Episode 315: Kent Sparks - The Beginnings of Israelite Religion
On this week’s episode of The Bible for Normal People, Pete and Jared are joined by Kent Sparks to unpack the early religious history of ancient Israel. Kent explores how ancient Israelites first gave God the name Yahweh, how Israelites understood Yahweh in relation to other ancient Near Eastern deities, and how the roots of monotheism emerge from a far more diverse and evolving set of beliefs than many assume.
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Pete: You're listening to The Bible for Normal People. The only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared: And I’m Jared Byas.
Kent: It's a blessing to have these ancient voices, but if you want them to all agree, then what you're inevitably gonna do is you're gonna have to run rough shot over somebody, right? You can't listen to all of the perspectives and homogenize them without taking some part of scripture and not doing justice to the human author who wrote it.
Nor the God who gave it.
Jared: We have today, Provost and Professor of Hebrew Bible, Dr. Kent Sparks. We're gonna be talking about the beginning of, where does he teach? We teach at Eastern.
Pete: What a coincidence. So do I.
Jared: This is actually, this is. Pete's boss. We should have done like a mailbag where you just-
Pete: I’ve been nervous all day.
I just like, oh no. What's gonna happen if I say something stupid?
Jared: So we're talking about the beginnings of Israelite religion, which is, it's gonna be an interesting question in itself. People might already be scratching their head. What do you mean the beginning of Israelite religion? So why don't you start us off, Pete?
Pete: Well, yeah, Kent, just maybe walk us through a little bit of how.
The Hebrew Bible itself explains the origins of Israel's religion.
Kent: Yeah. I mean, if you're going to sketch it out, in kind of an outline mm-hmm. You'd begin with the book of Genesis because God creates the world and Yahweh is the name of the God who does that. He is also the name of the God of Israel.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Kent: Yahweh's actual name is only called upon by human beings. Uh, in chapter four when we're told that in the days of Seth, people begin to call on the name of Yahweh.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Kent: Um, beyond that, Yahweh isn't that involved with humanity directly until we get to Abraham. And then Yahweh calls Abraham, who's one of the forefathers of Israel, the forefather of Israel.
Uh, and from then on the relationship between Yahweh and the children of Abraham and Israel is, is off and running. Uh, as you probably know, if you're a listener, you know something about the fact that there were patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, and God had a relationship with those four generations, at which time the Israelites went down into slavery in Egypt.
That's a story in itself. Uh, at that point, the people were enslaved for several hundred years, depending on how you, which biblical tradition you use to decide the distance. There some, sometimes it's, it's in years, sometimes it's given in generations and, uh, God remembers because the people are suffering his promise to the forefather Abraham, that he would take care of the people and bless them.
So he calls Moses to lead the people out of Egypt. And of course you probably know there were, uh, 10 plagues and these were ultimately successful, uh, securing Israel's freedom from slavery. Uh, the Israelites, uh, went out across the Red Sea. That was the last time that they had any encounter with Egypt.
The Egyptian army was killed at the Red Sea, and then they went into the land of Sinai where they met Yahweh on a mountain. And at that mountain they received, uh, the covenant, which was their, uh, the, the form of their relationship, their marriage with Yahweh, their God. And they received laws that, according to which, if they followed these laws, uh, they would have a healthy relationship with Yahweh.
And if they broke the laws, they wouldn't have a healthy relationship. Um, they essentially break the laws immediately, uh, you know, by building, uh, making a golden calf an idol, which was one of the laws they were not supposed to break. Um, eventually they invaded the land of Canaan. Uh, and at that point, uh, we, we have a whole sequence of men who lead Israel.
Uh, judges, we have kings, um, and. The entirety of that history is judged really according to whether the Israelites follow the law. Whenever a king or a leader follows the law, things go well. Whenever they don't, things do not go so well. So the, basically the story is one in which, uh, God creates the people of Israel, but they're constantly estranged from Israel.
And at that point, uh, God is fed up, one could say, with Israel's treatment of Yahweh. And so he sends them into exile. So he takes, uh, what really amounted to the movers and shakers of Judean Society, and he sends them off into Babylon. And this is in the sixth century BC. So we've covered, uh, several hundred years of history at this point.
Uh, he then brings them back, uh, less than a century later. Uh, they're called at this point Jews, because they were from the tribe of Judah. When we carry on with that history we're carrying on with the history of Judaism. Which comes ultimately, as we've just said, from Israel, and from the God, Yahweh, right?
So that's the story in a nutshell.
Pete: That’s the story in a nutshell. Yeah.
Jared: Well, let's, we want to scratch the surface of that because just like a lot of things, when we start reading the text more closely, things get more complicated than that. So, where does what we maybe were taught about Israelite religion?
Like, like we said, for me it's like, what do you mean Israelite religion? That's just truth that Yahweh existed. Yahweh is the god of the universe. Yahweh always was. So how do we have an origin of Israelite religion and where do we find it in the text itself? 'Cause I think for some people they think, um, asking these questions are coming from outside the Bible, but it's actually, scholars come to these things from within the text as well.
So I'd be curious what. What questions do scholars ask, or what passages can you look at that starts to say maybe this Israelite origin story is a little bit more complicated than just what we learned in Sunday school?
Kent: Well, one is the diversity of the text itself on these questions. Uh, if you get, if you go to say, Exodus chapter 3, you are told, uh, in the counter between Moses and God that everyone knew Yahweh's name, but they didn't know what it meant. I am that. I am.
Ah, that's what it means. So the revelation of the name is not the name, but its meaning. If you go to Exodus chapter 6, Moses is told by my name Yahweh. The patriarchs did not know me. So here already you have two different stories about the revelation of Yahweh.
One that he's been known throughout history and we're just learning his secret name and the other is that he's not really been known by his name, but only as El or El Shadai up to that point. The minute you see within the Bible itself, two stories about the revelation of the divine name of Israel, you know, that you're having to sift through.
As much as it feels like a homogeneous story by the time you look at the details. You begin to see it's not homogeneous. And there's lots of other examples. Uh, one that comes to mind is the text in Deuteronomy chapter 32, uh, the Song of Moses. There's a text there that says, in its very interesting text, one of my favorites says, El apportioned the lands.
And he apportioned to each of them a, a God according to the sons of God. And one of those, God was Yahweh, right? So just that was a convoluted way to say. L apportions lands to Gods and one of the gods that got a land was Yahweh who got the land of Jacob.
Now, some Bibles don't have that in there.
If you, if you read that text, you're not gonna see that in your Bible. Right. What you will see is something like he apportioned the lands according to either, uh, the Sons of Israel or the angels of God, depending on whether you're using the retic text or whether you're using the. And what happened is two different traditions, the Masoretic text of the Hebrew tradition and the Greek tradition saw the problem we're talking about, and they made it go away by switching either the word sons, sons of God, they changed sons to angels, or by changing from, uh, sons of God, they made it Sons of Israel.
Music: Mm-hmm.
Kent: Right. So the, so two different ways to solve that problem. Interesting. This sounds like a theory because you, we don't actually have, we thought for a long time the text that says that it's according to the sons of God. This is deduced by the text we have, but when we looked at and found some scrap scraps in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we actually found a reference to what we postulated, which is it does say that l apportioned the lands according to the Sons of God and Yahweh had his portions.
Pete: So, in my, who El is-
Jared: Yeah. Let's, let's kind of unpack-
Pete: Let's back that up a little bit because you mentioned El right.
Jared: And for a lot of people you just assume, oh, that's another name for God.
Like we hear of Elohim or El. So unpack this a little bit.
Kent: I, I apologize. Uh, so in the old Canaanite pantheon, El was the highest God and the other gods were, so you could think of ancient pantheons or groups of gods as families in which there are multi-generations. And the God at the top was the God El and the goddess Asherah.
That's in Canaanite theology. What, what this text is telling us is that the Israelite person who wrote this text accepted that El was the high God and that Yahweh was one of the sons of him.
So that in itself shows us that over time, because as you, as you rightly have noted, uh, in the Hebrew Bible, very often L and Yahweh are the same God over time, those two deities coalesced into one God, right?
So you have El, Elohim, Yahweh or whatever, they're the same deity, but it was not always so. Right. And we can see that in the Bible, not just by inference, by looking at, you know, Canaanite religion.
Pete: Uh, do, do you think that's weird? I mean, you know, 'cause um, Deuteronomy is so rather stringent about things, you know, and it's establishing this covenant with Yahweh the second time around.
All of a sudden you get this thing in chapter 32, it's like, oh yeah, well he's got a higher one over him. Did was that, is that a tension that was just sort of left in or was-
Kent: Well, I mean, the tension was resolved, right? The tension is, is our tension not theirs.
They fixed it. Yeah. Right? Uh, so, you know, one of the things that happened in the Israelite tradition is they had a lot of ancient poetry. The book of the Wars of Yahweh, for example, is the Book of Yashar. These are ancient books that are referred to in the Bible, but we don't have them anymore.
But if you look at, say, um, uh, Deuteronomy chapter 32, also 33, if you look at, uh, I, I mean Exodus chapter 32 and 33, Exodus 15. You look at, uh, Judges chapter 5, you have these ancient pieces of poetry. These are a part of their inherited tradition. They're not gonna get rid of them.
They're gonna, it's a part of making the text old to include this old poet. But, but if the poetry had theological ideas that were old, that being older were less advanced, they would fix that theology if they had to, which we can see, in this case, you can see in action. Two different groups of scribes solving the problem.
And a text that we found of the actual text that was the problem. Which was, by the way, postulated before we found that text. Right? Right. Yeah. Which is always interesting when scholars guess at something, they guess, right? Yeah. And then, and then they get it right. You know?
Jared: Mm-hmm. So they're not always crazy.
But what, what are the implications? 'Cause I wanna come, I just think this is gonna be very new for people who are trying to understand what it is that you're saying. And I think we are making some leaps, or just jumps or assumptions that people are gonna be able to track.
That what we're saying is, and maybe this ties a little bit to Israelite origins, because it seems like there was a group of people, the Canaanites, and they had a religious tradition. They had their own gods. And in this pantheon, like Zeus and all, you know, we tend in the West, know, kind of the Greek pantheon.
They had their own pantheon. And the top God was El. And then there were all these other gods. And, and El had a spouse. Asherah. And then there were these other gods underneath. And at some point, I feel like this is what I'm gonna ask you to fill in the blanks on, and now El and Yahweh are the same.
So maybe we can walk through some of that. Like how did we go from this other nation, Canaan, the Canaanites, having this pantheon with El, what does that have to do with Yahweh and how did that get introduced and how did those get conflated?
Pete: Yeah. Kent, that, come on. Do that.
Kent: Yeah. So, so I, you know, I don't think it hurts to, to shift the gears to a different theme for just a moment.
If you look at, uh, Greek religion, the Greeks had all sorts of polytheism, but over time they developed within Greek philosophy, this notion of the one true God of philosophers in the background. So there, there, there is a process by which a person or persons or traditions can reflect upon the complexities of divinity and, and begin to assimilate it into a single core, a single identity.
One of the things that I think helped Israel do that is that my view of the, of the origins of Israel would say that Yahweh was a very important God for the Israelites from the beginning, from very early in their history. So they had already an investment in the God, Yahweh, right? Yahweh? The text we just referred to a second ago.
Right? Uh uh. Jacob, that is, Israel was given as a gift to Yahweh and the land was given. Right.
Jared: So the, the Yahweh was like the local deity of that region that we find a little bit of a trace of in Deuteronomy 32, that it was apportioned to, uh, Jacob the way.
Kent: Yeah, that's right.
Jared: And so Yahweh was that regional God in this pantheon.
Kent: Yeah. Although, interestingly, right, if you, if you go with the biblical tradition here, it is, and this is one of the reasons I think this tradition has some truth to it historically speaking. Yahweh is considered a God of the southern desert from Edem or Sinai. Right. Nobody in Canaan is gonna make up that our God came from the southern desert.
Right. Uh, so my opinion is that Yahweh was a God originally located in the southern desert, and that the Israelite core of population originally were desert dwellers. And so when they settled in the land of Israel in, uh, you know, around 1200, 1100 BCE. They brought with them that God. And then it was only a, I mean, he was really the only game in town.
There's a, um, a scholar named Tigay who wrote a book about the use of, uh, Theophoric elements in personal names. For example, Eliahu, right. Elijah, that's my God, is Yahweh. Right. He, what he noticed is in the Bible, and really mainly in the archeological evidence, Yahweh is the, almost the only name you have.
You have El but of course we've already seen that El can also be Yahweh. So I think what we had as a henotheism, which is our way of saying they believed in other gods, but they had just the one God. Henos means one. So heno henotheism is sort of almost monotheism. Right. And eventually they got to monotheism.
And that's probably a, a, a philosophical move in part, not a difference in every way from what the Greeks did.
Jared: Yeah. Do you say that that's like a development that we see, not just there, but we, we see that development from kind of a polytheism to we, we elevate one now as it kind of henotheism where we're gonna acknowledge other gods.
But for us, this is the God. And then eventually that moves into a monotheism. Yeah.
Kent: I mean, many people in the ancient world were functionally henotheistic, so they would have a God of the family or a God in their land that was particularly important. Right. And they didn't really relate to any other gods unless, you know, they had trouble.
And, and one of the priests came by and said, you need to do a prayer or a sacrifice for this other God that's making trouble for you, or that sort of thing. So there is a natural tendency because we have, uh, you know. All of us struggle with attention. Uh, we have a tendency to focus our religious attention on an object, and so it makes sense that that persons would begin to think maybe there's just one God and not a bunch of them.
It's certainly more economical and easier to deal with just the one God. Of course, you then inherit the problem that Israelites had to deal with was why is there evil and darkness in a great world made by the only good God, right? You know, that's a different topic, but you, you, you're treating one problem for another.
Pete: As you're talking, Ken, it just sparked a memory. I, I forgot who said this, but they described the entire, not the whole Hebrew Bible, but at least maybe the narrative portions of it, and maybe the Psalms as well. That the, the, the purpose of this text is to defend the notion that Yahweh and Yahweh alone is worthy of their worship.
Not that Yahweh alone exists, other gods exist, but, and, and, and, and why do you worship him? Well, he created everything, Genesis 1, and he saved us from. So that it's, it's like an apologetic almost. And, and, um, and those historical, um, origins are lost in that, I guess, you know, I mean, well, they're not entirely lost. They’re there.
Kent: But, um, but you have to read between the lines. Or take seriously a few lines. Yes. In order to see that the story didn't unfold in the straightforward way that the overall meta narrative Yes. I say of scripture reveals the name of Yahweh and Israel religion.
Jared: How does the, um, I, I know, I think this is in the, maybe in the psalms, the references to the Divine counsel fit into that.
Like what's. What, what's the religious landscape that Yahweh emerges in in, in the ancient world?
Pete: Like Job and, yeah. Psalm 82 something.
Jared: Well, Psalm 82 was the one I was going for.
Kent: Yeah. You know, Psalm 82 is interesting. I think there's a sense in which, in the, you know, if you're listening this, you might want to go look up Psalm.
But it talks about the fact that, uh, it's sort of monotheism by war. Right? Right. Yeah. There's, uh, the, the, the one and true God of Israel is judging the other gods like men, and he's gonna kill them all.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Kent: So, you know, we’re accustomed to thinking you get by mon to monotheism because it was either always, you know, it was always true.
Uh, and that the process would therefore be, oh, we have to figure out, there's just this one God. Well. In this particular text, I think the argument is there's one God because the others were killed.
Pete: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Right. Because they weren't doing their job.
Kent: That’s right. They were not responsible for their, and in this case, right, it's Yahweh who's apportioning the land.
He's apportioning things, right? Yeah. He's replaced interest as the God over everything. What a mess. And so, because once he coalesces with El, he's in charge of the universe. Yeah. And when the other guards aren't doing their jobs, he can just get rid of them.
Pete: So, so do you think that might be, Psalm 82 might be, um, like a hint at the beginnings of something like Monotheism?
Kent: Yeah. I mean, it is an expression of monotheism by the illumination of the other gods. Right.
Pete: Do you have a sense of when that was written? I have no idea, but, uh, I mean, I don't know if anybody really does. Exilic or Monarchic?
Kent: So here my take is, if you read Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy is already thinking in terms of monotheism. I know people wonder about that. But when it says in the Shema, uh, that, that God is one, I think what he means is there's just the one. Not lots. What is, why is that? Because one of the things they're dealing with, uh, so it gets really complicated here, friends, but the book of Deuteronomy is very similar in many ways to Assyrian treaty texts.
And those date to the eighth and seventh century roughly. And there's lots of parallels there. I won't get into it. At about the same time there were religious, um, uh, revolutions that tried to restore Yahwehism to the land. Uh, first under Hezekiah and then under King Josiah. Uh, what we see in, in, uh, uh, Deuteronomy then is not against Canaanite, God, it's against people having extra Yahwehs and Asheras around the land.
When we see, the reason I'm pointing this out is in the, in the, uh, uh, description of, of Josiah's reforms in 2 Kings, he specifically says that he's getting rid of the Yahweh high places and bringing the priests of Yahweh to Jerusalem.
So this isn't, he's not getting rid of high places that are Canaanite he's getting rid of to Israelite. Right. So when he says Yahweh is one, what he means is Yahweh is not a Yahweh at many God. We have, uh, from Kuntillet Ajrud down in the south, we have, uh, the desert south, south of, of Israel. We have these texts that refer to Yahweh of Teman and Yahweh of Samaria.
They had notions that there were multiple Yahweh. When you want to take those, those Yahwehs and make them all one Yahweh in one city at one temple, that's the beginning I think, of monotheism, especially when you can see they're also wanting to get rid of Asherah, the wife.
So it's, it's, it's really a coalescence of monotheism.
Pete: And one of those inscriptions in Kuntillet Ajrud Yahweh does seem to have a wife. Yahweh and his Asherah. I just wanna apologize to everybody out there who grew up on VeggieTales.
Kent: Yeah. I'm sorry.
But, well, uh, but, but, but Pete, you're right. One of the things that happens is we we're reading the Bible and inferring some of what must be going on that Yahweh must have. In some circles, uh, a wife named Asherah, and then we dig up or find, uh, inscriptions from the ninth, eighth century that refer very specifically to Yahweh and his Asherah.
To Yahweh of Samaria, to Yahweh of Tamon. So, uh, I think this is the problem Deuteronomy is dealing with. It's trying to get rid of Asherah and it's trying to center Yahweh in one place. In the name of, of, of, uh, monotheism.
So when somebody asks me, when is, when do people kill off the other gods in a, in a kind of mythical monotheism?
I would, I would, I would probably, it's, it's unclear to me what is behind substantively the Deuteronomy move here. Is it philosophical? Or is it, you know, more historical? I would tend to think that, that the elimination of the other gods was earlier, somewhat earlier. Um, part of the problem we, we have to deal with is we shouldn't assume homogeneity of ancient Israelite thought.
Right. And a direct development of its ideas. Yeah. We have to give space for mm-hmm. You know, we’re desperate. We don't have a lot of sources and we wanna line 'em all up. But there could well have been, uh, people, well, earlier than Deuteronomy, who were thinking in monotheistic terms. It’s just that, you know, we, they didn't leave much behind.
Jared: When I was even thinking of, I think it's the work of Ben Summer on the Body of God where he sort of pointed out that there were actually different competing traditions that we find in the text on where is God located, is, are all these independent locations, like, is is God omnipresent or are these, there's one God in Jerusalem, and these are all representations. And what, what is the deuteronomic?
What are the priests really trying to do here?
Kent: Yeah. And my take on that is that there were different opinions. Right, exactly. There were people who thought, oh, they're different gods. And that's a problem. And there people thought, oh, that's the same God, so it's not a problem.
Uh, so I, I think that gets back to the fact that we can see from the theology in these texts that they are polemical. And when you're making arguments, that means that somebody thinks the other thing. So a big part of the Bible is that we've lost in many respects, one or more sides of the ancient debates, right. About Israelites.
Pete: We get hints of it and whiffs of it at places.
Kent: But I mean, Job, what, what a great example of, uh, you know, a tradition that on the one hand is saying, you know, this is retributive theology to the wall. If you're blessed. You did the right thing. If you're cursed, you're not.
And job is going, I, I'm not seeing it. So that's an example of a text that just lays out right in front of you, the debate between say, traditional theology and more philosophical reflection on the human experience.
Pete: Yeah. But you're saying before I think was important too, about not thinking in linear terms of development, but if things may be coexisting at the same time.
Jared: But I, I think that's, I mean, I think that's also a big shift for people to understand. That, I mean, it can be overwhelming
How do we approach the Bible with these kinds of things because we are given the text in a certain kind of linear way. Sure. And then you're, you're referencing like Exodus 15 and Judges 5, and we're, and there's these traditions that are older that get kind of plopped into these newer sections.
And it's sort of hard to say in any kind of developmental sense because they're, they're put together in these polemical ways they're put together for a specific reason. That, and one of those reasons is not to outline the historical development of these ideas.
Kent: Well, I mean, there, there is a narrative flow to the history of Israel as told in the Bible.
Mm-hmm. And it's organized to tell that story. Uh, I. It certainly doesn't manage to conceal all of the diversity that underlies that, that, that quasi-sanitized version. That's right. Yeah. Right. Uh, but you can see it's fairly easy to read it and not notice or just pass, uh, with curiosity over the infelicities that you find.
Uh, but, but I do think that in the end, um, one of the problems we're dealing with is that texts are written linearly.
But our minds are networks, we don't actually think in a linear way.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Kent: And so it makes sense that if you're reading a linear text written over the course of a thousand years by a hundred authors, that that's going to, to not feel entirely coherent and not satisfy a neural network.
But I think you have to begin, if you want to make sense of that unified text, what you have to begin to do is to take account of its diversities and let them be a part of a new neural network from the text. I hope that makes sense. So when the text says, oh, Yahweh, we've known him from the beginning, oh, Yahweh, we met him in the days of Moses.
Or oh, Yahweh, we learned about his name in the days of Moses, right? Each one of those becomes a part of the network of ideas that you use to develop your history of Israel, right? Right. Uh, and then once you do that, you have to ask, what does this, what is God saying through this diverse complex?
Jared: Well, it feels almost like that once you see those threads, it adds a depth to the text, and I almost mean that literally like it, it puts it in 3D, we have another dimension now rather than that linear way of reading that in some ways is very exciting. I think for a lot of us that adds some richness and depth to the text that makes it more interesting to then kind of start to wrestle with that.
Kent: And I think for those of us who got into this from a more traditional viewpoint and then found it to be complex and interesting, it is very interesting. Uh, what I think it's worth admitting though is for a lot of people it's not interesting and it's very disconcerting. And, and, uh, you know, try trying to, uh, I, I've had many people say when, when I introduced them to concepts, theological or biblical that are complex, they, I, I kind of wish you hadn't told me.
We have a diverse group of people here who are interested in the Bible. Uh, I think, you know, our task is to help those who are interested to navigate through this. Um, and, and I hope leaders at least take it seriously. Leaders in, in the faith.
Um, and then also for those who, who maybe haven't thought much about it, even if you say, I don't really want to know about the history of Israel, but at least I know. If I'm confused when I'm reading the Bible, there's a reason. Because it's not so straightforward. It's not so cut and dry.
Right. You know, I wish it were, but it's not.
Pete: Maybe a way of putting this, correct me if, if this is going in a different direction, maybe a way of putting this is that you can't really talk about an origin of Israelite religion. You have to talk about maybe origins and different stories that were brought together and edited together. That alone is a big thing, swallow, I think, for people and, but it comes from, there are things in the text that just don't fit some other idea in the text, and we also have to deal with.
Historical analysis of, you know, archeology.
Kent: Well it’s not unlike if you say Christianity. We have one beginning, Yahweh’s religion. Christianity, right? What if you have Christianity, you have orthodoxy, you have Catholicism, you have strains within both. You have all of the different emotions.
Pete: But at the beginning, everybody agreed. Wait a minute, they didn't. I'm sorry. Oh, yeah. Okay. I got it. Right. So, call James.
Kent: I think we have to get used to the idea when we use these big categories, they're very helpful. Handles Israelite religion. Yeah. Christian theology. But if you ask any questions about them, you'll realize that you're all always grouping together diverse experiences and diverse perspectives.
Under the rubric of a word, that's how genre works, right? Israel, like religions one could say, I mean, Judaism right now has many different versions of Judaism, right. Uh, Christianity too. It all, we're all we're saying is what you find in the Bible about Israelic religion is the same as what you find in all religions.
Pete: The thing is, I mean, I agree with that. We all agree with that. That's hard for some people to hear because they've been taught well, all that diversity is an aberration. It's a, it's a departure from the one true way it began. And of course, my, our denomination owns that way of, of thinking. Right.
No, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's almost like, I mean, um, well, when you, when you get it, it's okay. Right? But, but if you're in the process of trying to get it, it's hard.
Kent: Well, it's how you get
I think of the Bible as unique because in some way, in God's wisdom, we've been given this book to, to gather around and study and read.
But what it gives you is a, is a group of mostly men, perhaps a woman or two.
Um, who are each related to God in a serious way, but a different way. And we get to listen to all of these, these wise perspectives given over the course of hundreds of years as we do modern theology. And that, that's a, it's a blessing to have these ancient voices, you know?
Uh, but if you want them to all agree, then what you're inevitably gonna do is you're gonna have to run rough shot over somebody. Yeah. You can't listen to all of the perspectives and homogenize them without taking some part of scripture and not doing justice to the human author who wrote it.
Nor the God who gave it.
Jared: Right. Well, and, and not to get too abstract, but I think some of it that's hard for people to wrap their hands around is, I'm trying not to use philosophical language, but I'm gonna have to, and then maybe backtrack.
There's an assumption or a, a metaphysic of, of oneness or sameness and that we, at least for me in my tradition, grew up and I think most people in the West, that is the modern way of thinking of it is it's about identity and sameness.
Monolithic. That's where certainty comes from, is to get to the one thing. And it feels like culturally, because of, of science and the way we think about things, we're, we're on the brink of trying to think of a, a metaphysics of, of diversity or difference. And I just think we're really wrestling with that right now.
Like how, what do you mean? That at bottom, when you talk about Christian theology, we can't trace it back to the one right way. That there has always been diversity and that that doesn't negate or dilute truth. But can actually amplify it.
Kent: Yeah. I think the word certainty's interesting. I don't know if you've ever heard, but some people say it's a sin.
But you know, the sin of certainty, it, it is a sin to [00:35:00] demand certainty.
Such as only God has. It is this, it is the, one could say the sin of Job. Mm-hmm. Right? Because Job is sinless except for the end. God reprimands him for thinking he knows everything.
Right. Right. I think part of it is understanding how certainty does work in a positive way, and this can be sometimes helpful. John Henry Newman and Grammar of A Sin has an interesting discussion on what certainty is, and he says Certainty is not, uh, an epistemic destination. It's an epistemic function.
That is, we have to stop asking questions endlessly. Or, or we'll just always be perseverating on, on our, our decisions. Right, right. So certainty is sort of the mind closes. Before it has all the evidence it needs as a function. Right. So yes, I have certainty. I mean, I believe in God. I wake up every morning and I say, how can I follow Jesus and love everybody better, including my enemies?
Now, that's, that's kind of, I've closed in on that. If you ask me, is it possible that God doesn't exist? I mean, when I look at the Holocaust, it's sure I get, I get the question right? So there's a difference between certainty as a destination that is, I know for sure incorrigibly forever and certainty as a, as an operational reality, which we all have to have.
I think what, what is the problem is people need to, on the one hand, I think it's healthy to give up that notion of divine positioning, certainty. On the other hand, it's useful to realize you're gonna need to have closure. Right. But you have to be open enough to grow. Because here's the thing, if you care about spiritual growth, which I do, it, it inevitably involves an imagination in which you imagine yourself and the world as different than it is.
If you, if you close the door in a certain kind of incorrigible way, you cannot grow spirit.
And if you say, I'm gonna close my mind to the fact that this Bible verse says something that's not any really fundamentally different than saying, I'm gonna close my mind to God, might be saying something.
So, you know, I think that there is a relationship often between belief in that kind of foundationalism and scripture and theology and a lack of spiritual maturity. Because you're unable to grow beyond the bounds that you've created in your mind.
Pete: And I think this discussion we're having about religion to show the messiness of it, the diversity of it, the the benefit is that you have, you have to grow to get it, and you have to grow to accept the Bible that we have. And the stories that are told there and not make assumptions about how, well, since God wrote it, they all have to say the same.
Nobody can disagree with you. And that's not healthy. I mean, it's, it's, it's patently, I mean. Too strong to say it's, it's patently false. Just, it's, it's hard to read the Bible and say, well, everybody's on the same exact page here. They're not meant to be. It's an anthology.
Kent: Well, and and if you get to the point as you have, and I have, um, and you realize the diversity of scripture on, on many issues, including the, the origins of Israel, religion is palpably obvious.
Then it becomes, why am I not listening? And then it becomes a, again, a spiritual thing. Yeah. Because if God has created this book in such a way as to preserve the diversity of opinion in it, then I by all means want as a part of my theology to, to view, accept, and metabolize that diversity Right now, I'm not saying what we do with it or how we metabolize it.
But it's there. And to pretend like it's not by playing kind of alchemistic games to make differences look the same, you know? Right. That's, I don't think that's healthy intellectually. Yeah. And if it's not healthy intellectually, it's probably not healthy spiritually.
Pete: And the study of, um, Israel, the origins of Israel religion is one avenue that forces us to have that conversation.
Kent: It does, but what, what it can also do is it can help us appreciate the value of process. Yeah. I mean, when, when you look at, at, uh, human evolution. What an incredible story, right? That we were living in a world we were, we weren't living in the world.
That there was a world where nobody was living. Nothing was living. And then the first, you know, single cell bacteria appear, and over time, this becomes sentient beings. What a story. Right? Instead of zap, you know? But a, a whole story. How did we get to the monotheism that we know and love as Christians?
Well, we got there through a process. And the fact that that's true means that for each one of us no less than Israel, we have a process. We have to grow, we have to walk the journey. We have to, uh, navigate diversity. We have to make decisions. Right. So what the Bible's giving us is kind of an example of how Israel walked it.
How Paul walked it, how early Christians walked this walk, and that diversity's a part of that. It’s a template in a sense.
Jared: Yeah. And I think that's a really good way of saying that. Um, and I think, uh, Kierkegaard was fond of saying like, we, we can't, because it's a process and because it's a journey, it's not something that can be downloaded to us.
We have to walk it. And so instead of seeing the Bible as this thing that helps us skip over the process. It actually is just modeling.
Kent: It’s pushing you to do the process. That's what I think. One of the things I've always loved about the work you guys do here on The Bible for Normal People is you're pushing us.
To take seriously that process. I, I don't think it's just because, you know, for biblical scholars and we wanna be biblical scholars, it's also about the church. About spiritual formation, about, you know, brokenness and about healing. All this is a part of the work you do, and that's what I love about it.
Jared: I think we can just wrap it up, but we are just waiting for Kent to say something nice. Anything, anything else you wanna say about us or thing?
Pete: Well, you know, I, I think that, um, again, for people have to get there and that's, that's the tricky part of how, you know, teaching college students first year college students, you ever notice this?
Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit. And, and trying to ease them into a way too. To accept the implications of looking at, say, the diversity of, you know, Israelite origins and when and where did Yahweh pop up and how and where is he from and, and all that stuff. And um, and I think the trick is, as we maybe move to the future is, is to try to find ways to communicate that in ways that is exactly what you're saying, Kent.
There's a spiritual value to doing it. That you will not get anywhere else than that process, but, but the Bible's supposed to tell me what to do. Who in the world ever told you that?
Kent: Well, yeah. If someone's going to tell you what to do, it's gonna be God telling you what to do in God's way, which includes through personal reflection through relationship, through scripture, through tradition.
Pete: No, that's sinful. That's sinful though.
It's just the Bible.
Kent: Otherwise God is really poor at communicating. That's right. Right. Either. Either, right. I mean, if, if God were so successful at communication to overcome that, we would all just agree.
Yeah. God has created an economy where we have to navigate through different voices and perspectives, and that's how we land in different places. Right, right.
Jared: Well, and again, it maybe it problematizes the idea that getting somewhere or getting it right is actually even the destination, maybe that's not even the point.
Kent: Triumphalism is the death of spirituality. Anytime you think I've figured out the secret. I've arrived. Right. You're, you're dead.
Sin of certainty. Yeah. That's right. Well, it's, yeah. Whatever. Somebody should write about it.
Pete: Somebody should write a better book about it.
Jared: I think thanks for coming on, Kent and for being here. This is our first in-person interview, which is great. Um, but I think I, I just wanna end by, I think that was a, a wonderful benediction to talk about how these things that feel so esoteric and feel so nerdy and actually be one of the ways that we enter into conversations about spiritual formation and our growth and how we, and to your point, I appreciate, you recognize that is what we're about.
We're about not leaving it out here as nerdy fact in our heads, but how does that actually change how we think about faith and how we think about faith expression?
Kent: Agreed.
Jared: Well, thank you.
Kent: Thank you.
Jared: Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you wanna support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just wanna give a little money, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give.
Pete: And if you wanna support us and want an all access pass to our classes, a free podcast and a thoughtful community of people asking tough questions about the Bible and faith, you can become a member of our online community, the Society of Normal People at thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join.
Jared: And lastly, it goes a long way. If you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show. In addition, you can let us know what you thought about the episode by emailing us at info@thebiblefornormalpeople.com.
Outro: You’ve just made it through another episode of The Bible for Normal People.
Don’t forget you can catch our other show, Faith for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People Team.
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