that what you're talking about?
Speaker 1:Don't you have a website or something that's dedicated to that specific Nope, so sorry. That's all right.
Speaker 2:I thought for sure that I'd read that somewhere.
Speaker 3:I kind of want to drill down even more. On understanding, john, like from your perspective we've talked about, I wrote down, you said or would this be right in what I wrote down, a right approximation what you're saying that if you're trying to analyze and figure out the characters and why they are saying what they're saying I'm doing what they're doing then you're missing the purpose of the narrator's message.
Speaker 2:You may be missing the purpose of that. If the narrator is actually using that to communicate his message, that's fine, but again, then that has become the narrator's message, not the character's message.
Speaker 3:We've said. You've taken notes. This is really helpful in context. I want to understand more and so you've said what to do a few times and I have an overarching premise of what I believe the message of the Bible is, and it's directly related to a restoration of relationship. So my question to you would be in regard to being relational, like connecting with, because I even wrote like a narrator's purpose in my mind is to some degree like the intent of the narrator's heart trying to be communicated, and that may be fluffy language, but do you have a description of what you believe the grand message is, the narrator's purpose in the Bible?
Speaker 2:Of course we've got a variety of different narrators. Each one has a purpose for their own book and I don't believe that every book intentionally addresses the same issues. You just can't make that work. I think that the largest meta-narrative of the Bible as a whole not just the New Testament meta-narrative, the Bible as a whole pertains to God's desire for relationship and to dwell among his people. I don't think every book addresses it, but I see that as the main theme that you can trace through Old Testament and New Testament. It makes a lot of sense presence and relationship. But that doesn't mean that every narrator is addressing that. Every author of every book is addressing that. We have to take each book in its turn to figure out what they're doing. So in that sense they may or may not coincide. When I go to a book I can't get to the heart of the narrator because I can't psychoanalyze him either. No, myers-briggs tests on narrators, we can't do it. But I have to believe that he's an effective communicator and that therefore he has literary intentions. Whatever his heart intentions might be, he has literary intentions and hopefully I can get to the point where I can understand those.
Speaker 3:Do you believe you can know the heart of the heart behind the narrators? Because there's the narrators inspired by the Spirit, but then my context of understanding is that God is the ultimate author behind that intent. Certainly, okay, I'm just trying to connect.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but again, let's be careful. God is the ultimate authority. He is vested as authority in the human instruments and therefore that's where we have to get it. I can't get it straight from God, I have to get it through the human instruments because that's where he put it. He hid the Easter egg. I have to go find it where he put it.
Speaker 1:That's the language we need.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a child, I'm three years old, I can't just say the author understood this. Fine, but God really meant all of this. Okay, now we have no authority. We just did an end run and we got no authority for that. To that extent, I'm trying to get God's message which he gave through those human instruments which I need to try to understand and appropriate to my life. That's really helpful. I can't necessarily say that by doing that I'm getting to God's heart. I can only say I'm getting to the communication that he vested in those authors Okay, and certainly that maybe reflects part of the heart of God, but I don't want to be too presumptuous on that count. When I look at what the Bible is doing consistently throughout, I would not say that it's trying to reveal the heart of God. I think that's probably above our pay grade. We'd love to know that, but we couldn't handle it. What it is revealing, my understanding, is it's revealing God's plans and purposes. Again, not in Toto, it's not giving everything, but it's really revealing God's plans and purposes sufficiently so that and here's key so that we are able to participate in them.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:Because that's our response. Our response is not becoming part of Abraham's story, it's becoming part of God's story. Our response is to see how Abraham became part of God's story. Maybe I can become part of God's story in similar ways probably not, but maybe. But I want to know how it can be part of God's story and to see that. I have to know how God's story is progressing and to see how he typically uses people in his story as his plans and purposes unfold. Sometimes people cooperate and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they're instruments and sometimes they're obstacles. Sometimes they know what they're doing and sometimes they're clueless, but yet God works through it all. My job is to become part of God's story, and the Bible tells me what God's story is.
Speaker 1:That's super helpful. So what would be the best way to weave through that? Because what kind of something that I've thought recently is? You can basically take now the basic principles that you learn through reading the Bible, not necessarily use it as like a principle book, but use it as like a. You can learn the story and how God moves and how God works, and then you can learn the patterns a little bit, and then that helps you so much to be able to be in God's current story. Being that we're still doing acts like acts at least I've heard this, I think I agree with it just acts just goes and then it just ends and then we just took out what they left off and history just keeps on going. So would you say that's accurate about just using God's story, using the general themes of the Bible, to be able to know what it feels like and where he is at, so you can jump into that story.
Speaker 2:It's not an uncommon way to do it, but it has its hazards. It's difficult sometimes to discern whether the text is simply being descriptive or whether it's trying to be not prescriptive but actually trying to tell you how to think and shape things. Even when we read acts since you brought that up I'm not a New Testament scholar but acts describes how the church developed in the first century church. That doesn't mean that all the things we find there are still valid today or would still work today or are still the kinds of things we would do, because it doesn't go through saying since I told you this story, this is exactly how you ought to do it. There's never a go thou and do likewise. It's describing how the church developed and some of the ways in which it developed just wouldn't necessarily work today. So I'm wary of the idea that we can just go through each passage and pull out principles and extrapolate them and universalize them, as if the Bible is teaching those. I find that typically the Bible isn't teaching a lot of the things that we seem to think it's teaching. Let me explain that one.
Speaker 3:Can you say it again so?
Speaker 2:yeah, the Bible isn't necessarily teaching some of the things that we think it's teaching. We love to say and the biblical model for acts is this the biblical model for nutrition, the biblical model for dieting, the biblical model for wealth management, the biblical model for leadership, the biblical model for capitalism? We always want to give a biblical model for something, because then we don't have to say it on our own cognizance. We can say the Bible tells you, and usually, of course, it's something that you already believed anyway and you want to promote. And so that's a problem. We do this all the time. We have the Daniel diet and we've got Nehemiah's model of leadership and this and that, and we bring those things out as if the Bible is teaching us how to do leadership. Now the Bible is describing Nehemiah's leadership. Other people did it different ways and yet were successful, and so we have to be careful to say Nehemiah is the Bible's model for leadership. Nehemiah succeeded because God was with him. Whether he did everything right or not, I don't know, but has that part about pulling out his enemy's hair? I don't see a lot of pastors doing that, as much as they might wish to, but we end up dismissing the things that we don't like and just pick up the things we like and it becomes our model of leadership, not Nehemiah's. You just happen to find some of them in Nehemiah. When Nehemiah prayed we should pray. Who's going to say we shouldn't pray? That doesn't help you, ani, and you didn't need Nehemiah to tell you that. And so we try to make the biblical view of everything in the world and biblical view of dating, biblical view of social media, biblical view Ah, that's Stop it. So what is the biblical view of podcasts? You don't pay.
Speaker 1:They are in there. By the way, Podcasts are in the Bible.
Speaker 2:We've got some. The Hebrew word is port-post and it's the Hebrew word is crap.
Speaker 3:You should never put it in. I'm hearing what you're saying in a lot dumber words in my brain which are a lot of times. Tell me if this is part and parcel with what you're saying. A lot of times we come to the Bible and we want to read it like a manual for life. Here's the applications. Here's the things, what I need to get out of it so I can go do what I need to do or what.
Speaker 2:I want to do there you go.
Speaker 3:Actually, so I can go do what I want to in spite of what I need to. Yeah, there you go. So when we come to the scripture that way, we're coming to something almost like it's cold and dead, like just facts on facts and our interpretation of the facts aligned with our own intention. And I'm going to put this out there in public, it's my favorite dad joke of all time. I felt like the Holy Spirit gave me and somebody's going to steal it. But the Bible. We come to the Bible as a manual. When the Bible is trying to give us Emmanuel, like it's trying to say here's part and pattern of the way God functions and men function. But the whole intent is you said Emmanuel, like God with us. And I'm thinking about that in terms of relationship. Like John, I don't know if you're married or how many kids you have her, but the idea of relationship to me, like I can know a lot of information about my wife, but to know her heart I have to organically enter into seasons of hardship, joy, like I have to walk with her, and I feel like that's what the Bible is inviting us to. Is that, am I off base in that, or is that accurate?
Speaker 2:Not at all. When I talked about the meta narrative of relationship and presence, I call that Emmanuel theology. I use that all the time. I haven't used the pun of manual versus Emmanuel yet.
Speaker 3:It's copyrighted it's copyrighted 50 cents.
Speaker 2:But I agree Another way to say that it's not about us, it's about God, and when we use it as a manual, it's about us. It's going to give me tips to flourishing life. I did a book called Wisdom for Faithful Reading that has lots of this information in it, but toward the end of that book I talk about the me box. We like to take each little bit of scripture and drop it in the me box. What does this mean to me? How does it help me flourish, to know God's will, to substantiate the agendas I already had anyway, to substantiate the theology that I already believed anyway? We want to drop every little bit into the me box and we're going to find something there that we can drop comfortably into the me box, even if that has nothing to do with what the narrative is about or what the author had in mind. My alternative to that is that we've got the God box and every little bit is pushing up into the God box to help us understand God's story, to help us understand God's plans and purposes. An application, then, isn't the me box. Application is us plugging in to the God box, us plugging in to God's plans and purposes, god's story, finding our place in God's story, knowing how to participate in God's plans and purposes and every little bit helps us to understand that, rather than going directly into a me box. So that's when we treat the Bible as a manual, as a how to, as all of that, we're doing the me box thing, and most of the time that pays no attention whatsoever to the author's intentions, which is where the authority is, and therefore that's sad and that goes back to my hermeneutical literacy. This is what we're talking about.
Speaker 3:It's interesting the way you even describe that because the me box the manual. I just need the information. If you read the book by Dale Carnegie how to win friends and influence people, you can consider that a very manipulative amount of information. Like I just need to use this information to get what I want out of people. Or if I relate to my wife that way, like I just need to know the details to satisfy her to whatever degree she needs to be satisfied and be supposedly happy so that I can do whatever I want. And I feel like you're saying that to read scripture that way is to read scripture from my own, like my own satisfaction. Apart from it, would that be valid?
Speaker 2:It's a selfish way of reading. It says that it's all about me and that I can grab whatever I want from it in whatever way I want from it. That will satisfy me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's something that Matt Chandler says a lot is You're not David, you're not him, dad come it, and that's something that's it's hard to do, though it's hard to not be like. I'm definitely pretty shabby on my Old Testament, as a lot of Christians are I love the New Testament. It's a nice read the Old Testament. I read it A lot of. It's really cool and I'm interested. A lot of it is just like all right, I'm going to read this because I feel like the discipline is for me is to read it, and I know I'm talking to an Old Testament scholar. So you're going to be like, hey, by the way, it's the best part of the Bible, so you can rock and roll with this.
Speaker 2:I'm not blind to the idea that it's very difficult to know what to do with the Old Testament, and that's why we need to be certain about our method. If we don't have a method that sticks, a method that's focused where it has to be, a method that has controls, a method that has accountability, if we don't have those, we're just grabbing anything from anywhere and if all else fails, just say it's about Jesus.
Speaker 1:I feel like when I read the. Old Testament. I need you behind me with a big stick and be like Wacking me like no this is not what this means.
Speaker 2:Stop it, that would be helpful. Yeah, in one sense that's what my new book is supposed to do. It's a stick.
Speaker 3:That's what it's going to be from now on. Every time you start to do that and learn the habit, you're going to hear John Watt and go Stop it. So I okay, I'm glad you brought up the you're not David, because I feel like I'm going to make John mad. And I'm fine with that because I'll probably learn, because when I at first, when Matt Chandler said that I'd agree with that, I like you're not David and that is a right way to look at scripture. And then I believe there's a paradoxical nature that David is to some degree an archetype of human beings on a redemptive journey. So is there also a way to say you're not David, was David, but you are you and you are a type of David. Yet you can't use David's story like a man, you want to know what to do with your life. Is that valid, john?
Speaker 2:The question is that what the narrator is doing with David, because it's only what the narrator is doing with David that counts. Every character in the Bible is human and therefore, oh, this is a human being. Of course, except for the serpent in the garden, every character is a human being. So to say, they're human. Like I am great. That doesn't get you the authority, the biblical texts, yes, sir. And the question is you want so what's your objective? Do you want the authority, the biblical text, or do you want your own imagination filled flight of fantasy to an inspirational idea?
Speaker 1:and put it on your wall. You got to put it in a frame.
Speaker 2:Put on a post. That's right, at least a poker sticker. Unfortunately, if we judge by what goes on in Old Testament preaching in the United States today, it sounds like they're perfectly comfortable with the latter A flight of imagination to fuel an inspirational thought. I love inspirational thoughts, but it's no substitute for the authority of the Bible. And can you imagine that people out there call me liberal? Anyway?
Speaker 1:What are you, a liberal? You believe in authority of Scripture. What are you talking about?
Speaker 3:So there's like all right, I'm going to get hit with a stick again. I'm good with that. I'm learning there's authority of the Bible, like I'm with you, john, yes. And then there is Good, because I didn't make that up. That's the only reason I'm with you. So there I hear that and then there is like creative, inspirational, artistic relationship that I have with God as a person. That's not about it I don't know how to say this. Like it's not about the authority of the Bible. The authority of Bible is my reference point of all authority, consistency, it's my how I judge and test those voices and inspiration. But correct me, I hear you saying I'm not saying inspiration is not valid or creative ingenuity and learning through story that is also outside of the Bible is not valid, but the reference point of what is authoritatively true, principally true about God and his nature. Is that acceptable, sir?
Speaker 2:So question number one.
Speaker 1:Is it what the? Narrator is saying.
Speaker 2:Yes, I don't know anymore. Yes, of course the narrative has a message and that message potentially can be presented in very motivational, inspirational ways. That's number one. When somebody says, oh, I don't want to do the narrator, that's so boring, I want to be inspirational, let's try to get those things together. Secondly, are there things that are worth telling people, even if they're not in the Bible? Sure, you have spiritual insights and I can believe fully. No reason not to that. The Holy Spirit has given you insights into life, into all kinds of things that can be very beneficial to share with people. Great, that should not be mistaken for biblical interpretation.
Speaker 3:Amen.
Speaker 2:It should also not substitute for biblical interpretation. Otherwise we're not preaching the Bible, we're just preaching our own inspirational ideas, and they may be good ones. They may be wonderfully motivational, beautifully spiritual, exquisitely theological. But don't say you're preaching the Bible. You're preaching things that you've used the Bible to piece together, maybe, I don't know, whatever. Okay, so those are different things. What I find is that we often are willing to substitute inspirational thoughts as if it is the Bible, or maybe just here's this inspirational talk about loyalty and we use the story of Ruth. Well, ruth certainly is a great example of somebody who is loyal beyond all expectation, wonderful, and that can be a really inspiring sermon. I've heard one like that recently and I loved the sermon, but they didn't even touch what the book of Ruth was about. They just use the character of Ruth. If you want to preach loyalty, you can use Ruth. You could also use Sam Gamgee from Lord of the Rings, okay, and it wouldn't be any different, because if the Bible is not trying to give an inspirational talk about loyalty and you're drawing that, you may as well get it from Lord of the Rings. It's no different that you got it from a biblical character, do you?
Speaker 1:believe that there's a place for both. If John Walton's given a sermon, which would you believe that there's place for biblical interpretation, there's place for hermeneutics and things like that, but then there's also a place for that storytelling kind of idea in there, absolutely so.
Speaker 2:Let me give you an example. If I were preaching from the book of Esther, I would be wanting to do my due diligence, talking about the message of the book of Esther as the narrator is laid out what's going on here, and develop that and make that as powerful as I can make it. But somewhere along the line in the middle of the book, I'm going to get to that chapter when Azirksis and Haman meet, both having had a sleepless night. This is between the two banquets, right? I think they had too much chocolate or Turkish coffee or something, and neither of them could sleep, and so they meet in the antechamber there and they're both thinking about the same thing. They're both thinking about Mordecai, although their thoughts are very different, right? Remember? Haman wants to hang him, azirksis wants to honor him, and they don't share what each other is talking about, and it's very intriguing little exchange that takes place here. Haman believes that the king is talking about him and therefore when the king says, what should I do? It's like a blank check Just fill it in, you can have whatever you want. That's what he thinks, right, and look at what he does. He doesn't ask for more power, he's already the second most powerful person in the world. He doesn't ask for more wealth. Those are the two things that people would typically ask for, unless they ask for a pony. But he doesn't ask for more wealth. Again, he's probably the second wealthiest man in the world at that point. He does ask for a pony in a sense he wants to be Right. He asks to be led around the city wearing the king's robe, and there's proclamation being made. What is it that he is asked for? He is asked for not a pony. He is asked for prestige, honor, because no matter how powerful and how wealthy you are, you can never get enough of prestige. And you can find that in the secular world, you can find it in the Christian world, you can find it in the pulpits, you can find it in the mission field, you can find it in the classroom, you can find it anywhere. We have this insatiable desire for prestige. You can preach a whole series of sermons on our desire for prestige in the ways that we pursue it. Now that makes a great sermon, and there are plenty of people who could preach it better than I could. But if I were doing that, when I started to move from the text itself and what the narrator was doing, I would say something like this so we've been talking about what the narrator is developing here in the book. We've been examining that. As I was reading this week, I couldn't help but notice that Haman's heart was driven by prestige, and that rang a bell with me. It resonated, and so I wanna talk about it a little bit. Okay, and just in that little transition, I've drawn a distinction between what the Bible's doing and what I'm doing, and I hope that the Spirit's leading me in what I'm doing. Okay, but I've made the transition and I've separated those two things so they're not gonna be confused. And I'm not ignoring what the text is doing, but likewise I'm taking advantage of a good topic to talk about. So when you do something like that, just that little transition, you actually are teaching hermeneutics. Don't tell them that, but you are. You're teaching hermeneutics because you've told them there's a difference between those two things and many people sitting in the pew don't know there's a difference.
Speaker 3:I say, my example of what you're describing is when I think the Spirit is leading. I say, okay, this is the book of Jared and it's not in the Bible, and it's just literally. And if you think valuable sticks, test it, otherwise throw it in the garbage like the chicken and spit out. And that's how I relate to what you're saying.
Speaker 2:There's a difference between the Bible's word and my word, and most people aren't careful enough. Again, that's what I mean by hermeneutical literacy.
Speaker 3:So I just lost my thought. You go Grant.
Speaker 1:Gosh, that's just. I definitely you're on a much different wavelength than I am in a good way, Because I need more of you in my life. So I'm gonna read your new book. I'm gonna get ready to get hit by the stick. That's a fact, but so In the book.
Speaker 2:I call them red flags, not sticks.
Speaker 1:Just say that sounds a little better, but I just love that idea because me and Jared say this all the time. It's like my way of saying it, which is a little less articulated, is just this could be garbage, but here's what I think. This could be trash to throw it away. But here's something that I think, and if I'm going through the Bible with somebody like I don't, it's really hard to not put your own spin on it. It's really hard to like. It's harder than it should be, like we read other books. I'll just read a book and I'm not putting my own spin on everything. It's like what did John Mark Comer have to say? And it's here you go, and then it's you're not being like oh, what did he? Oh, there's character. I need more like him. And obviously the Bible's an error and it's authoritative. So there is a big difference there, but it's. This might sound super simplistic, but just the idea of read the Bible like a book, like don't, I don't know, I feel like there's a lot of various I'm relating to what you're saying.
Speaker 3:It brings to mind when the first time I ever read the Scarlet Letter and I was in a literature class and it was the question, like you're describing, of does the author have an intended message he's trying to communicate? And they're the narrative reading style, or the story and narrative. The class that I was in essentially said they attributed so many things to the author's intended message that just it just wasn't there. It was like an unlimited amount of things could be attributed, just based on the creative interpretation of whatever was being read. So what you're saying, grant, that you read John Mark Cullmer, like to some degree that's also just a. Here are some facts and here, like in his new book, live, no Lies, or things like that. But then I was thinking about this earlier, like if you read Lord of the Rings or, like you mentioned, sam Gange, we don't. I don't think we think about it as much because, tell me what you think, john, there's not as much consequence involved in my interpretation of Lord of the Rings, like I do, to some degree, read it for more enjoyment, whereas, like when we come to the Bible, we often come to it as a manual that we need to get life out of. It's like a.
Speaker 2:It's a word of God and that's what he say. This is the word of God and so it's important to me, and so it has something important for me, and that puts it at a whole different level than other literature. Of course, the other problem is that sometimes we treat it like other literature in bad ways, because, as you're experienced with Scarlet Letter or with Tolkien or with anything else, anybody can read any number of different things out of it, and generally in literature classes they will encourage that Everybody gets your own reading. That's fine, and you can do that with literature because it is for lots of other purposes, but not authority. But you can't do that when it has authority and so many people in the church will affirm strongly, wholeheartedly, sincerely, biblical authority, but they, in their practice, they don't know how to work out the implications of it and so, as a result, they end up disrespecting the Bible by neglecting actually what its authoritative teaching is, and they don't even try to get to it. They're very content with their own spiritualized reader responses.
Speaker 3:Okay, so we'll end with this. If you're speaking to a group of people and you want to give, I mean actually speak like you're speaking to me and Grant, like you're speaking to a room of three-year-olds, learning how to interpret what would be the simplest tools from your perspective. To begin again in the way that you read scripture, the Word of God.
Speaker 2:I can't go to three-year-olds yet, but let's get there, okay. So if the Bible has authority, what does that mean? Authorities defined as something that we submit to, that we're under some obligation to submit to, whether it's national authority, parental authority, whatever employer authority. We submit to it and that submission requires us to be accountable. We're accountable to that relationship of submission, okay. So we have to treat the Bible that way. We are accountable to it. We can't just do what we want, and even a three-year-old or four-year-old or five-year-old would understand that they're under the authority of their parents and therefore they can't just take anything that their parents says and think about that in any way they want. Their relationship to their parents, their obligation to their parents, means that they have to understand what their parents are asking of them. They can't just twist it around to be what they want it to be. Now, of course, that's the endeavor of most teenagers to do.
Speaker 3:That's the purpose of teenage years I didn't say I couldn't do this.
Speaker 2:I work at a college, just anyway.
Speaker 3:That's perfect, though, John, because that's exactly what we're doing. We're coming to it and saying how close can I get to not breaking it? That's perfect yeah.
Speaker 2:And too often we've even been told look for promises to keep, Look for commands to obey, Look for, and you say no, the Bible isn't an anthology of commands to keep. The Bible is not just a deposit of promises. What are the human authors doing? And we're pretty tough on our journalism these days. You can't just grab a half a line of what some leading politician says and turn that into something that's totally against it. It's called lacking integrity if we do that. Well, yeah, it's what we do with the Bible all the time. Why can't we treat the Bible with the same integrity that we treat representing someone else's thoughts in a report or a journal article?
Speaker 1:Gosh, I feel like I almost need to throw everything I know about reading the Bible and just throw it in the trash for a second and just begin. I don't know, it's like the narrator thing. I do read it somewhat like that. What is the author trying to convey? Because that's how you read literature for the most part.
Speaker 2:What are they trying to say through this Like?
Speaker 1:that sort of thing. But also I'm very character heavy so I care. I've had so many conversations with so many dudes about if you were this guy, what would you do. Or if it was this writer wrong when he did this, what is this telling me to do in my life through this? And we've had like fun, kind of like fun, and air quotes, conversations about that kind of stuff, but it's really it seems to be that.
Speaker 2:Meaning you had to make it up. Whatever you said, you had to make it up.
Speaker 3:And it was fun.
Speaker 2:And then it's not your authority, not the Bible's authority anymore.
Speaker 3:John says I'm not against fun, it's just not authoritative.
Speaker 2:That goes back to the idea that we've been fully invested in believing that the characters deliver the message. That's not correct. The narrator delivers the message.
Speaker 1:The easiest way I can understand that is yeah, I've read it wrong my whole life, but let's keep going. Let's keep going.
Speaker 3:The easiest way. I can understand that. It is really simple. But, like we've mentioned Lord of the Rings once or twice and it's super simple. It's not authoritative, but it's a story that we know and we know that no character is giving you the point of that story. Like the point of the story is the whole story and what the narrator is doing through that. And then the takeaway Like you don't take away snippets of lines that you're like oh, sam Genji said this and he's a hobbit and so I'm going to live my life this way you take away a sense of the principles and patterns of truth and I that's what I was trying to say earlier with the themes. Just, you put that better, but I'm just I guess one thing that's last that comes to mind for me and I don't know if you think this, john, but A large problem, I would say to some degree, is we just don't read enough of it, and I don't even mean every day. If you read five verses, if you just grab the Lord of the Rings, it's a massive tome and you just read a paragraph a day, you can spend an eternity never having any idea what the heck Tolkien is doing.
Speaker 2:So an example, an illustration that I use at the end of my book Wisdom for Faithful Reading. Think about your answering the question what should we be doing when we open our Bibles, whether we read it for three hours or for three minutes? What should we be doing? Ok, think about your facial recognition programs on your phone or on your laptop or whatever. Right, you set it up for facial recognition so you don't have to type in the password and so the program pings your face. Right, it's pinging your face to make sure that you have that you can come in. I've been told, and by people who know, that every time your facial recognition program pings your face, it gets better. It has more details about your face, more options, more variables, and the more it pings your face, the better its identification of you becomes and the harder it is to fool. If, granted, if you cut off your beard or if somebody had a broken nose, or if they dye their hair or whatever, no matter what you do, it's got enough information that it's not going to be fooled and your identical twin could try to come on and it won't be fooled if it's pinged you enough. Ok now. So I use that as an illustration that when we open scripture, we're pinging the face of God. Every time we open it we're pinging the face of God and for every little bit we read whether it's three verses or three hours or three chapters or whatever it is we are pinging the face of God and we're getting fuller exposure to what God is like, what his plans and purposes are, how he works. And the more we ping the face of God through scripture and that's the only way we can do it the more we do that, the harder it will be for us to be fooled. We see a verse that we say, wow, would God do that? Or wow, has your God a monster or boy? He's pretty mean here. Or we're not going to get fooled, because if we've been pinging the face of God and have not perfected but so exquisitely clarified our understanding, we're not going to get thrown. But we can do that every time we read the text. But we're not going to be doing that. We just grab some line that hits us and say, oh okay, that's my thought for the day, my inspirational idea. I will paint my room green. We still have to be knowing what scripture is doing, and it's trying to feed us information that will help us understand God's story and enter into that story to understand his plans and purposes and be participants in it. Thanks for listening to the Across the Counter podcast.
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