Episode 316: Pete Enns & Jared Byas - Is the Bible the Word of God? & Other Easy Questions
At the close of Season 9 of The Bible for Normal People, Pete & Jared set out on their annual holiday quest: taking questions that people have been asking for centuries and attempting to answer them in an hour-long podcast episode.
Mentioned in This Episode
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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.
Pete: Hey folks. Before we jump in today, we have a few quick announcements.
Jared: First, we just wanted to remind everyone that we have a really great advent guide out now. It's a digital download and the best-selling resource we've ever put out. You can get it at thebiblefornormalpeople.com/adventguide.
And lastly, as always, this is our last episode of this season.
We are very excited to kick off season 10 in February, but until then, you won't hear from us on the podcast. As horrible as it is to think, Jared, I don't know. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, doesn’t it?
Jared: Yeah, that’s what they say, On behalf of our entire team, thank you for supporting us in 2025.
We can't wait for our 10th anniversary next year, so stay tuned. On today's episode of The Bible for Normal People, it's the last episode of Season 9, and it's just us. It's just us.
Pete: And we’re taking your questions. Yeah, we're gonna look at some questions. It's a mailbag episode. It's gonna be a lot of fun.
We like doing this, so let's get started.
Part of the inspiration to scripture involves that development and change over time, which involves compiling and editing and things like that. And at the end of the day, what we have is various collections that all do a good job of getting people to think, to be on this wisdom journey, to be on this path of trying to follow Christ and it's all good.
Hey everybody, so today we're just going to get into this grab Bagg mailbag episode. We love getting questions and we get so many of them. You know, it's hard to find a time to like, when can we do these? But this is a good opportunity to at least get into some of these questions and we'll see how far we get.
Jared: Yeah, we're at the end of the year. No one wants to be on the show anymore. Everybody's hibernating for Christmas. We don't wanna put in the work of getting all the questions. So it's mailbag time, guys.
Pete: Yeah. But thank you for sending the questions and doing our work for us.
That's, that's fantastic. You know, anyway. Checks in the mail. So, okay. First question, Jared, is I'm gonna ask this of you. Question is, I don't know how it's, yeah, it is a question. I don't know how to study or interpret the meaning of stories when I read the Bible. So how do we relate to the Bible after critical scholarship?
That's a common question.
Jared: Yeah. I mean, I think there's a couple of parts to it. So we'll start with setting up what we mean by relating to the Bible after critical scholarship. 'Cause I think, that is, I appreciate the question. It sounds like maybe they've been listening to the podcast for a while, because I think that's what a lot of people feel, but they wouldn't put it this way, right?
They would maybe say, how do we read the Bible in the modern world now that we have science and history and all these things. We, we can't, I think you often say this, we can't go back to a pre-modern right way of looking at the Bible. And one of the problems is critical scholarship.
And I say it as a problem because it does unearth some things literally. We're talking about archeology. Yeah. And other things that we can't put the genie kind of back in the bottle.
Pete: No, I, and another way of phrasing the question that just came to me, I've heard this many times now that you've taken the Bible away from us, what do we do with it?
Right. Which is sort of a similar, that's a more aggressive way of asking the question, but I get it.
Jared: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, it is, it is a different, so I think sometimes we emphasize the continuity. And we say things like, well this, these aren't new questions. Right. Like, people have been interpreting the Bible this way for centuries.
But I think it's important to recognize, but there is a distinct difference between pre-critical scholarship interpretations and what Christians did with the Bible. And post-critical scholarship.
Pete: That's true both historically and not so personally. Right. Right.
Jared: So, I mean, I think the question is how.
How do we study or interpret the meaning of stories? And I, I, I can't help but think there's two questions here. One is, and maybe it's not so simple, and maybe you can push back on this, but one is, are you doing that as a historian? Or are you doing it as a person of faith? And, and I hate to make that a binary, but I do wonder sometimes if that's a helpful way to think about how we study or interpret the Bible.
Because there are tools and resources. If we're studying it as historians, there are tools and there's sort of rules of the field to follow that we sort of have developed. And that's being a critical scholar.
That's looking at the text and asking what, what happened, what is, um, what's being layered on here that we can sort of unpack or unpeel? What are the theological, what's the theology of the ancient interpreters and when was it
Pete: And when was it written? And why did they write it? Right.
All those basic questions of interpretation.
Jared: But I think what gets mixed up is whenever we say, okay, if we're doing that, then how do we do this other? And that's where I wanted to focus on the word, the meaning of the stories. Because, um, we can kind of problematize that by saying what do we mean by the meaning of the story?
Are we talking about like what it meant back then? Or are we talking about what it means to us now? And I think we wish that those were not different. But I think that they are. Yeah. So I think kind of I, what I would say in terms of how do we relate to the Bible after critical scholarship, we have to be clear about the purpose for which we're reading this text.
Are we reading it to study it critically? Mm-hmm. Are we reading it to get, uh, to be filled with, like you say, as a means of grace. Are we reading it for answers? Like what?
Pete: What's the purpose of it? Well, I mean, I'm understanding this question to be very much a personal question, right?
Like, you know, I used to know what the Bible meant, but I don't anymore. And how do I then read it with having to rethink everything.
Jared: Right? But I think I say it, I set it up that way because. I think for a lot of people what's confusing is they get this knowledge of critical scholarship. And then feel like, I don't know what to do with this knowledge.
And I think what I would wanna say is it's okay to set that aside sometimes. Like when we say what does it mean, what we're often asking is, what does it mean for me? What does it mean in my community's life or in my life, in my faith? And I think it's appropriate to continue to have that be running in the background.
Like learn, have your study Bible. Learn about those contexts. Yeah. So that you're not drawing conclusions that can be harmful to people. But I think there's a place for reading the Bible as a means of grace. As a way to, to dig into and ask theological and personal questions.
Of our faith and of our life. Right. As long as we're not expecting it to give. Answers like it's a divine oracle. Or as long as it's not hurting other people and causing harm to others, what would you say? That's kind of where I would go on it.
Pete: So I think this, what, what I'm, how I'm understanding the question is given the historical critical moment.
How can the Bible continue to have meaning for me? Right? That's, that's how I sort of understand this and, you know, I, first of all, I mean, not, this sounds snarky, I don't mean it to be, but it's maybe that's good that we don't know what to do with these texts right away. And the meaning that we had, the meaning that we were harboring, um, came from someplace.
You know, it came from maybe church influences or other others. And that's why it's not easy to sort of say, my goodness, I have to rethink everything. But it might also be good as well because no, no church, no denomination, no pastor, no guru, uh, has all the angles on this text. And, uh, I guess what I'm saying is, you know, to be, uh, broken up a little bit before we move forward is not always a bad idea.
And, and then how do we relate to the Bible? Well, you know, I, I think that happens slowly. I actually think that evolves and the way we answer that question on one day may differ from five years later or ten years later. And that's part of, forgive me for using the, you know, overused term, but that's part of this journey of faith, of reading the Bible, that it does change.
It's always evolving and you know, we might say it's odd to think that it would always stay the same or understanding of this text. And the thing about critical scholarship is just, it's like, um, you know, jumper cables on your battery. It just, it makes a big difference asking those kinds of questions. So, you know, if it's not, you know, historical, what do we do with it?
And if, or the historicity is questioned, what do we do with it? And I, I think that's of great value, um, to ask those questions and to ponder them. What, um, what we've talked about Jared here on the podcast as well, is really the history of Christian interpretation, which. I think for the most part has sort of assumed that yes, it's historical, but who cares?
It's not that important, you know, that that's an overstatement. It's, it, it's not where the action's happening, the action is happening sort of beneath the surface or in creative interpretive lenses that we put onto the Bible. And you know, that's where we get things like allegory, which people don't like nowadays.
But it was part of the history of the church for about 1500 years. Sort of making a comeback a little bit too.
Jared: I was gonna say, I think a lot of churches today, even though they would not say they're doing it are using an a, a variation of an allegorical approach. Right.
Pete: I think anytime you look at a passage and do more than simply explain, I think this is what the author meant to say, but you start moving it into your context. You’re doing something different.
Jared: Well, if you say this narrative, and there's a part of that narrative that gets updated to say, well, instead of a dragon, it's the challenges you face in life. Or instead of this, it, we, it represents this in our life.
That is an allegorical approach.
Pete: Yeah. At least it's not a literal approach. Right. But yeah, that's, that's the thing.
Jared: The symbolic or allegorical, where you're trading what it says for what it could mean in a way that relates to our context.
Pete: I, you know, I think part of this question too, there's so much going on is that, you know, what do you do about things like, you know, the assumption of, of supernatural events.
We, I think we have another question coming up question, right? We're gonna, we're gonna save that for that. 'Cause it's really a sort of separate issue, but I think it's a big part of things. You know, how do we relate to the Bible after critical scholarship? I think a way forward is to keep going and to keep studying and to keep thinking.
To have a good study Bible, which actually explains some of these critical issues. Right? And, and just know that there are many people out there who are critically minded and who still read these stories and get meaning from it. It just may not be exactly the meaning that we've been used to hearing, and that that's the hard part, which I absolutely recognize.
It's hard to be, it's hard to feel that what you've always thought some of these stories were about right is maybe something that people call into question for good reasons.
Jared: Yeah, I, and I, I think that question or the word in the question of how do we relate to it is why, for me, like you said, if we wanna relate to it in terms of how to study it, then we relate to it in this realm of scholarship.
Right. And that means you gotta roll up your sleeves and do a little work. Mm-hmm. You gotta read some commentaries from diverse backgrounds. Yeah. You gotta read some study Bible articles. Yeah. Listen to some podcasts. Not gonna name any names. But like, you know, we gotta do our homework if we're gonna figure out how to study it.
It's sort of like, oh, critical scholarship has opened up a world and we can either run away from it or we can lean into it. And that requires some work. But if we're gonna relate to the Bible as a, as a person of faith, not that you can bracket out the critical stuff. For sure. But I think there is a way to relate to the Bible that doesn't require that you become a Bible scholar.
Pete: Yeah, right, I mean, and that's another way of asking the question people have asked me. I can't do what you guys do.
Jared: Yeah. It's like, I'm never gonna go to grad school and get a degree in Bible.
Pete: And my answer is always, don't worry about it. You know, and, and you just engage with people who do talk about it.
There are ways of, of, of getting some information through, again, through good study Bibles. But it's not necessary because of how the Bible, I think, I'm gonna put it this way. The function of the Bible historically has transcended historical issues.
I, and I think I, would be willing to defend that it's not just about history.
People have wondered, I mean, you know, going back to the second century, Origen was like, I oh, this God killing business. I don't think that's really true. So, but I think these are invitations to us to understand these stories, allegorically, right? That was his answer. Yeah. And others too. And Okay. That's how they handled it and some people handle it, like you said, by just saying, I'm not gonna deal with it.
I'm gonna keep going the way I've been going. And if that's what people need to do, then I say, yeah, that's fine. My job here is not to say you can't do that. Right. Right. It's just people have to do what they have to do.
Jared: Yeah. 'cause I think it's a lot for people to synthesize and they can, I think this, this question comes from a sense of feeling lost, like, well I've, I've got in knee-deep into scholarship. I don't know if I can find my way back out. Yeah. And now what do I do?
Pete: Well, as Winston Churchill said, if you're going through, hell keep going.
Right. And I think that's good advice here too. Yeah. Just keep, keep pushing forward. And even though it feels like maybe a desert for a while. I think after a while you start seeing things and it's, it's a much nicer vista than you might think.
Jared: Yeah. And, and know that you're not alone.
Right. There is a great cloud of witnesses, of theologians and very normal non-academic people who are going through and have gone through the same transformation or transition. Right, right. So, yeah. Okay, good. Well, we solved that one. What's the next one? Did we, um, well, which one do you wanna do next?
Jared: What’s the question that you selected for us here? Um, who decided what writings to include in the Bible and why should we trust they got it right?
Pete: Yeah. Well, uh, we don't know.
Jared: All right. Well, next question, anything?
Pete: No, we don't, you know, the thing is, you know, there's this notion, and for example, in the Hebrew Bible that the Council of Jamnia, which was late first century, like they made these decisions, but no one believes that anymore to the, the decisions were probably made on the basis of the popularity and use of books.
If, if books are used to capture our story and our history. If they're, if they are maintained, they become canonical. And I think that's more how the process works. And we, we have this notion of sort of like, you know, there was a board meeting somewhere and people made decisions and, you know, it's like in church, right?
You, you, you can, okay, we don't have drums or, or a guitar, right? Or something like that. Why not? Because the people won't stand for it. That's why, you know, churches do what they do because of the will of the people. Very often, maybe sometimes just the leadership, but the people as well. And I think it works sort of like they, that way with the biblical canon we have, especially in the Hebrew Bible, there are books that were recognized as being of value and they made the cut.
So I guess, you know, if we ask the question, you know, how can we trust that they got it right? Who's the they? Right, right. It's not a committee, it's not a person. It's the people. And to me it's like, that's really interesting. You know, what works, what has moved people, what has inspired people stays. It's not just, it was not an academic kind of discussion.
Jared: Yeah. A way of saying that I, I think of a way to maybe categorize what you're saying is there's a kind of a top down way of looking at this. Or a bottom up way of looking at it. Right. And I think for a lot of people in the West and America especially, we like to think that the best way to do it is top down.
So we sort of project that on and say yes, yes. Surely there was a group of people who had been ordained by God to make these decisions. Right. And they got it together and it was a really clean and neat process. 'cause that's how we can feel sure that they got it right.
Pete: Because God always works in clean and neat ways.
So that's the way it goes.
Jared: Exactly. Of course. So there's that top down. But what I hear you saying is, well, there's another way to think about this. And this is the bottom up, which is also the way of saying that I think a lot of people, that the church came first, the people came first.
And then these things emerged. I think of it like some of the things that we have in America that are sort of our canon. Like the writings of Mark Twain or Huckleberry Finn or something. It's like, well, yeah. We can, at some point a school district said, let's include this in the ninth grade reading list for our students.
But that's not the same as saying that this, somebody ordained it as important. It was actually already important amongst the people.
Pete: Right, it’s like nobody said, okay, let's take a look at this. Yeah. This is a random book. See if it's just gonna make the cut here completely. I don't think so.
What do you think now? Okay, we're gonna take it out.
Jared: It was more like, whoa, this is in the zeitgeist. This is obviously a very important text that has meant a lot to people in terms of their identity.
Pete: I think that partially explains the diversity of texts that we have in the canon. Like there are things that if, if you're gonna have a committee, I don't think we'd have what we have.
Right. We don't, we wouldn't have books that flatly have serious tensions with each other within the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament as well. And I just think all of that is good news. You know, the way Jared, I think you remember this too, in, in seminary where we went it, the choice was between does the canon create the church or does the church create the canon?
And you know, I, the more I've thought about it over the years, I say, yeah, I understand. If you wanna talk about divine superintendents, that's fine, but the divine superintendents took the form of very messy, almost haphazard, chaotic looking historical process.
I'd rather just ditch all that and say, well, the church formed this. They made decisions. There were debates. There are still different Bibles in the world, right? Right. People don't agree still, right? So there's no one Bible. That's a big point to make.
Jared: Yeah. I think that, you know, this question says, why should we trust that they got it right?
It's like, well, we need to ask what Bible you're talking about. Right? Which Bible? Who got it, right? Because there's different bibles now. So it’s gonna be a challenge.
Pete: Which again, is really cool because people recognize different things and you know, frankly, I wish Protestants would recognize the apocrypha 'cause there's some pretty good stuff in there, right? I would trade a couple books out of the Bible that we have the Protestant Bible for some of those.
Jared: Hot take. Hot take. You heard it here first. Yeah. Pete wants to take books outta the Bible.
Pete: I know.
Jared: And replace 'em with-
Pete: But here’s the thing.
It'll never happen. You know what? The people won't let it. That's right. My, my students ask me like, I get this question literally, why don't we just add books to the Bible? I say, go ahead, knock yourself out. Let's see if it works. 'cause nobody's gonna read it. Yeah.
Jared: Or if they do, it'll be 27 people and we call that a cult.
Pete: Yes. Oh my. Anyway, what's next? Alright, next. Okay, this is, this is tying a little bit to the first question we had with you. So, uh, here it is. What do we do with central Christian doctrines? This is really getting to the point here. It's not just reading the Bible, but Christian doctrines right in a de-mythologized world where naturalism is taken for granted.
And appeals to a supernatural or interventionist God seem increasingly forced, even for Christians. This is a good question. Yeah. So answer it.
Jared: Well, I may take a little bit of a, a shortcut or a, I may avoid the question. You may have to jump in on the Bible. 'Cause I'm, I'm focused in on this question of what do we do with central Christian doctrines?
And I think that's important because what it, I guess what can often be implied in this question is that central Christian doctrines come directly from the Bible. Right. And, and so I would want to maybe push back on that gently from the beginning, because my answer to what do we do with central Christian doctrines is that we update them.
Because that's what we did from the, it is not like in the Nicene Creed, that is the Nicene Creed is biblical. That we just sort of took it word for word from the Bible. I mean things like God of a very God, you know, shaken, not stirred of the same substance. Yeah. These are not, these are pretty Hellenized or Greek loaded terms.
That come from a context beyond or post the biblical time. Right. And so if we're saying what do we do with Christian doctrines, we do what the fourth century did, which is we do our best with the data we have available about what God is like. And the Bible is part of that, but also our culture and our philosophy and all this.
And then we update it, right. So, I think there are theologians who do that. I mean, this is probably the central job of the theologian is to update these Christian doctrines so that even if we say something like, um, the incarnation as a central Christian doctrine, that's a container to mean something.
But what that means has gotten updated through the centuries. 21st-century theologians are gonna explain the incarnation very differently than a fourth century theologian.
Pete: But you see that's, I mean, I think that's sort of the point though, that in the modern period, that kind of thing happens for different reasons than in antiquity.
For most of the history of the Christian Church, we are not dealing with a de-mythologized culture. Which means basically like the question says, you know, there's, you don't really talk about supernatural intervention by God or something like that.
Again, presuming a certain definition of what God is, right? Like God's just being up there that intervenes and, and a lot of people think God doesn't intervene anywhere. God is everywhere. And, and anyway, that's a whole other discussion we're not gonna have now. But the thing is that, you know, um, we do live in a de-mythologized world where naturalism is taken for granted and appeals to Supernaturalists or God.
God seems increasingly forced, even for Christians. That's true. But people have been thinking about that. Theologically and philosophically they're thinking about that very same issue. And, and you know, you could look at it as, um, you know, one of these things that happened in the history of the church periodically, you know, every 500 years there's some paradigm shift, something else going on.
And I, I think, um, I mean, not to, I won't get on my hobby horse for long, but thinking about things like science and, and other kinds of things that we have to think about where, you know, um, is God up there looking down? Well, no. There is no God up there looking down.
Jared: What does up mean when we're a blue marble in space, what does there mean? Space? What does, right?
Pete: I mean, James Taylor has a song. There's a line in there. There is no there, there. Yeah, you're right. There is no there, there. So what do we think of God? At that point we started thinking of God a little bit differently than, um, maybe some people have done in the past, even though there's a long history in Christianity of thinking about God.
Jared: Kind of, but man, updating those images of God in those metaphors is very tricky 'cause I would a hundred percent ascribe to God's not up anywhere. Right. But when I think of God, do I still think of God as up in the cloud? Yeah. That is like my immediate thought. Yeah. That's I'm saying, which I know is not true in any sense.
Pete: But we’re just aware of it.
We, we don't, we don't insist that that's where God, is it just sort of a race.
Jared: But I’m just saying, like, it’s so hard to, like, how do you download different frameworks for how to think about God. Right. Which is like, it seems like it runs away from my own mind. Right? Like I don't think that, but it's so ingrained in how I think about it. It's hard.
Pete: Well, I think though, you know, central Christian doctrines that that's the part of it that has me very interested. And you mentioned the Nicene Creed, but you know, of course people disagree with what central Christian doctrines are and they disagree with even how to understand what those central Christian doctrines are.
Having said that, I get the point. Mm-hmm. You know, like, what, what about a, a death that atones for other people's sins, right? Yeah. What about God, man, you know what, what about resurrection? What about second coming? Are these, are these central Christian doctrines? I said yeah, they are. I think they're all, you hate this word mysteries that we can't really fully explicate, but the point still is that, you know, Christians are Christians.
People are trying to follow Jesus, they are looking at these things, right with a different set of eyes. You know, and, and what does resurrection mean? And, and people write books about this stuff and you know, so I guess, you know, what do we do? We keep being human in our own context and trying to think through these things.
Maybe without being, wait, this is not gonna land. Well, if I say it this way, I'm gonna say anyway, maybe without thinking that the world's gonna come crashing in on us if we don't get back to that previous sort of certainty that we had. Right. Right. And I, I'm, there's nothing wrong with feeling certain about things, but you know, the, the way sometimes we have a fantasy about the, the central Christian doctrines that Christians have always believed.
They haven't. Right. They haven't, you know. Yeah.
Jared: And I think that in this context, I think that's part of my. I get the value of the word mystery, but I, I, I often challenge it because I don't want it to be a way for people to squirm out of the discomfort that might come from saying, well, maybe some of those central Christian doctrines are no longer tenable, and we have to update them.
I don't think people want to say that. So then they say, well, you know, penal, substitutionary, atonement, I don't know what it is. It's a mystery. It's like, well, maybe that's just not a good way to think about it. Right, right. But we don't wanna say that. So yeah, that's why it kind of started with this idea of, I don't know, we just update it.
Yeah. Because there are writers who have other frameworks that, that take into account quantum mechanics. That take into account these things. If we just had ears to hear. And we're able to sort of come along on the journey. Now are they certain, do they, are they central Christian doctrines and now that they're undoubtable and absolutely true.
Well, no. We don't have access to that. Right. So we're not just substituting one fundamentalist idea of Christian doctrine for another. Right. But like, to your point, there are updated conversations to join if you want to join the conversation around these things.
Pete: I know, I, and I think, um, that's very helpful and people, people do say, I'm not really sure how I should think about these things. Right. You know, I just posted something on my Substack. It's something like, I still believe all of this Jesus stuff. I'm just not sure what I believe about it. And it's, you're, you're in, you're in the, you're on the stage.
You're, you're, you're going, uh, through the, not the paces. It's much more, it’s deeper than that, but you're, you're a part of that. You're trying to embody this, but you're also asking the question things like, okay. When people say to me, I'm not sure if I really believe in the resurrection. And I say, okay, well yeah, that's join the club.
Many people have thought that, and, and, and it, it's okay. It is okay. I'm adamant it is okay. God's not mad. He's not looking over your shoulder saying, you better get this straight real fast, right? 'Cause if you flounder on this, everything else goes down the toilet. It's more a matter of, I have reasons for having some suspicions.
Even in Matthew's gospel at the end, you know, Jesus is appearing and some people believe some people didn't.And next verse, it doesn't even, it doesn't like, what are you trying to say here? It's okay. You know, but you know, it, I think, you know, I'm, and I'm not big personally on central Christian doctrines being settled.
In Nicea or any other place. I mean, these guys weren't idiots. They weren't proof texters, they were philosophically oriented and they were trying to do something that at the time was worth doing. That doesn't mean the conversation has ended. And that for many people is, that's a deal breaker for them.
If you say that, I don't know what else to say.
Jared: Yeah. I agree. I mean, I feel like to crystallize it is to doom it to irrelevancy. Like that, there's a whole reason why it needs to keep going and the conversation needs to keep happening, but I, I think that is a posture that I found very helpful, and I think others have found really helpful.
What you're talking about, which is this commitment toward, or there is, I, I guess for me, it, it's helped me a lot in my faith, I'll say around this question of a de-mythologized world where naturalism is taken for granted. Where I offloaded the burden of my faith from a mental ascent to propositions about what God is like.
When I was younger, my entire identity of whether or not I was a Christian or not was based on whether I had the right ideas about who God is. And how God acts in the world. And what the Bible is, and I've over 25 years shifted that burden. It's not a, it's not a quantitative difference.
It's a qualitative difference. Where now the burden is not, I don't have as much angst about what I think about God. 'Cause my faith does not rest, is not grounded in getting the right information about what God is actually like.
So that allows me to have these conversations without a lot of fear or angst because my faith is rooted in this commitment toward an embodied faith that loves like and looks like Jesus.
And the Jesus community, like, I'm not even sold on it has to, what? What's Jesus, the Jesus that does? How do you, how do you trust that Jesus that you read in Mark unless you trust? I'm like, I'm not into that.
It's just the burden of proof. Yeah. It's interesting and it's worth conversation. Very much worth it, but not the, but it takes the anxiety off when I'm like, well, my faith doesn't rest on getting that right.
Pete: You got four gospels. Your job is to figure out how they all work together. That's not fair.
Okay. I'm just gonna say that, right. Yeah. That is just not true.
Jared: That's a cruel thing to say.
Your entire faith rests on interpreting which of these in our sacred book gets to be right?
Pete: You know, I, I don't, I don't like to like act like I know what God is thinking and even that anthropomorphism of God doing thinking to me is, is troublesome, but um, does God think more of people who are earnestly trying to live a life that reflects Jesus?
Who are at the same time very unsure about what to do about incarnation and resurrection and second coming, and atonement, all those other questions. Or is God happy with people who just toe the line and maybe are very belligerent about it and don't have love of neighbor or even of self>
Right. You know, I mean, those are just two categories, yeah, there's a spectrum. So, but I just, I think about that. Yeah. You know, and, and, um, I, I, I have to believe that God understands, another anthropomorphism, God understands our humanity and when and where we're living and the, um, the amount of data points that we have to keep in mind if we wanna say anything about anything.
It's a lot, you know, and I think sometimes just to give ourselves a break, take a step back, take a deep breath, and not be too concerned about getting it all right.
Jared: Yeah. I mean, I would even go further and say, I don't just think about it.
I think you just articulated that shift for me that was very impactful. To make that move that I, I sort of, I put a lot of weight on the idea that God, that God is more interested in the way that I live rather than this. And that has lifted this burden of getting it right, which ironically then allows me to study more. Be more open, be more curious. Which then ironically, I end up learning a lot more.
Pete: Right. And, you know, people might say, but Paul was very adamant about people, you know, um, being in Christ and of course. You know, I agree with that. I think it's wonderful. But there was an urgency there.
That he's coming back very soon. The kingdom's gonna be set up. And, and when that didn't happen, at least not the way that, you know, many people might think it would've happened. We're, you know, this is 2000 years later. I mean, just think of this as we're as far removed from the time of, it's a lot of Jesus As we're removed from like the year 4,000 in the future, this, a lot has happened and it's okay to be overwhelmed with the thought of it all.
And then just maybe to find solace someplace else, which might be a not knowing and trying to understand and being okay with that.
Jared: Right. Well that kind of does lead us. This Jesus talk leads us into the next question, so I'm gonna read it. What does it mean to worship and follow Jesus?
This is what we were just talking about. If so much of what has been written about him in the Bible has been fabricated in order to make theological points? So this is a nice dovetail into what we were just talking about. Pete, answer it.
Pete: Well, it's a good question. Well, I keep saying this.
It's a good question, and it is, I mean, it's a question that I think about and, you know, I'm just riffing here. One way that I look at that is the notion that the, the, the, let's just take the story of Jesus, the gospels and maybe, you know, the New Testament letters are articulating something amazing in a cultural idiom.
In a way that made sense to them at the time. But what they're talking about is actually beyond that culture, it's, it's, it's, it's, there's, there's a, um, I don't wanna say higher meaning or higher purpose, but they're, they're pointing at something that's more transcendent than that. That's, that's my belief now.
I can't prove that. Right? But that's, that's how I sort of look at it. So, you know, uh, you know, the way Paul talks about, you know, Jesus dying on the cross and what it meant and the atonement. I think to myself, there are cultural reasons why he would explain Jesus' death that way. But to me that doesn't mean, oh, now it doesn't matter anymore because we might have different models for thinking about it.
It means is there, is there a way of accessing something beyond, let's say, the cultural enmeshment of this story that goes beyond it? When I wrote Curveball, I had, um, a chapter. I had a few, what I call mystery passages. Things that I think just push us out of, and this is, you know, from like Ephesians and Colossians, which may very well have been written after Paul.
Some people think so, some people think not, but if not, it's maybe Paul's later years where things are getting a little bit, like not as grounded in the second coming. You know, and, and, and Christ, all, all treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden. That's, that's a pretty, that's like going out there, you know, and, and, and Jesus, the fullness of the deity dwells in bodily form.
Jared:Right. Yeah. It's like, it's it's getting a little more expansive.
Pete:It is, yeah. You know, and I, to me that's like these, there's even a trajectory in the Bible itself to point towards that and not just use it as a shorthand term. The transcendence of it all that no human language can actually fully capture, and we're catching glimpses of it, and the job of the church is to keep enacting the roles and the parts, but also to rescript things at different times and places to make more sense.
That's, that's how I handle that, which is, I recognize maybe overly wordy and not helpful to everybody, but it's a very good question. And that's, that's how I think of it. So, and that involves Jesus and who Jesus is and, um, where is Jesus now? And are we talking about Jesus or the Christ? You know, the, you know, well people say Jesus was divine, right.
You know, it's like, okay, hold on a second. Here it is. Jesus wasn't divine. The question is whether. Jesus was, you know, the, the, the divine was in him in a way that it wasn't in anybody else. It's a very different kind of question. Right, right. Anyway.
Jared: Yeah. I mean, I think again, we maybe would take a little bit issue with the idea that, um, much of what's been written about Jesus in the Bible has been fabricated.
I just think that's a little bit more baggage than it can hold. If we understood how the ancient, ancient people wrote. That's a, and what they were thinking that's a huge point. Yep. And so I think that's part of it is-
Pete: What is the genre of a gospel? What is the genre of an ancient letter?
Jared: Yeah. And, and then taking from there, I guess so much sometimes these questions, this is again, I'm maybe getting in trouble for this 'cause I don't mean to be offensive to our listeners and I think this is something that happens where you can take people out of fundamentalism, but it's very hard to take fundamentalism out of people.
Which is, these questions, a lot of them still rest on a certain framework. And so that's why it's like there's a, there's something that doesn't fit right. It's like putting on a jacket that's too small or something. Like when I read these questions, I'm like, there's just something not right about the question.
And it's like there's a deeper framework or structure that this is operating by. Where things are either historically accurately true, and I can trust them. Or they are fabricated. And that is a binary that operates at a mm-hmm. At a fundamentalist level.
That when you are a scholar of history. Or when you have, uh, maybe developed spirituality that moves beyond these binaries. That it just doesn't, the question doesn't make sense anymore. The way to frame this and it, it, and it can sound like I'm trying to squirm out of an uncomfortable thing.
No, I don't, but for me it's like, I don't know if, if it's fabricated, it's fabricated, it doesn't, I'm not trying to squirm out of it, I'm just trying to point out sometimes these questions, yeah. I wanna kind of pull up a mirror and say, the way you're asking that question makes me think, assuming, think you still have some fundamentalist assumptions.
Pete: Yeah the word fabricated is, is problematic and nothing, you know, offensive to the question or it's, it's a good way of putting it. But fabricated does assume sort of a black and white view of history. It's either historical or it's not. Right. And another way of thinking about that is, you know, the gospel’s okay.
The gospels say things that Jesus didn't say or do. Most people still think, you know, there's some discussion about this now, in, in scholarship and, and when the gospels were written is always gonna be a, I think a topic of debate. Right. But basically we're from, from 70 to 100. You know, two, three generations after the time of Jesus people there, there's been this Jesus community and right.
They have been thinking about the significance of who Jesus is for them and their time and place, and so they tell stories that reflect later theological developments. Later, later communally meaningful things. And so, you know, people have said things like, you know, Jesus walking on the water. That didn't happen.
You know? Okay. Honestly, I don't know whether it did or didn't, but I'm just saying like a way of understanding that is, they're trying to portray Jesus as God with us in ways that are meaningful to them because, you know, God controls the water, God, God treads on the water, God commands or, or even just stilling the storm, right?
Rebuking the storm. That's language right out of the Psalms. What Yahweh does. So, I mean, to, to me, that's interesting and, and we can look at that and say, well, you know, this, this just shows that Jesus is the God of the Old Testament. Or it can show, people have been thinking about who this Jesus is and are searching for language within their own tradition to talk about right, the significance of Jesus.
And you know, it may be that people, I mean, this is a real possibility. It may be that people, as time went on, we're able to catch a, um. I don't wanna say better vision, but maybe a, a legitimately deeper understanding of who this Jesus was who seemed to be basically sort of a prophet concerned with his fellow Jews.
Jared: Yeah, and I, I think that's kind of where I wanted to end or land the plane here of what does it mean to follow Jesus. What if we took a view again, that there's something fundamentalist about like, well, only Jesus matters. And Jesus’s followers and the Jesus community. That's all like, yeah, we gotta get that out of the way, that's fake and we need to get to the real thing.
It's like, well, what if we had a different view of that that says maybe there's Jesus and Jesus's power is to have this trajectory. And, and we are, we are recipients of that trajectory. Right. Which is called the Christian tradition. And that's a powerful thing that has its source in Jesus.
Right. But we don't need to, like, I feel like we're cutting the ladder out from under us and trying to get to something that's like, why would we do that?
Pete: Well, well to use Walter Brueggemann's uh, uh, analogy about the Bible. The Bible's a compost pile. Jesus is like a compost. Yeah. Correct.
It's, it's the things like, you don't just focus on the historical Jesus. That's good because I mean, if, if you will, we can say by divine wisdom, we don't have the historical Jesus. We have four communities that are giving us their, an understanding of their faith or understanding of who Jesus is.
Right? That's what we have and to me that that is a driving issue for how we think about it. Who is this Jesus to us? Right. And, and we have gospels and we have letters and we have the history of the tradition of the church. Right. And we can think about these things. And, and that's not wishy-washy.
That's, that's actually just the way that it is. And to think that, no, we just have to go back to the beginning. Right. People have tried that. It ain't happening. It hasn't happened. You know, we get back to the earliest manuscripts and we'll have a just very clear bible. Further back you go, the more of a mess it is.
We, we, we have a fabrication of unity of a Bible, we, we want that. Right. It doesn't exist. Same with Jesus.
Jared: And to that point, maybe we need to question that pursuit. Like what of, what value is that? Yeah. Because I think that could be problematized.
Pete: It's a modernist thing.
The making of the modern mindset here.
Jared: Yeah. Some might say it's the making of the modern mind. Some might say I say that.
Pete: Do we have time for more?
Jared: I think we have time for one more.
Pete: Okay, here we go.
Jared: So, um, yeah, so let's do it.
Pete: In what sense is the Bible the word of God?
Jared: These are tying together. It's almost like we planned it.
Pete: This is, we didn't really. We just picked. I like these questions.
Let's talk about it. Okay. In what sense is the Bible the word of God? After learning about how it is compiled and edited into a collection, what is left that can be called God's word. Go Jared.
Jared: Man, we were just having to kind of, and I mean this more in the technical sense, find the genealogy for or deconstruct these terms.
Because there's a big word in here, um, or a big phrase, God's word. That there's a lot of baggage with. So we'd need to ask this question asker. What are you assuming we mean by God's word? So again, I would assume probably kind of a fundamentalist understanding. Which is, it is actually God's word.
And when you drill down into what that means, there's usually this, uh, you know, idea that, that God has zapped some writers who then are just the transmitters of the divine language into these ancient languages, I guess, and that it's exactly what God wanted us to have word for word.
To the point that it is worthwhile to study every nook and cranny. Um, of these, and, and if we do that. In my tradition, you could even get beyond the words to what was called like the code, the Bible code. Yes. I had a book called, right, where there's like hidden meanings between the words.
And if you pull this from here, you get this secret knowledge. 'cause it's the word of God because it's the word of God. Gotta go looking for it. Exactly. Yeah. Right. Um, and so, I mean, that makes things interesting. I think you find a lot of curious things if you do that. But if that's what we're talking about, then I would say in, I don't believe in that sense that the Bible is the word of God.
So that would be my answer to this question. Right? If that's the sense we mean it. I just don't think that it is.
Pete: Well, I, I want to, yeah, I, I agree with you on that.
Jared: So now make it more nuanced and build this back up, Pete.
Pete: Okay. I'll try. Do I usually do that? Am I the one who usually does this around here?
Jared: I don't think so.
Pete: I don't think I am. I think I'm the problem. I'm the problem. We're always trying to, we're trouble. No, he didn't mean that. He didn't mean that he meant something else, but, but I think what, just taking the phrase word of God, I think. Let's say something like a text that is in some sense authoritative for us or some, and I think that's sort of what they mean.
And you know, after learning about how it was compiled and edited into a collection, by the way, and is still being edited by translators and, and Bible editors and things like that hasn't stopped.
Jared: How can it be an authority once you've seen how the sausage is made?
Pete: Exactly. Yeah. That's a good way of putting it. And I think here, what has been helpful to me years ago, I, I'm 99% sure it was Walter Brueggemann who said something like this, that the, let's call it the inspirational process of scripture is not simply about the text when they were written, but it's the traditions behind the text, the very traditions that get put into writing in various ways that then get disseminated and changed and edited and added to, right? I mean, we have, you know, things that were added to within the Bible itself.
I mean, depending who you ask, but Isaiah seems to have been written over about a 200 year period of time. Very, very few people, even very conservative people, say, yeah, there's something going on here. That part of the inspiration of scripture involves that development and change over time, which involves compiling and editing and things like that.
At the end of the day, what we have is various Bibles, various collections that all do a good job of getting people to think, to be on this wisdom journey, to be on this path of trying to follow Christ. And it's all good. I used to joke with my, um, conservative seminary students that God's little joke, uh, about inerrancy, is that the Bible of the New Testament church is a translation.
The Greek translation of the Hebrew and not always a very good one. It's like, it's good enough, you know, it's, it's, it's fine. You know? And, and, and that's not to minimize the question, I think it's a great question, but I think part of, you know, Jared, your point is that getting back to what's being assumed behind a question, right.
That and, and just talking about that. And then we come back out and look at the issue. Other kinds of avenues forward, start presenting themselves. Right. Right. And, and I think that's great. 'Cause we're just people we understand anything limitedly, I understand myself in a limited fashion.
Right. I'm 90% under the ocean. That iceberg thing. It just, and, and what do we know?
Jared: Yeah. I mean, and, and more and more, I think a lot of these questions are similar to questions we've been talking about for the last couple of years. I mean, we've been thinking about them and talking about them for longer.
But it does make me think we just really have to, we need a paradigm shift around what the Bible is and what we do with it. Because even asking that question-
Pete: We should start a podcast.
Jared: I think, which, where we ask that very question, that would be a good podcast. Um, but I, I think, I don't want to just kind of undermine each of these questions, but I do think the question is asking it from a particular frame of reference. And that frame of reference wants the Bible to be authoritative in a top down way.
And it's, it's coming from, again, a fundamentalist understanding that did have an understanding of the Bible that was that way.
It is top down and there's a loss, there's a grief, right to say, in what sense now is it this? And I think I wanna say. We need a new paradigm because in that sense, it's not.
Pete: It, it, it might be, um, something we're not even thinking about right now.
Jared: Yeah, we need to rethink authority.
Pete: And so it shatters our presuppositions about things.
You know, just like I've been asked again many times by people like. Okay, Pete, I see what you're doing. The, the Bible, it's not this, it's it's, it's something else and that's great. I agree with you, but I need something else to take its place. Right. And my answer is always, you don't get anything to take its place.
That's sort of the point. Yes. But I'm rudderless. Well that, that is where the cultivation of the life of faith in community actually comes into play. It's not just myself and my understanding, it's actually being with other people. And I think actually, you know, I believe this seeing, seeing God through the actions of other people, that's even a biblical idea.
1 John 4, you know, and, and I think that the, that's the kind of rediscovery of sort of the tradition itself. Which seems like a big paradigm shift. It's more, I think sometimes it's a matter of remembering that the church wasn't always in a quagmire of modernist questions.
Jared: Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and then super modernist responses to those questions. Right. Like that's a pretty recent development of how to frame the Christian faith.
Pete: Which are oftentimes expressed with great animosity towards other views and things like that. Not that we're perfect, but you know-
Jared: But you grow up where you're taught that that's the only way to be Christian.
Pete: And you have to defend that.
Jared: And not to be harsh about it, but to your point, it feels like it can be almost like if, say as a child, you're pushed around in a stroller constantly, you never got to walk on your own. And then as you got older, you continue to be pushing the stroller and then one day you just didn't have the stroller anymore.
Mm-hmm. And it can feel like, well, I'm never gonna walk. I need something to take its place. What's gonna get me from A to B? And it's like, well sometimes you, you have to realize, you just gotta build those muscles and you could actually, you could walk yourself.But I feel like that's what happens when you're given this very kind of, I mean, I don't mean it to be too harsh, but like authoritarian framework.
Your muscles are underdeveloped. And so then when you get that taken away, you're kind of looking like what's gonna replace it? Right. Right. How do we fill this gap? And if you just pause, like you said at the very beginning of the episode, if you're just patient and sit in the mess for a little while, you'd be surprised at the muscles that start getting built over time. To engage this faith in a different way.
Pete: Just one last point to that, 'cause I think we need to bring this to a close here, but, um, you know, the historian Mark Noll would say this is a particularly American problem, a little bit European, mainly American because America was founded without a state church, without a magisterium, without sort of an authority structure in the church.
And so circuit writers would go west and just give Bibles to people and say, this is all you need. Right. And we're still feeling the brunt of that today in America with just the Bible is the answer book.
But I found a problem here. Like, I'm not sure the earth is 6,000 years old. Oh no. What do we do?
Jared: There’s no other infrastructure.
Pete: And Augustine in the year 400 was like, of course it's not 6,000 years old. Right. You know what, don't talk if you think that. Right. See, this is a particularly American problem and I think that to me, um, relativizes it properly.
Yes. Yeah. I get, I get the point. I feel it too. 'Cause I'm an American and I was raised to think in a certain way. But I've, I've been trying to train myself to think differently to, like you were saying, to come at it from a different point of view and ask different kinds of questions.
Jared: Well, we've been asking these questions.
What is the Bible and what do we do with it for 10 years now? 10 years, I guess. Nine. Yeah. But we're about to be, this is the end of the ninth year. We're about to be doing it for 10. I feel like we're close. Yeah, we got the answers.
Pete: Nah, that won't, I don't think that's gonna work.
Jared: Alright. Thanks everybody. We'll see you next season.
Pete: See ya.
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.
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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.
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