Does the Bible address modern moral questions? In this episode of The Bible for Normal People, Pete and Jared dive into a discussion on the uniquely modern tension between an ancient text and modern ethics. Together, they explore the following questions:
How do we navigate the tension between respecting the original context of biblical writers with authorial intention?
How can we maintain our religious roots in Christianity in light of historical consciousness?
How do we draw the distinction between the theology we find within the Bible itself, and the theological implications that we can extrapolate from it today?
In our modern age, how do we embody and find deep meaning in an ancient tradition?
Is it fair to ask the Bible to provide clear instruction on modern problems/issues?
Instead of looking to the Bible to justify what you already think, what is a better way to engage the Bible when considering problems biblical writers never envisioned?
Why doesn’t the Bible address modern moral questions?
What is a hermeneutical hangover?
How does the Jewish religion handle modern ethical problems and questions?
Is it necessary to ground our morality in the Bible? Why or why not?
What makes the Bible different from any other book?
Isn’t it fun to articulate problems and have deep discussions about theological stuff even though Pete and Jared don’t ever get around to providing final/clear answers?
TWEETABLES
Pithy, shareable, less-than-280-character statements from Pete & Jared you can share:
“The Bible doesn’t address modern moral questions, because it’s neither a modern nor a moral book.” @jbyas
“The tension a lot of people feel is that they have inherited a faith from their churches that is still very much pre-modern, in many respects.” @peteenns
“When we ask the question, ‘What does the Bible say about X?’ we’ve already assumed that it has something directly to say to us today in the modern world and that it’s geared toward this moral or ethical purpose.”@jbyas
“The only thing driving us is not the text itself, it’s our need to have the Bible teach us. So what we’ve actually done is not adhere to biblical teaching, we’ve actually imposed our conclusions onto the biblical texts.” @peteenns
“Deconstruction can make you aware of the inadequacy of your current worldview.” @peteenns
“What I’ve learned is that a high view of Scripture, for me, is respecting the otherness of it. Respecting Paul for who Paul was, in the world that Paul lived in. For me, that’s treating the Bible with respect. And it’s ironic that, by doing that, I’m often accused of disrespecting the Bible.” @jbyas
“We have a responsibility to do the abstract thinking necessary to advocate for this world that we live in. But I do not need a Bible verse to do that, because I think that’s expecting the Bible to do too much.” @peteenns
“I’m not expecting [the Bible] to be authoritative for my life, in a directional kind of way, but by shaping a conversation about how I think about my own humanity.” @peteenns
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Website: thebiblefornormalpeople.com
Podcast Episode: Making of the Modern Mindset
Support: patreon.com/thebiblefornormalpeople
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Pete Enns: You're listening to the Bible For Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared Byas: And I'm Jared Byas.
[Jaunty intro music]
Pete Enns: Hey, folks. Welcome to this episode of The Bible for Normal People. What's our topic for today, Jared?
[Light laughter]
Jared Byas: Today, we are going to talk about “Respecting the Bible for What It Is (And Isn't).”
Pete Enns: ...and isn't. Both of those things. Because what we're all about here is: what is the Bible?
Jared Byas: And what do we do with it?
Pete Enns: And what do we do with it? Which are these eternal questions.
Jared Byas: Yeah. But I think part of the reason this topic has come up for this episode is because—I think there's a reorientation that I've been going through where, you know, I've been having this episode on the "Making of the Modern Mindset." And sometimes I can be critical of—
Pete Enns: Your podcast series.
Jared Byas: Yeah, the little miniseries. And I can be critical of modernity and the limitations of modernity. And yet, I need to have a corrective lens to help me recognize also, though, that I respect the tools of modern critical scholarship. In fact, I'm assuming it sometimes in my criticism of modernity. And so I'm standing on the shoulders of critical scholarship. And I just think maybe it would be good for us to talk about some of that.
Pete Enns: Yeah. So I guess modernity being critical of itself, in a sense? Is that...?
Jared Byas: I think sometimes there's this idea that we can throw the baby out with the bathwater. And instead recognizing like, yeah, modernity produced some really good things, even when it comes to reading our Bible, that have been really helpful for us in interpretation. And yet, it can still be limited.
Pete Enns: Right. So one of those things is—and we've talked about this a bunch of times before, we're not going to beat a dead horse here today—but the idea of context, of understanding something of the context of these biblical writers, because it can really help us from saying things that are just pretty wack about the Bible, you know?
Jared Byas: Well, and I think that's the heart of this episode, is let's dig into and talk about this tension between respecting the original context and the authorial intention. What were the authors trying to convey? What were they trying to mean, when they wrote it? And how we understand it and make it relevant for us today. That is a perennial problem...
Pete Enns: Yeah.
Jared Byas: ...and tension. And, you know, we just had Dale Allison on the podcast, and he talks about—and you frame it this way, and it reminds me often of Jon Levenson, because that's the first writer I read that really wrestled with this—how do we be Christians in a religious sense, and historians and experts in modern critical scholarship? How do those things go together? Because it's not obvious.
Pete Enns: That's, in a way, the modern tension, I think. And now, I mean, how long has this modern tension been going on? That's a good question. It's longer than just a couple hundred years. But it's really with the rise of things like, well, you know, science and the enlightenment and things like that, that gave people more of a historical consciousness. I think, you know, modern people have more of a historical consciousness than, say, John Calvin. Even though John Calvin had a historical consciousness, it wasn't informed by things like archaeology or advanced science in any sense.
Jared Byas: Well, the data hadn't rolled in yet.
Pete Enns: It hadn't rolled in yet, and especially the big one is comparative religions—what we know about other religions of the ancient world. So we can look at the time of Jesus and understand something about Greco-Roman civilization and religion and how those two things, you know, are not unrelated in the gospel. So yeah, I think it is a big tension that we live with in the modern period. And not to get off topic here, but the struggle I think, the tension a lot of people feel, is that they have inherited a faith from their churches that is still very much pre-modern, in many respects. It doesn't know what to do with science.
Jared Byas: It hasn't even integrated the data and evidence that we've gotten from all these modern advancements of archaeology, historical data, and scientific data, all these sorts of things they haven't even really wrestled with that yet.
Pete Enns: And that's the big divide, I think, between, again—just let me use the labels, folks don't take them, you know, too black-and-white-ish—but between fundamentalism and liberalism, you have fundamentalists have sort of done an apologetic end around historical problems. And liberals have gone right through it, and had what Walter Wink, a New Testament professor, calls an acid bath—and the naïveté has been sloughed off.
4:57
Pete Enns: But, you know, now liberals have been saying, we're not really sure what to do anymore with this faith. But then you have also people in fundamentalism, who are becoming awakened to the modern problem of evidence and things like that. And so we have these two groups that really have very similar DNAs, you know, but they're approaching this historical thing in very different ways. That tension is still very much with people. And it's with me, it's with you.
Jared Byas: Right.
Pete Enns: You know, I haven't gotten over this yet. It's, you know, I don't cry myself to sleep, but I still think about it a lot. How do you maintain a tradition, which is essentially a pre-modern tradition, in the wake of modern developments of thought that challenge that pre-modern tradition? And how do you do that? That's a big thing.
Jared Byas: Yeah. And we've talked about that, I think, in a few episodes, so I think it'd be good for us to drill down and get very practical in this episode. Because for what I've been thinking about, and frankly, just to be a little introspective about the podcast itself, is I think about this sometimes with our episodes—of how do we draw the distinction between the theology we find within the Bible itself, and the theological implications that we can extrapolate from it today?
Pete Enns: Right.
Jared Byas: And I think that sounds really nuanced. And I think it may take some time to unpack exactly what we mean by that. So there is a view of God that the ancient people who are referenced in the Bible had, that the authors of the Bible had, they had a view of God and that gets imprinted in the Bible. And then we have a certain view of God. And those theological implications aren't the same as what the ancients thought of God. And I just think that sometimes in our effort to be biblical, whatever that means, we can disrespect that original imprint of how they thought of God. And we can make it seem like the ancients are on our side, with whatever the social, or justice or ethical or moral topic of the day is. We can disrespect that original intention. And I think the thing that helped me was understanding modern critical biblical scholarship. That gave me that distance I needed so that I could actually respect it on its own terms. I don't know if that's making sense.
Pete Enns: No, but then, you know, if you live too much in the original historical meaning, however difficult that is sometimes to carry out like, you know, the author's intention is a very difficult thing to uncover.
Jared Byas: Right.
Pete Enns: The best we have is a text from which we extrapolate a possible historical intention, because we can't ask authors. And then authors aren't always the best interpreters of their own material, which, you know, literary critics will tell us. But, you know, we have this rather difficult situation of having a very different view of even the nature of reality than these ancient writers. And that's the ever present tension. How do we embody and live with and find meaning, deep meaning, in this tradition, which for most of its history, was not living where we live?
Jared Byas: Right.
Pete Enns: And then getting really practical about, you know, we need to respect the original intention. But then how do we do theology? It's easier just to say, well, their intention is what we think it is, and that—you can make the connection that way very nicely, but it will eventually unravel.
Jared Byas: Right.
Pete Enns: And so maybe there's another way of doing it. And by the way, folks, we're not going to have final answers to this, are we Jared?
Jared Byas: Everyone is going to be shocked that we're not going to have—they've come to expect...
Pete Enns: I know, they're so used to these clear answers we get. But you know, folks, isn't it just worthwhile to have discussions about this stuff? And just to articulate the problem?
Jared Byas: Especially in this case, because I think the problem might be even in the questions we ask. So again, some of what we're saying may feel abstract. And so let me bring a very practical example. We might ask the question: Is the Bible for or against abortion?
Pete Enns: [sarcastically] That's obvious...
Jared Byas: And that question itself is problematic because of the things we're talking about. Because when we use the word abortion, we mean something very specific. And we're trying to ask, what does the Bible have to say about something that, frankly, wasn't the same kind of thing that we're talking about. And so when we do that with all kinds of things, what does the Bible have to say about immigration laws? What does the Bible—you can be on the left or the right politically to ask these questions—what does the Bible have to say about x or about y or about z? When we ask those questions, we're stuck in this problem that we've been talking about.
9:59
Pete Enns: Right. Or climate change, or I mean, name your favorite topic. Name something that means something to you.
Jared Byas: So is it even fair? I'm going to ask you this. Is it even fair to ask that question? "What does the Bible have to say about climate change?" Let's say.
Pete Enns: No, I don't think it's fair at all. I think it's, you're gonna start looking for things to justify what you already think. I would rather say, is there wisdom in our tradition that we can engage today for understanding a problem that they never envisioned?
Jared Byas: Well said.
Pete Enns: Are we done with the podcast now? That's it?
Pete Enns: That's it. But that's my opinion. And I know that might not be super popular, but you know, I don't look at abortion, for example, as a biblical issue in terms of there are passages, you know? You know, people have tried. And it's not that the Bible informs their understanding of abortion, it's that their understanding of abortion drives them to read the Bible in a certain way. And I just want to say to that, just let's be aware of what we're doing, right? There may be other reasons for some people to be really against abortion. But those are, let's say, more ethical reasons, or I'm going to even say theological reasons, the way you understand God, or the nature of life, or things like that, or human freedom, you know? I mean, there are different angles to come at that. But you can't find a verse to address this problem the way we understand it today. Because it's the problem the way we understand it today.
Jared Byas: That's it. Yeah, maybe another way of saying it is the Bible doesn't address modern moral questions, because it's neither a modern nor a moral book. And so, again, it comes down to what is the Bible? When we ask the question, what does the Bible say about x, we've already assumed that it has something directly to say to us today in the modern world, and that it's geared toward this moral or ethical purpose.
Pete Enns: Right. And I think a way of expressing the idea is, I mean, probably many of you have heard people talk about the "biblical teaching on." The Bible is teaching something—well that's making a lot of assumptions that it's there to teach us about X, Y, and Z. And it teaches us about, well, what's it teaching us? It's teaching us whatever the Bible wants to talk about. It's there for—it becomes our authoritative guide. And I do want to suggest that if that's the case, we really should be Six Day Creationists. I think Genesis 1 is teaching that from the perspective of this writer (that's my important qualification), that creation is a six-day affair with a seventh day of rest. It's morning and evening. I take from the point of view of the writer, I take that to be somewhat a plain statement. It's just that today we have to wrestle with things like science, you know? And how do we do that? So I don't want to put science onto Genesis 1 and say it's talking about Day Age Theory, you know, that is talking about epochs and evolution and stuff.
Jared Byas: If we really understood what the original authors meant, we would know that they meant a day is an age.
Pete Enns: Right. And the only thing driving us is not the text itself, it's our need to have the Bible teach us. Right? So what we've actually done, though, is not adhere to biblical teaching, we've actually imposed our conclusions onto the biblical texts. That, I mean, I think that's not uncommon. Who doesn't do that on some level? But it's about being hermeneutically aware. Oh, wait a minute—I just did that, didn't I? So what are the implications of that? So, you know, I think there are so many topics like this. Abortion is one, and creation is one, and you mentioned immigration.
Jared Byas: Yeah, immigration, where we talk about—just with a lot of refugee crises and things like that. It is like we're going back to the Bible to support our activities and actions. And I think sometimes I cringe regardless of where the argument is, whether it's my position or a position I disagree with, when we (what I would call it) disrespect the original intentions of the text where it's clear, at least in my mind, that this isn't what this is talking about.
Pete Enns: Whatever it's about, it's not about this.
Jared Byas: Right. And sometimes it's just even a practical reality of: how could it be? It's a modern problem. It's a construct that we deal with, the idea of political like nation states is different.
Pete Enns: Exactly right, yeah, right.
Jared Byas: Policies are different. And so I don't know what we gain from that, other than maybe it's this holdover of treating the Bible—and I say holdover more from a progressive standpoint—I think from a more fundamentalist, religious perspective, it is this—but thinking of the Bible as this authoritative thing, out of which we have to ground all of our moral decisions in it.
14:58
Pete Enns: Because it essentially speaks directly to us today.
Jared Byas: And so I do, I think sometimes I can be maybe even harder on my progressive friends. Because it seems like they're still doing that, even though they don't even hold that view of the Bible anymore. It's almost like this hangover.
Pete Enns: Yes, right.
Jared Byas: It's maybe like a hermeneutical hangover.
Pete Enns: Or carryover?
Jared Byas: Yeah, where we still have to, have to, ground it...
Pete Enns: Of course they're drinking, probably, because they're progressive. So, that’s fine.
Jared Byas: So that's just a literal hangover. That's not the hermeneutical kind.
Pete Enns: [Light laughter]
Jared Byas: So yeah, and I think it's worth bringing up because it reminds me a little bit of Nietzsche—where, you know, Nietzsche kind of says we're still in the modern world, we're still operating as though there's a God. And I don't know if you guys realize that yet. Like, once you realize that we've killed God, this is like, this is gonna be pretty scary. Like, you can't ground it in this anymore. And I feel like sometimes, as progressive Christians, they will do that too. Where it's like, no, you realize you got rid of that authoritative understanding of the Bible, and yet you're still kind of trying to ground all of your ethical and moral proclamations in it.
Pete Enns: That's right, yeah. Yeah.
Jared Byas: And I just don't know if that's being intellectually honest.
Pete Enns: It's not being intellectually dishonest.
Jared Byas: Or maybe not aware.
Pete Enns: I think it's more not aware. I think it's more of a reflex, you know, and I think sometimes, you know, what happens with a lot of people, they have the crises of faith because they become aware. It's not because you know, they'd read some book and that made them become godless or something, just that you became aware. And that's true deconstruction, you know? They became aware of the faults within their own system and said, "Oh, crap, what do I do now?" Right?
So I mean, but you know, back to the original author thing. You know, it's important with respect to, you know, refugees, for example. The Israelites weren't refugees when they came out of Egypt. They were delivered by God. And the only reason they hung out for 40 years is because they were disobedient, but they had a land they were going to. They were by definition not refugees, they were going back to a land that they claimed as their own, right? Jesus was not a refugee when he, you know, the Holy Family was going down to Bethlehem.
Jared Byas: Down to Egypt.
Pete Enns: Well, first down, you know, to be born. And then you know, but then going down to Egypt. It was a flight, but it was not in any respect a "refugee status" like we think of today. But again, see, the thing is that—I think that personally, we should be really willing, especially a rich country should really have their arms open wide to help people who are suffering under political regimes. I'm just saying, I don't think I need the Bible verse to support that. What I think, I mean—and you feel free to disagree, Jared—but I think what can support that is a broader engagement of, let's say, Christian theology over the ages. And not just Christian, but Jewish theology too, and if you want to throw in other religious faiths, go right ahead. But I think there are other rationales for why we should be against refugees instead of a biblicistic one, because that I don't think that's, that's just making the text a tool for what we already think.
Jared Byas: Yeah, I think that's often what we do. Right? The Bible is a tool. Even if you come back to thinking about what I'm hearing you say in the context of that Wesleyan quadrilateral that we bring up quite a bit, is to say, we may come to the conclusion that as Christians, we should maybe have this policy toward refugees. And when we say that, I feel like the conservative Protestant answer, the answer I would have gotten: "The reason we can do that is because we have a straight beeline to the Bible."
Pete Enns: Right.
Jared Byas: But actually, the quadrilateral is helpful to say, "No, but what does our tradition say historically? What does our experience say? What does reason say?" Those all can be theological. That can all be because we're Christians. It's just that this, this hyper sola scriptura that we got handed to us, has caused us not to be able to see how valuable all those other things are.
Pete Enns: Right. Forgive the hobbyhorse moment here. But this is, you know—the history of Judaism is not a simplistic thing, just like Christianity isn't. But you ask a Jew, even a conservative Jew, "What do we do about this ethical issue?" and they're not going to run to find a prooftext in their scripture. They'll anchor something there, but there's a whole Jewish Talmudic discussion that has happened (and not just Talmudic, but beyond that) to basically inform them because the faith is always anchored, but it's always evolving and changing too—because times change. And situations change. And it's that in creative engagement with a text—see, that's, I love that!
Jared Byas: Right.
19:54
Pete Enns: And as sort of a creative engagement with trajectories of the text. But I want to understand those trajectories as much as possible as coming out of...the biblical writer was saying something for that moment. How can we bring that into conversation with our own moment in time? And I think that's the discussion that's been a part of Judaism and Christianity for probably 2500 years.
Jared Byas: Yeah, you know what two words come to mind when you described it that way? Which I think, I've been looking for these maybe principles, and I think a few of them are coming into focus. One, we've mentioned it, is awareness. I think one thing I like about the crea—the way that I often engage with Jewish writers, in their creative interpretations, is they're all very self-aware of what they're doing. They're not pretending to anchor that creative interpretation in the Torah. They are very self aware that they are tagging this on to the end of a very rich history of tradition, and creative reengagement with that text over time. So I think awareness is critical. And I think Christians often lack that awareness because we were taught that that's not okay to do. So we do it, we just pretend we don't do it. So we're incentivized not to be self aware of what we're doing, because it would actually make it less-than if we did that. But the second I think, is, and this is a word I think we'll hear more and more from you about, is adaptable. It's that the Jewish engagement often is more adaptable to new data, new understandings. There's a mechanism where we can fold in new information into our tradition, that I think, at least fundamentalists, as I would have grown up with, we would have not had that adaptability. Our faith isn't resting on how do we engage in modern problems in faithful ways? It is, how do we impose the once-for-all truth we have on our culture? Which does not lead to adaptability. There's no need for it! What are we adapting to if we have the truth?
Pete Enns: It's also dangerous to do that.
Jared Byas: Well, and you can even hear it in the language when I say we impose. There is almost a colonizing impulse built into that.
Pete Enns: Mhmm. Right. And it becomes a power tool, and that's one of the downsides, one of the dangers of not doing, let's say, the contextual work of trying to understand these texts. Again, bringing those texts into different situations historically, that's difficult to do. And people write commentaries, and people have traditions of how they do that. But still, to work with a historical meaning, let's say, as best as we can tell—at least again, it's not so much, "This is the one historical meaning." But there's some that you just have to rule out.
Jared Byas: Right.
Pete Enns: You know, the Bible is not talking about X. You can use this passage if you want to, to talk about something you already think is true, but let's not kid ourselves. We're not getting that from this text. You know, and I mean for me, one of the things I've been thinking about recently because I've looking at some scientific things for this book that I just finished—and don't get too happy about that, because I don't really know science very well—but I'll talk about it for several chapters in my book.
Jared Byas: So yeah, knowing about stuff hasn't stopped you from talking about it.
Pete Enns: Never, never. I've made a career out of it, actually. So, but it's, you know, it's creation care, climate change, and things like that, which I think are very, very real. And I think Christians should be very, they should be on the forefront of saying this planet is a gift, what are we doing? And I don't think we need to anchor that in the biblical principle or a biblical verse. I don't think giving humans dominion over the planet is supportive of climate change activism. I don't think things like the Year of Jubilee is, you know, where you sort of let the land regroup a little bit. I don't think that's about caring for the planet, because the whole point is to care for the Israelites. You want to have good crops and stuff, just let the land lie fallow for a year and then start up again. So I don't think there's a need to sort of connect this, you know, Paul, creation is groaning, waiting for the revelation of the sons of God or whatever the passages in Romans 8. Again, that's a very theological eschatological statement, I don't see what that has to do remotely with climate change. But I still think it's a very true and real thing, but for a different sort of sets of reasons. And one of which is just bringing evolution into it right at the outset.
We're all connected. Every living thing has DNA. I don't quite get how it works. But it's adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine, they're all grouped together, but in different orders, and in different, like, numbers of genes and all that kind of stuff that I don't understand. But we're all connected! You know, we have like, what is it, 99% of apes DNA we share. I think, mice, it's like 75%. You know, I did not know this until I started reading, but we share 50% of our DNA with cabbage. Think about that. Which explains to me why some of my students can fail an open note test—but that's another issue entirely.
25:09
Pete Enns: So the point is that, here's one reason why we should care for a planet: we're all, all of life has the same code. We're all—Plants, you know? Bugs. Everything. We're so connected, and if we are the most conscious of beings, and we are, for that reason we have a responsibility to do the abstract thinking necessary to advocate for this world that we live in. But I do not need a Bible verse to do that, because that's taking things—I think that's expecting the Bible to do too much. And the bottom line is that I don't care if the Bible said the opposite, I would still want to do this. You know? Because I think it's true and right. And I think it's, you know, I don't expect biblical writers 2,000 years ago to have even had a conversation about this.
Jared Byas: So I think even in the way that you're saying that, it makes assumptions about what the Bible is, because again—I just keep, I can't get out of my head my presuppositionalism. Right? Which is this idea in some of, I think both of our backgrounds, of, "What grounds you to even say that something is right and true? If you don't have the Bible as this infallible grounding, why should I believe you when you say that we should advocate for creation?" You know, why should I? And so I think that perfectionist thinking, that we have to have this infallible grounding for anything we know and do on a moral front, is often what's feeding this desire to go ground it in the text.
Pete Enns: And I understand the argument. I mean, it's a good thing to have.
Jared Byas: Oh, yeah. Sure.
Pete Enns: But the problem is: "If you don't have the Bible, how are you going to ground your morality?" And my response is, “Are you asking me to ground my morality in the Bible?” Because there are a lot of things there, you know, I mean, the Bible assumes the continuation of slavery.
Jared Byas: Yeah, if you do truly ground your morality in the Bible in a plain way, it's likely that you will get arrested soon.
Pete Enns: Right! And you should be, you know, and for a very long time. But you know, the response is, like, for example, okay—slavery. Even in the New Testament, it's assumed by Paul, right? But people say, "Yeah, but that's not a biblical teaching." Well, what is it then? A suggestion? You know, how do we determine teaching? And that's a very slippery thing, because a teaching—something gets the label "a teaching" if it's deemed consistent with a certain theological outlook, right?
Jared Byas: Well, there's already a filter by which we're deciding...
Pete Enns: The filters are always there.
Jared Byas: Right.
Pete Enns: They're always there. Even a literal interpretation, that's a filter, and you don't interpret everything literally. And you have reasons why you don't do that. So the Bible becomes more of a conversational resource really, than this authoritative thing that is determining all these, let's say, ethical questions. And of course what started this whole conversation is that trying to respect...Let's not say the author's intention, because it's hard to nail, but just the other worldness and antiquity of it. Respecting that, will at least make us very self-conscious about what we're doing when we're sort of imposing our own agenda onto the Bible. And that when somebody says, "I think you're imposing a modern agenda on the Bible," at least we should take a moment to reflect on that and to pause and to say, "You know, I didn't think, I guess maybe I am. I wasn't sure that I was doing that."
Jared Byas: Yeah, that that space of humility that allows us to say, "You know what, you might be right. Let me do a little more investigating into that." How am I maybe projecting my own agenda? And, again, those intentions aren't always malicious.
Pete Enns: Yeah, right.
Jared Byas: Those intentions are often: I want to do good, and I feel like I need to ground it in the Bible.
Pete Enns: That this is the only way I know how to do good.
Jared Byas: Right. "I have to ground it in the Bible, and that motivates me and inspires me to do that." I just think that we don't, you know, two wrongs don't make a right, so to speak. Like you don't, you don't have to do it that way to be motivated. We can be grounded in the broader Christian tradition. There are a lot of good things to say about that. And I think learning to allow that to be a good enough grounding, for me, is more of the work to do.
Pete Enns: A less absolutist kind of grounding, but one that's more, maybe, willing to be in conversation. And that's what you know, the Wesleyan quadrilateral, again, is really quite a striking bit of wisdom. "Well, it doesn't tell you what to do..." Of course it doesn't, that's the whole point. But you're engaged in community, thinking about reason and tradition and Scripture and…
Jared Byas: Experience.
29:53
Pete Enns: Experience. Thank you. The big one, yeah. And you know, the three-legged stool of the Episcopal Church is a very similar notion. But, so scripture is there, and it's there for a reason. You can't get away from scripture, and you shouldn't want to, but it's not like a plain reading of the Bible that gives you theological knowledge. It's who you are as a person, it's when and where you were born, it's the influences of your life, it's your ability to exercise reason. And an example of exercising reason for me is...I understand why Genesis 1 talks about creation the way that it does, because it's an ancient document and it's participating in an ancient world, and it's how people understood things. I've just applied reason to that. "You've explained it away!" No, I haven't explained it away. If you take that literally, you're explaining it away! Right? But we can have a reasonable discussion on that, and it'll be a lot determined by our larger worldviews or experiences or traditions and all that kind of stuff.
Jared Byas: Yeah, and I think it does go back to, you know, we use this word "worldview," which, given my background in Christian higher education, makes me shudder a little bit. But I do think there is something to say for—we come to the table always and already with some perspective of how the world works, what principles are at play. So it is this—we can't get away from that, we will always have it. But I do feel like there's this mutual movement, where we're always interpreting the world by it. But we're also able to create these little spaces. And this is why I think maybe we both are so interested in humility and curiosity, because I think those are good tools to open this space, where our experience of the world can actually critique our worldview. And shift it just a little bit. And that's that mutual interplay. If we're not aware, there's that word again, that we have a worldview, that we have a perspective on the world, then we won't ever have that space that can critique that worldview or that perspective.
Pete Enns: And then there's a commercial for deconstruction, because deconstruction can make you aware of the inadequacy of your current worldview. That doesn't mean you try to jump for the perfect one, you just take that journey and see where it goes and grow as a human being as a result without achieving absolute knowledge.
Jared Byas: So at the risk—I want to have a real live example here, because as we're talking, I keep drawing connections to the Adam and Eve story, as we're talking about this. And so I almost hesitate to bring it up, because I'm like, well, maybe I'm doing the very thing we're talking about here. But again, for me, it's illustrative. It is a, it's content that we can use to sharpen our understanding, to be thinking about things. And I think we do this with literature and with story all the time. And so I think I want to bring it more into well, not that we can't do that. It's just that what if we did it more on the level like, I make all these other connections culturally between literature and movies and other things that enrich how I see the world. That's why we have these stories. And so I think it's not that we don't want to draw connections between our experience and the experiences we find in the Bible, it's that we want to be aware of what we're doing and why we're doing it. And maybe it needs to change, because the way I understood those connections in the past didn't allow for differences of opinion. Didn't allow for humility. Didn't allow for curiosity and creativity. It didn't allow for these things that now I think are important to being Christian.
Pete Enns: Yeah, you know, over the past few days I just read a short story by Tolstoy called "The Death of Ivan Ilyich." A friend of mine said, you gotta read this, so I read it. It was fantastic. But the thing is that I, throughout, I was connecting it to my own existence. But I was doing so recognizing that I'm reading a late 19th century Russian novel, and I was trying to imagine that moment, that space, even the names themselves. And I imagined them, and the way houses I imagined were decorated back then in the 19th century, right? And the kind of like, there was this whole upward mobility, success orientation at which I could connect to mine. But theirs were different, because they had different titles for where these people went on each stage of their success. And my point is that I actually connected with it, by letting it be that other story back there and not saying like, "Well, this means me. This means my time." Right? And, you know, reading "The Lord of the Rings," the same thing, you know, you get a lot out of it. And boy, the riders of Rohan were so brave going after the orcs, but I'm not thinking, "who are the orcs in my life?" I'm not thinking, "I want to get a horse." I'm just saying, you know, it's something that story makes me think about my life differently. Right? Now, the Bible does that too. And of course, the question—and a legitimate question people would raise—is what makes the Bible any different? I think it's because of the content of the story more than anything, but it's not that it has this immediate connection to us. We have to work at it. And part of that working at it is trying to under—just let the Bible be this ancient thing. And then how do we connect to our reality? But we're not taught to read the Bible that way, most of us.
Jared Byas: And again, for me, we talk about having a high view of Scripture is often assumed to be that direct connection. And I think what I've learned is a high view of Scripture for me, is respecting the otherness of it. Respecting Paul for who Paul was, in the world that Paul lived in. For me, that's treating the Bible with respect. And it's ironic that, by doing that, I'm often accused of disrespecting the Bible. Like, the respectable thing to do is just to, is to consume Paul and Jesus and the New Testament and the Old Testament, and put it under my experience, rather than just letting it be what it is and having a relationship with it.
Pete Enns: And I think what's wrapped up in that is the notion of biblical authority. If you have that direct connection, you can have biblical authority. But I know Jared, you've talked about this, too, I forgot what book it is you were talking about, it might even have been Tolkien. But how reading these stories when they have an effect on us, there is a sense in which that story has authority. You know? It's forcing the question of us to examine our own existence. I think the Bible does quite a bit of that actually, if you sort of get away from the, you know, "for my morning devotions, what am I supposed to get out of the coup of Jehu in 2 Kings?" or something like that? Probably nothing, by the way. But, you know, just reading that story, I put myself in their antiquity and I say to myself, I don't want to be that way. But that story is still having an effect on me. That's a very Jewish conclusion, in a sense. I'm not expecting it to be authoritative for my life, in that sort of a directional kind of way, but just shaping a conversation about how I think about my own humanity. Which is not secular advice. I mean, our humanity is a very precious thing, and Christians should be at the forefront of saying that sort of thing, as far as I'm concerned.
Jared Byas: Right. So as we come to a close here, I think for me that the takeaway, the thing that I frankly, I think I learned through processing this with you in this episode, are these two ideas of awareness and adaptability. That we do have a framework when we're reading the Bible. And for me, I want to grow in the awareness of that framework, and I want that framework to be adaptable. Because I think that's what allows me to, again, for me, that's what allows me to keep a "Christian" understanding of the Bible.
Pete Enns: Right. And I think, you know, my last little statement here jumps right off of that, that what you're talking about is the history of Christianity and Judaism. And they weren't inerrantists looking for the Bible to answer all of their questions. It was a different approach, and the adaptability was always there. And I think that's something for people to sort of embrace and just take home with them—that the kind of discussion we're having, half the stuff we said might be crazy. I don't know. But the discussion that we're having is, absolutely integral to the nature of the Christian faith and frankly, for a lot of people continuing on this path. Because if you don't—listen to the James Kugel episodes, and others, you know—the reason that this stuff has survived is because it's been adapted. It has moved, it's not stood still, it's moved along with the people. And I think that's a good thing to hold onto. It's actually very orthodox. It's very incarnational in its thinking. And, you know, we're not weird for talking like this. We're actually pretty normal Christians,
Jared Byas: Right. We fit within that tradition.
Pete Enns: The Bible for Normal People.
Jared Byas: Exactly.
Pete Enns: This is it.
Jared Byas: All right. Thanks, everyone.
Pete Enns: See you folks.
[Music begins]
Outro: Well, that's it for this episode of the Bible For Normal People. Before you go, we want to give a huge shout-out to our producers group who support us over on Patreon. If you'd like to help support the podcast, you can leave us a review or just tell others about our show. You can also head over to patreon.com/theBiblefornormalpeople, where for as little as $3/month, you can receive bonus material, be part of an online community, get course discounts, and much more. We couldn't do what we do without your support.
Outro: Our show is produced by Stephanie Speight, audio engineer Dave Gerhart, Creative Director Tessa Stultz, Marketing Director Savannah Locke, and Web Developer Nick Striegel. For Pete, Jared, and the entire Bible For Normal People team, thanks for listening.
[Music ends]
[BEEP]
Jared Byas: I lost track of time. When are we supposed to be done? I think we should be done about now.
Pete Enns: I think so too. Yeah.
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