Episode 3 - The Bible

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a reading from scripture ezekiel 23 there she lusted after her lovers whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses so you longed for the lewdness of your youth when in the egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled this is the word of the lord thanks be to god it is right to give him thanks and praise welcome to the liturgist podcast [Music] everybody

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hello i'm lisa pano i'm michael gunger i'm that idiot science mike so we're talking about the bible today guys and um there are plenty of verses like this in the bible like our introverse we we had so we just were talking about some just before we pushed record well for those who aren't familiar with um game of thrones i mean uh the story of lot uh essentially while a lot is leaving sodom and gomorrah with his family his wife turns back to the city has turned into a pillar of salt but lot makes it out with his daughters they camp uh his daughters decide that um now that all the men of their city are gone they have no other way to have children and so they decide to get their father very very drunk and while he's kind of passed out sleep with him so that they can have children both of his daughters oh my gosh rough yeah and people freak out over game of thrones but uh that's a relatively new work compared to and then is it those very daughters that he sends out to have sex with the strangers that he offered to yeah yes yes because they wanted to come and sleep with the angels that were in his house is that right i'm a little rusty on my bible trivia is this real life this is the story this is the actual goat and he says don't i don't you can't sleep with these these guys that are in my house because they're guests of mine but here take my daughters and have sex with them real classy guy let's not forget my favorite verse judges 4 21 but jail herbert's wife picked up a tent peg and hammer and went quietly to him while he lay fast asleep exhausted she drove the peg through his temple into the ground and he died and he died is the best part of that well it's like a cliffhanger you don't know he had a very bad day so here's the deal like this is the book this is the book that billions of people we hold this book to be the word of god to be god breathed to be like this source of spiritual inspiration and spiritual grounding and it's wild i mean it's a it's a difficult crazy game of thrones-ish sort of book at times so today we are as always looking at a subject from the lenses of faith and science and art and we tackle and wrestle with stuff we swim in the chaos that happens in our conversations today's about the bible what's going on i'm surprised you didn't play an intro i was literally waiting for the guitar and i was like what's going on yes i'm sorry the b-i-b-l-e yes that's the book for me i stand alone on the word of god the b-i-b-l-a i'm sorry i can't allow harmonies on the podcast that's too far it's two it's not enough we should have had three you could have three there if you would have been on your game mike i feel let down it's so funny to me could i just be honest that well of course the bible is such a central part of christianity part of our faith and the absolute most controversial slap fight thing we have christians freak out over how other christians read the bible to the point that that is the driving force between most doctrinal divisions in christendom um it just it astounds me and what i can remember from a temporary outsider leaving the church and then contemplating all this with my secularist friends it seems crazy and absurd uh that we as a people have decided to value this one particular archaeological relic so deeply and yet we do and we all do you know it's it's very difficult to find a christian who says they don't value the bible but that deep value of these scriptures and the way that we read it and the way that works in our lives uh leads us to dismiss other people and even to quite viciously fight publicly on the internet so how can we have a book that is both life-giving and really really really really controversial among the people who believe it to be true it's a crazy thing

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what do you think about the bible what do you mean what i think about what do you think about it like as in general or yeah just whatever comes to mind i mean it's kind of difficult to read like but other than that it's pretty good inspirational okay there's your hope wonderful thank you you're welcome that's it what do you think about the bible i think the bible is pretty unique okay and i believe i believe in christ awesome thank you yes sir what do you think about the bible i think it's god's word and it's inerrant and i believe it to be true with us today is dr peter enz now when michael and i decided to do an episode on the bible we thought it'd be good to get someone who knew what they were talking about and peter was the first name that came to mind for us he's the author of inspiration and incarnation as well as the evolution of adam and later on this month early next month he's releasing another book called the bible tells me so um peter is an absolute wizard and a person i respect i dare even call him a bible ninja so peter welcome to the program thanks appreciate it bible ninja that's that's the first time i've heard that so that's pretty cool do i get to kill people only if you use uh commandments from the old testament got it okay that's oh yeah i forgot that the jesus part gets in the way of that all right fine whatever so we've been involved in a you may have noticed um an internet-wide discussion over how the bible should be read right um and that that seems to be an issue that really gets people hot people are very passionate about specifically how you should read the bible and what it means uh in our lives um so if you wouldn't mind just giving us a a a little overview peter of how you approach the scriptures and then maybe we'll take some questions from our listeners yeah i mean how do i approach the bible how long is this show i don't know how to do that quickly but it's just a very thumbnail sketch i mean i i read the bible as sort of this confluence of um texts that were written at different times different places by different people for different purposes and they sort of come together in this book that is scripture for the church and i try to pay attention very much to you know what's going on back then and at the same time you know holding on by faith that this is god's means one of god's means of connecting with us and us of connecting with him so those sort of two sides sort of come together in this mishmash that um is is hard to uh you know quantify very easily and which is why you know one of my books inspiration incarnation i do what christians have done for a very very long time is sort of draw this analogy between christ and scripture and how christ is incarnate he's there's the god side and there's the human side together in a way that no one can explain and we would better off trying not to explain it and and the bible works in an analogous way it's thoroughly encultured and human at the other hand god speaks with it and through it and by it so um and that that's about as as technical as i want to get with that because i i don't understand it i don't and i'm perfectly fine and happy not understanding how all this works what would you say to someone who um would say that that lack of certainty weakens your position um well i think you know um it depends on who the person is and what the context is uh you know if if it's an aggressive question on the internet i i would ignore it because you can't get anywhere with that if it's somebody that i know that i can sit down with i would probably um take them through a micro version of my own journey of why i've come to these kinds of positions of not always knowing and being comfortable not knowing and you know i would probably want to talk about here's what i'm seeing going on in the bible i'm having trouble explaining this through older ways of thinking i have i've had to move to other ways of thinking that i think are a better that have better explanatory power for what i'm seeing here you know um you know very quickly things like why you have two different versions of israel's history in the same bible right next to each other and they're not compatible they don't say the same thing they say different things why do i have a bible that works that way well you know when confronted with that i'm very happy to say well i'm not exactly sure why what i do know is what i'm reading and i sort of have to start from the ground up in that sense and and and continue the journey of trying to make sense of the bible and my faith and um it it doesn't hurt the position of faith i think it actually augments the need for true faith and trust in god because we we don't control this stuff we can't understand it fully and that's fine it's not only fine it's good and right

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so pete when you first came to the bible like what were your early years with the bible and you know what kind of world did you come from how did you read it differently early on yeah yeah you know i wasn't raised with the bible i wasn't raised in a home that would be christian by um you know conservative evangelical standards uh my parents were european they were immigrants and they sort of you know you know believe in god but just don't let it get out of hand sort of way we went to church and i was confirmed lutheran as a as a kid but you know reading the bible was not really an issue for me until i got you know into my late teens early 20s and you know then i started getting in with a sort of different crowd different influences i went to a christian college and that's only when really reading the bible started so i actually didn't come at the task of reading the bible with a lot of background or a lot of um i guess hindrances i would say and and it was always more for me an open book uh that was ready for exploration not for you know nailing everything down so to speak and and making sure you have the right and certain answers for everything i know for me as a as a kid i was kind of taught that um you know the bible was it was god's word to me and god's word period and there was an element of that that was kind of like god said this you know like this is these are god's words and we'd even in our kind of world call it like god's love letter to me and and i think that's a lot of the stuff we've been running into online where you kind of see you know if you you start having a different idea of a certain interpretation of a passage like noah or adam or anything um a lot of people's response is just well you know god god said that it happened so are you calling him a liar and so do you think that's a pretty different uh approach to those sort of passages than than the early people that would have uh interacted and wrestled with those scriptures would have taken and and what's what's the difference between a modern reader in some ways and and some you know how those initial things started i think that's that's a very very good question and i guess it depends on where early we're talking about but i think just if i can answer the question this way moving backwards you know the mentality of well god says this and and if he says it you take it literally he wouldn't lead you astray he wouldn't he wouldn't try to trick you with fancy language that you have to do a lot of thinking about he's it's a love letter he's just speaking to you directly etc that is a very modern approach to the bible to put it that way and it stems in my opinion you know i'm not alone in thinking this way but it stems in my opinion from a lot of battles that the church at least the conservative church has gone through over the past couple of hundred years where you've got you know german scholars you know quote undermining the bible in the 18th century and 19th century and you know the advent of of scientific inquiry and the fossil record and then you have darwin coming along telling people you know you came from apes and and all these sort of things the the the the the jenga tower started you know people started pulling these things out and they were afraid the whole thing was going to fall and i think a lot of what we're seeing today sort of a reaction to that that's been going on for generations where you know don't become like those liberals hold that at bay and the way to do that is to build a fence around how you think about the bible and the the clearest fence is an absolute literal one and that's that's a pretty new way of reading the bible i mean you've always had people who read literally but um you know you can go back in the history of judaism older than christianity and you know people were very creative about reading things symbolically in the bible it's it's it's not a new thing to say listen a literalistic reading of the bible may not be the best way to do it but that's not a new thing to say that's actually a very old thing to say i mean and the church fathers you know and you know before 500 a.d roughly um they were a diverse bunch you can't lump them all into one category very complex thinkers but um many of them would be very upfront about saying things like we can't take this literally we have to treat it metaphorically or or allegorically or symbolically or christologically we have to think differently about this because literally it either makes no sense you know augustine was famous for saying you know if you think genesis 1 describes the creation of the world you shouldn't talk because you're going to embarrass yourself you can embarrass the faith if if you read that scientifically you're you're way off base other church fathers had difficulty with you know genocide in the old testament you know and and especially when you've got the whole jesus thing to factor in you know about loving your enemy you have to think you can't read this as fundamentally a literal truth to be passed on to people you have to read it in a deeper way and find deeper meaning in it that's that's normal in christianity that's not unusual and in that sense it's god's love letter to the church fine you know in that sense but not not in the sense of it's god's love letter you know because people who take it that way they move outside of those communities of faith and they start seeing the real problems with that kind of reading you know god's love letter to you winds up becoming a dear john letter and you're out of there you're not going to you're not going to take any more time with something like this it just doesn't make sense and if your only option your only paradigm is the bible has to be read this way or christianity is not true well that's why people leave the faith and you can't blame them i certainly can't that uh that

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i've got this little half-baked theory that i love to run by you p because i certainly don't have a phd from harvard in this sort of thing as you do uh but tell me what as as a like as i've thought about this and as i've explored other traditions and stuff and catholics and how different you know orthodox people and different people in the faith think about these things differently i totally am with you on a lot of the modern stuff i also wonder if there's some level of just our ecclesiology and how protestants and evangelicals in particular approach church um that because we divorced ourselves from from the main line of the church that goes back you know all the way to the beginning which is you know the orthodox or the catholic couldn't trace their their lineage they can say this pope was preceded by this pope was preceded by this pope was preceded by peter you know um and it was the church that gave us you know that assembled the bible in the first early centuries of christianity and for a lot of people the scripture and the church capital c go hand in hand and it's there's any authority issues and stuff it's not the whole solo scriptura and the whole like well just read the bible when we've divorced ourselves from the church um we don't have anything else like if you don't have the bible what do we have and so it's kind of become like we need it to be something that it was never involved and you know michael i think i mean i'm trying to act with you completely on that i think you and i both pretty much probably agree on that and we're probably three-quarter baked there there's always there there are some issues that are hard to sort of fare it out but we're i think we're basically you know that's i think what you're saying is true it's it's it's demonstrably you know it can be defended it's it's it's it's a good way of thinking about it i think um but you see what happens in protestantism isn't that the bible is divorced from church so to speak it's just that the bible is connected to individual denominations and micro denominations saying well we've got it we've got the right way to read it so you never actually ironically you never escape connecting you know canon with a particular christian tradition the question is how big is that tradition going to be and and you know if there's a fault with protestantism as there is with any tradition it's it's it's um it's an ever decreasing circle of truth in terms of what tradition has it and what tradition doesn't i've been involved with traditions that really explicitly say um i mean the reformed tradition that i'm familiar with at least one very small facet of it we hold the truth and trust for other traditions that's what we do we we have our finger on the pulse more than others and you know that's the kind of dangerous thinking you have there but you see it's encouraged by you mentioned sola scriptura which you know means scripture alone um you know the reformers didn't mean we ignore tradition or anything like that but the bible is our fundamental last court of appeal for all matters of faith and life which is a great idea um one that i i basically i fundamentally agree with as long as we hold our conclusions sometimes with an open hand instead of with a closed fist because what happened in the wake of the reformation you had um chaos you had interpretive chaos you had you had you know all these movements starting very quickly and and you know there were literally thousands of protestant denominations across the world and that's a result of you know you have the book that you sort of elevate in a sense saying this book tells us what to do almost in a sense almost objectively read it right and the book will never lead you astray well the problem is that you put that into the hands of normal people and people have perspectives and they have strengths and they have weaknesses and they have viewpoints and they have contexts and cultures and before you know it you've got calvinists and lutherans and methodists and anabaptists and charismatics and you know all across the world in each culture that adapts these denominations they transform it and change it and um you know it's it's it's it it doesn't really solve anything so you know i think an ecumenical discussion which many people have and are having is is a very good idea and not just ecumenical today like looking like having diverse christian traditions talking amongst each other but also diversity and traditions across time you know looking back and trying to capture the larger christian story especially in the contemporary world culture we live in where micro theological disagreements don't mean anything you know just you know what is christianity what is it there for what does it do why is it worth looking at okay i have one from it what makes the bible old testament or new testament different from the scriptures of other faiths yeah well see there are two ways to sort of answer that and i think sometimes behind that question i'm not suggesting this is behind the question of behind the person who asked the question but you know point me to something that i can show to prove that this is a better book and and there used to be a whole list of sort of apologetic answers for that that really don't don't they're not as persuasive like well the bible's historically accurate all the time or it's scientifically accurate or its predictions are fulfilled 100 percent you can look at the bible you can see my goodness this bible just um it authenticates itself right and and that's how we know but you know we we really don't have that in the bible we have a book that is adopted by you know jews and christians you know different canons but the same heart and um same core books i'd say and you know you you can't point to something and say this objectively is better i think the only way is and this is this sounds intellectually wimpy but it's not it's actually existentially excruciatingly difficult and that's for individuals and churches and movements to embody the message of the bible which is fundamentally a message of christ who he is and to live that and to demonstrate by example that this actually works it's not it's not as easy as sitting down and here are the 10 reasons why i know this is fundamentally different you have to embody the god speaking to you um you know in in difficult contexts and show that this is worthwhile now you can't see me fist pumping and throwing my arms up in a victory v but that was a really fantastic answer well thanks

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yeah i've always you know since reading uh while reading your book one of the things that affirms me the most about the scripture and makes it different because i i certainly have read other scriptures um but based on my own experience and my own um experience with god and specifically with christ the bible is the only book that uh is a recollection of other people trying to follow and understand and serve the same god that i'm serving and this sort of multi-millennia epic journey is really comforting to me from a solidarity standpoint if nothing else well i i the way you put it um you know the the you mentioned you know in about a month i have a book the bible tells me so that is is coming out and um one of the themes of the book is in reading the bible we're actually watching the spiritual journeys of people at different times in different places you know the in the beginning of the monarchy is not the same spiritual journey as people after the exile ended it's they're they're in different places and they do say different things they talk about god differently they talk about the law differently not not black and white differently but there are nuances there are shifts you see trajectories you see movement you see you know the saints of old because of how they're experiencing god they're thinking and writing differently about it and a lot of that has to do with their own just like us today their own the stuff that happens to them in life you know you you you rethink your theology because of experiences that you have that's that's as plain as the noon sun you know so i think um i i think of the bible then as modeling diverse spiritual journeys all centered on the same god and how he's moving and acting right so that's why you can read a book like ecclesiastes where the guy's clearly having a bad day and he's having such a bad day you even says things like you know wisdom is not even worth it because you're just gonna die and what's god up to screwing up the world like this and it's never resolved and then you have some psalms that are quite happy and then others that are pretty miserable and then there's job i mean you've got this sort of diverse and it's all good it's all there there's no sanitizing the dark sides of faith that's that's in the bible it's not the major part but it's a it's it's a significant minority voice it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house and you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through betterhelp you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions better help has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's better help e h-e-l-p-com slash liturgists what i love about that view is it takes the some of the tension away from the conflicting perspectives you know the conflict even conflicting accounts and the contradictions um it actually becomes part of the beauty of the bible rather than something that uh preachers just try to like excuse and and explain away as not actually being contradictory at all right and i don't i don't mean this as a swipe for me it's because i understand i've lived in the context and and i've moved from them but i understand this is not a cheap shot but the problem is that um for for a lot of christians the bible that they have the bible that they're told this is what the bible is it's actually embarrassed by how the bible behaves and you have to keep making excuses for it you have to keep sort of dressing it up nice before you take it out in public you have to you have to sort of smooth over the edges because heaven's sake we can't let out the fact that this text says this you know this text says x and that text says not x you know and and and you know that's a serious tension for people but you know what if the bible is fine just the way it is what if it doesn't need to be protected what if what if there's something exactly what you're saying michael what if there's something there of beauty something for us to learn about our own lives with god and what that looks like right you know maybe in a sense the bible decenters itself a bible like this can't function i mean brian mclaren has this wonderful analogy where the bible in america is like the constitution so you go to it and you interpret it rightly and then you know exactly what to do and that's not necessarily a good move and that's a particularly american move because we're a constitution we don't like monarchy you know we like constitution and that's sort of how we live and the bible becomes sort of our constitution exegete it correctly interpret it the right way and you're off and running you'll be fine you know one of the things i mean just you know i don't mean to go on like this but one um one anecdote that it sort of changed my thinking in an instant while i was at harvard one of my professors john levinson a devout jewish professor he he said something in class he has it in writing too i'm trying to think of where it is but if i can paraphrase he said for jews the bible is sort of like a problem to be debated and to be you know gone back and forth with for christians the bible is not so much a problem to be solved it's a message that has to be proclaimed and if the bible is a message that has to be proclaimed you can't have theological tensions you can't have fundamental tensions or contradictions that everything has to be fundamentally on the same page a jewish perspective is historically generally speaking very different where you find god in the struggling with the text you find god in the reconciling of contradictions the way that group over there did but there's another group over here that does it differently and you know what they're both good they're both fine they don't have to fight over which one is best you know the talmud the great collection of jewish tradition and talking about the bible and jewish life they're forever going back and forth debating you know how to understand this stuff and what to do with it and the debate is canonized it's the debate that's canonized it's the debate that's there for people to read and to look at not to hush hush let's clear it up and then we'll present to the public our final opinion the debate is the opinion right the debate is the way that union with god is fostered not in coming to a firm and final conclusion and they would say because this is the word of god we can't come to this the final move on everything which is not a christian move for the most part for christians we say since god is true and this is god's word it's got to be plain for the most part there might be some tricky things we have to look into for the most part this is a unified central message that even a child can understand you know it's a different perspective it's a beautiful perspective that blew my mind like four times in a row

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i have another question from jeffrey thompin and he asks what is the basis of your determination as to which scriptures are authoritative for today's church

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i interpret the question to mean which parts of the bible are more authoritative than others and how do i determine that and you know i i determine that on the basis of things that are hard to quantify i keep coming back to that but first of all my my understanding of the overall point of scripture which is promoting christ and the new people of god made up of jews and gentiles and all of us together as people united in love for one another you know so i read passages that you know if there are things that are incompatible with that um like many christians throughout history i just say well listen there are some parts of the story that don't continue on you know i i don't think i should dash my enemies babies heads against the rocks you know i mean assam thinks that but you know that's that's okay but if and for me to say you know we i don't want to do that anymore i i'll be adamant about this next point i'm not saying let's disrespect the bible it's it's more let's understand it and let's you know come to terms with the the spiritual trajectory that we see happening in the christian bible right so you know if jesus says you know love your enemies which is not just the person you happen not get along with but it's likely the enemies around them which is the romans that's how i would understand jesus statement but you know if jesus says love your enemies you know for me you know i don't read the canaanite genocide passages as being fundamentally harmonious with that i read it as being part of an ancient tribal understanding of what god is like and and it's our responsibility not to stay there but to keep in fact within the old testament they're not staying there they're moving you know you've got diverse thinking in terms of what outsiders were like within the old testament itself so it's nothing new there were trajectories built into the old testament already it's it's a very christ-centered way of working through the very difficult question the perennial christian theological question of what does it mean to read the bible well and to follow god by reading the bible well right but you can't i know the question is not asking it but you know that you can't sort of nail that down well here are the three things i do to make sure i get it right you know it it doesn't that's actually a very low view of the bible that we can control it rather quickly but we probably can't [Music] if there's anything i've noticed that the bible does not do well it's provides simple answers to complex questions it provides complex answers to complex questions um and and you know i i think also that that's a higher view is to say that because of the scope of this this work well these works really um there is much to be gleaned from any topic but it's it's you're not reading cliff notes you're getting very near and dear to multiple stories that changed over time and had different cultural contexts were written in different languages and even written from completely different understandings of who god is and how god interacts with us right now of course if you have a bible like that the the response is and i get this response i disagree with it but i get it the response is well what sort of objective anchor then do we have for what we believe and you know if people are looking for the bible to be an objective anchor they're going to be really disappointed for the very reason that you just said it doesn't give the kinds of answers that you would expect an objective anchor to give our anchor i mean faith is subjective isn't it i mean that's that's it's hard to avoid that and we are putting our trust in the higher power we're putting our trust in god we're putting our trust in christ and we're looking to the bible to help us figure out what that means and that you know there is a significant subjective element there it's hard to avoid and you know i'm not really sure how to get around that i can't i don't don't even want to get around it it's just the way it is i have another question from chris stein he asks where do you discern that the bible stops being myth and starts being factual yeah that's a one of those questions that i think is in a lot of people's minds um let me begin first of all by saying that myth is not bad and factual is not good you know that that divide that's part of the conservative evangelical fundamentalist mindset that myth is a bad thing myth means lie myth means not true i think genesis 1 is thoroughly mythic it's also thoroughly true right it's it and and understood contextually it's thoroughly true so i don't want to make a division between that see in a sense the entire bible is mythic i mean here i'm just piggybacking on somebody like c.s lewis who says you know in christ in in in the incarnate son of god crucified and raised from the dead um we have myth becoming reality because other cultures have stories of dying and rising gods and and and and you know this this human divine human hybrid so to speak which is not the incarnation but you know what i mean so i mean other cultures have had these notions it's not an entirely new thing in christianity but you know in in in christ myth becomes reality right so you know i think it's important to keep that in mind to to sort of put up a wall between those two concepts is is a very insensitive reading of the encultured nature of the bible itself which is ancient literature all right so maybe do you have time for one more question yeah sure yeah david anthony pate asked us do you think the apocrypha is god-breathed if so does that make our protestant bibles which exclude these books somehow incomplete furthermore why were some of those books accepted by some and rejected by others and i just think that's a great question because i don't know that a lot of christians are really familiar with the process by which scripture was assembled or why we have an apocrypha in a protestant bible in a catholic bible yeah i mean that that's another one of these non-tweetable non-blog issues it's it's i think it's very complicated i mean on one level the simple answer at least for the the protestant canon is that our old testament books are the books that are in the jewish bible and the decision was made well that's our bible we're not going to add to it and and the reason why is because the books in the apocrypha with maybe one exception um ecclesiasticus or ben sira they were all they're written in greek so you know jews are probably not going to include greek books as being on the same par as genesis or exodus or leviticus greek is not a bad thing for them but books that were produced in greek at a later time were never really seriously considered as being part of their canon it does show though how much jews were still writing and thinking about their faith they never stopped writing they kept writing it's just you know the jews made sort of a cut off and they debated these things in the first century and you know what what books are in what books are out that kind of thing so that that's they debated those things the the the christian church had an old testament at the beginning the first christians really that's a second century this is after all the apostolic period because of the prominence of greek for them and their adaptation of the greek old testament they took some of these other books with them so to speak and and you know eventually they became part of you know the the roman catholic you know what became roman catholicism the roman catholic canon to which the protestants responded a thousand years later you know so it's it and why some of these books were included why others weren't my goodness gracious these things were i mean there there was a time where you know the book of hebrews and and and the book of revelation for example were like people doubted that should be in the bible you know how late how late is that to people oh i'm trying to remember exactly i said probably let's say maybe second century maybe even a little bit later you know um i mean christians were always thinking in terms of what you know how do we expand our authoritative book to include the jesus part but it wasn't always necessarily clear and people had different criteria but at the end of the day what what really won out was their understanding of having the authority of the apostles behind it and and the authority of tradition and also simply the content of some of these books you know that they're more harmonious and they sort of fit together but i think one way to start a great argument among christians is talk about cannon formation because there are a lot of different opinions and especially in the conservative world i i think there's a tendency to round off some of the rough edges of canon formation but uh um it's it's another one of these just very complex issues that you you can't just say you know god wrote the bible and he sort of delivered it to the church there were hundreds of years of debates and disputes about these things but you know i get an awful lot out of some of these apocryphal books i mean the ecclesiasticus and the book of wisdom i mean i wrote my dissertation on the wisdom of solomon in the apocrypha it's it's a book that is is of tremendous inspiring spiritual value for christians i would say you know more so than maybe um song of songs i'm not knocking on the song of songs but people scratch their heads and say what the heck is going on here is it allegorical is it literal what do i do with this and the thing is that you see in the history of christianity and i mean this in roman catholicism the most commented book in probably the last thousand years of the church is song of solomon because people have had to you've got to you've got to work hard at interpreting this differently and it's usually been taken and understood as an allegory of christ in the church we are full of of sexual not even innuendo but just really fairly explicit sexual language but you know the medieval christian commentators understood that and and they ran with that saying yeah actually you know your relationship to god in christ is more intimate than anything you can possibly imagine and the best way to get that intimacy across is to talk about sex that's what the book's about now historically that's not why it was written but it came to be understood that way you know i mean one of my professors also at harvard james coogle another you know devout jewish professor would say i mean this is a very non-protestant thing to say but it's it's the kind of thing you sort of throw there and just sit on it and think about it for a second he said what makes the bible the word of god isn't the words on the page it's the interpretation given to the words and that's that's a really good way of thinking about the song of songs sitting on its own and let's say an ancient context is a love poem it's it's okay to ask what is this doing in the bible well the answer given throughout much of christianity is well it's about god and christ and the church that's what this is about but that's that's the interpretation given to the words not not just the words taken in their plain sense you know same thing for for christians even just the old testament in general what makes the old testament the word of god for christians if you really press them it's how all this stuff brings me to christ well that's an interpretation of the words i mean exodus on his own doesn't bring you to christ but exodus read christianly brings you to christ and if anything see that's the example of the new testament writers that's what they're doing they're rereading israel's story in light of this ending and and i think that's a great lesson for how we think about canon or interpretation or theology or anything it is impossible to read something without interpreting it absolutely yeah i mean people say you know don't bother me with interpretation i'm just reading the text playing well that is an interpretation just say you're reading the text plane and and and plain how i mean people disagree on how to read the text plainly so who's right yeah beautiful pete thank you so much for being part of this this is have i screwed up your lives sufficiently now or what okay well i just want to say i've already pre-ordered my copy of the bible tells me so and believe it or not i didn't even order the kindle version i ordered the hardback because i'm so excited um and this listen i'm just so excited about how many people are just gonna have to google term after term after term on this episode i think that's what we strive for last week we talked about evolution and i had a lot of people messaging me saying their fingers were worn out from searching google and i'm really excited that this week we've upped the necessary google requirement to understand the episode it's me right now i'm on my iphone just googling away and i thought i had a lot of christian lingo down peter thank you so much this has been very very insightful and thank you for your work and uh and for stopping by and talking with us absolutely happy to be here thanks thanks for having me on

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i think you have a fascinating story mike with your evolution and how you approach the bible because um what you needed it to be at a time in your life that you were really going through a lot of pain it couldn't give you the answers you were looking for can you just tell us this like for those that might not know that story just a little piece of that and how just your kind of struggle and journey with the bible and how what it was and what it came to mean for you well i was a wee young evangelical christian and i loved it and i um i was a frequent um i would even say daily bible study kind of person um and that meant a lot in my life and that brought me a lot of peace and helped my life better help my life be better anyway um but uh you know my dad had an affair and he decided he was gonna leave my mom and that conflicted with my new testament understanding of divorce so i decided i needed to have the answers in scripture to tell my dad why what he was doing was against god's will and so i entered a period of i would say obsessive bible study i read it cover to cover multiple times in a year not because uh i loved it but because i needed it to do something i needed to use it as a almost a weapon against my father which is really twisted but felt justified at the time and you know it's a miracle that dad and i still have a great relationship that he has frankly been able to forgive me for as arrogant as i was in those days but uh it didn't work the more i read the bible uh the more confused i got um you know there's these different accounts of history in the bible that don't line up with each other there are things i'm not talking about science conflicting with um the bible or the bible conflicting with external scholarship i mean the bible itself did not seem to line up and the answers and selling apologetics didn't work and that actually led me can you give a couple of those examples genesis 1 and genesis 2 um you know different chronologies i haven't uh i used to be real sharp on these and believe i have tried to not be so sharp on them um you know how the gospels line up with each other um i could pull up a spreadsheet um that i still have of course you could pull up a spreadsheet i will yeah i cataloged my my confusions in excel i thought that was the best way to do it you you told me that so how many contradictions uh when you were reading through how many contradictions i got the thousands for sure um now the the problem is i i abandoned that effort because if you're interested in potential biblical contradictions if you want to read scripture really poorly and basically take a literalist reading but but but an atheist literalist reading there's a document online called the dossier of reason that catalogs the bible's self-contradiction some of them frankly are questionable but there are more there than i had in my excel spreadsheet and so i abandoned the effort when i saw that someone had already done that work the skeptic's annotated bible will also list tons of contradictions but that led me out of the faith and and and the bible became nothing but an archaeological record of mythology for me eventually god made his way back into my life but i didn't immediately return to the scriptures they still seemed quite silly and quite foreign and it wasn't until i started to consider them as a product of christ's church that they became interesting to me again i'm i feel like i'm still a like i have a little detox to do from kind of how i was my dealings with the bible as a young person i've seen it used as a weapon too many times i've seen it used to just support somebody's political agenda or power agenda so many times use it to justify going into dark places and so like that's been hard for me the bible my relationship with the bible has has been tricky over the years it's it's been really important to me at times and really beautiful and then other times cause of great stress and anxiety um and oftentimes i've i've just avoided it in through the years and seasons of just i just can't deal with this thing right now it's just too complicated but then there are time you know i had i had a recent experience we my wife and i had uh we just had our second little girl a few months ago she just turned three months old two days ago and um she was born with down syndrome we weren't aware that she was going to be born with down syndrome we just in the delivery room found out and also right away found out she had these heart issues and they were gonna have to take her right into surgery and then she's about to have another surgery that's gonna be open-heart surgery and we were just it was a lot it was it was just this onslaught of emotion and the world had just totally tilted its axis and was unrecognizable anymore and i found it really interesting that uh i the bible was one of the first things that i went back to i was actually talking to alyssa on the phone and um she had alluded to something and was you know fearfully and wonderfully made she said something like that i took the bible and i brought it into the delivery room with lisa and when we just got the first chance to be us and i read through psalm 139 out loud and it made me understand on something like this is why this book gets fought over so fiercely this is why people have held on to this there's there's power in this book like we i read these words over our little down syndrome kid that needs surgeries and needs medical attention and needs therapy and it's you knew her and her when she was in her mother's womb you knit her together she's fearfully and wonderfully made and it's just gorgeous and it's powerful and there's so much scripture like that that is just he's classic more than classic like sacred in the fullest sense of the word passages that people have come to for thousands of years and said these words there's something about these stories and these words and these myths and these histories and all this struggling that there is god's breath that we find and we encounter when we wrestle with these scriptures and so it's not something that's easy for me personally to always know how to do that well especially with my past with the bible but i think part of the reason i was excited about talking about this on the liturgist is because it is something that i want to learn how to wrestle with better because i have experienced power and beauty in the scriptures in a way that i don't experience in other books there's this idea that it's a book we have a relationship with and what an interesting statement but i think that's true for many many people that we have a relationship with this book and for for some people it's a complicated relationship and one of the last encounters i had before i left the baptist church was sitting in the office with one of the the ministers on staff at our church and i was telling him about all my confusion and my my frankly frustration with scripture and the way that i was reading it and he encouraged me to take a few months off from reading the bible he said you honestly you've read it so much you know the content um but you're you've you've gotten so hung up over uh the specifics and and among the historicity and all these you're reading it so critically that it can't work in your life and he says why don't you just take a few months and don't read the bible at all don't even think about it take a bible vacation and it you know that there was a southern baptist minister with that much wisdom and that warm a heart that he would say those words to me let me know that sometimes the best thing to do with the bible is to back off and not to keep trying to to to stretch it and force it into however our thoughts are working right now and it also reminded me um you know as we we talk about it's impossible to talk about issues in the church and have an interesting discussion without using words like evangelical mainline protestant catholic progressive liberal conservative reformed all those words get thrown around they have meaning but that that minister and frankly my mom who i would call a conservative evangelical um make me want to add the disclaimer that when we use those terms they're never blanket and so while you know my problems with the bible did come down to me understanding it as a conservative evangelical and other conservative evangelicals have used their understanding of scripture to really hurt me other conservative evangelicals look at the bible and they see it as something that is an ultimate message of love and they approach others with that context because of it the bible is so complex and nuanced and subtle and overt and poetic and powerful that it becomes something markedly different as it is transmitted through all the different individuals that follow it so my mom reads the bible she reads it relatively literally um but the outpouring of that is the most compassionate human being that i've ever met or this minister at my old church read the bible and even though uh you know he read it certainly much more literally than i do the expression of that was actually more loving than my progressivist read so let's talk about it with art do you have any new jingles art jingles for us liz you messed up my rj the last time i wanted you to like overdub it so it was like art actual delays like with my voice on top of my voice on top of my voice all right let's give it a try okay you ready yeah okay i'm gonna go i'm gonna protools that guy up um so i think it's interesting as a person that writes music and lyrics and um you know there's a lot there's that in the bible there's songs the psalms are all like it's music it's it's poetry it's songs and i find it interesting and i think i probably see the bible a little differently because of what i do with art and lyrics and stuff because i often have people totally misinterpret my stuff and it doesn't doesn't even it doesn't actually bother me that much if somebody reads something different from the words that i'm writing here's something different that's like okay it's doing its job like that is the whole that's a main reason that people write poetry rather than prose is because it can speak so many different things and i think that's why we all love art it could speak right to my life directly and i think the bible can do that for us as well but if we get caught up on little things we totally miss the art of it it's a book it's a library of books and that in itself is an art form like writing things down into human language trying to contain trying to reflect and speak of uh infinite things and the the mysteries the greatest mysteries of the universe and beyond the universe like god trying to speak of god and trying to write of god and trying to tell stories about how god plays a part in our world it's so artistic just the very nature of what you're doing because you're trying to put it into characters on a page what a crazy thing and so i think that's what you get these you get within that crazy art form you have things like uh the donkeys the donkeys emissions and the the people putting their uh you know putting spikes through heads and it's all part of the movie it's all part of the story it's all part of the wrestling and the the insanity of it and uh that's as an artist um it makes it interpreting it is the whole point interpreting it and wrestling with it and letting it speak to you um so i don't know that that kind of isn't for me an interesting way of looking at the bible as as a piece of art in itself well the point of art is some subjective experience some conveyance of a truth that can only be found by looking within and you know i find it interesting forget the fact that we're reading ancient art and not only are we reading ancient art we're reading ancient art from different historical time periods so you can't even uh take one set of assumptions that would help you understand the epistles and apply them to the gospels and you certainly can't apply that to the prophets and you can't apply what you learn in the prophets to uh the torah they all read differently um but even when i think about uh when i read modern things if i uh journal and write about what a book meant to me or a movie or especially a song and if i wait two years and i listen to the same song and i journal about what it means to me now and i compare those two writings the insights and the experience i have with the same source material are dramatically different so you know to to look at the bible artfully to read the bible artistically to me is not to demote it to make it a lower view but in fact to admit the persistent power the bible has to continue to create new insights and new experiences in our life in a way that something that was purely historical may not be able to you know i don't know that i have a rousing movement in my soul when i reread a history textbook that doesn't radically change me now there are certainly historical events that are moving don't hear me wrong but when we write in such a way to most accurately or journalistically convey factual information that is not nearly as powerful in driving personal change and insights as something written artistically and if it's just historical it's such a curious uh choice of historical data a lot of times you know like he stabbed that what is the fat king he stabbed him with the sword and the sword was absorbed into his belly because he's so fat like was that is that the necessary historical information that i need to know to follow jesus so i yeah as just history it's it's a it's confusing for sure and you know it's gotta be a dude that wrote uh that ezekiel passage because i mean unless maybe you can correct me if i'm wrong but i think uh the the woman lusting after a guy who's a mission is like that of a horse seems more like a guy sort of perspective yeah she was there's nothing more sexy than that am i right ladies am i right do we lose you mike no what am i gonna say mike you need a lot more to say can we get your perspective there's nothing i can say appropriate for this podcast there's much i could say but there's nothing i could say appropriate for the podcast i've always got that that beep ready for like 30 seconds of beep did there's something wrong with the podcast no mike's just saying a lot of perverse things about emissions and barnyard animals so yeah but i mean that that's i mean even that like culturally um uh that was a particular way of understanding power and influence in those days virility that was part of a move and an understanding of what it meant to be a human and a a an evolution if you will of human thought um are you saying you don't take that literally mike well i'm saying it wasn't meant literally um in the same way that uh the final passages about moses speak to his ability to have an erection those things were a sign that someone was authoritative uh i think i'm gonna start reading the bible more again it's awesome it's like it's not only beautiful it's it's frightening it's not only sacred it's sexual what i love the most about the bible is the way it describes the entirety of the human experience it is not only about peace it is also about war and why we go to war and why we're driven to conflict and it it doesn't hold back in telling those stories and telling those accounts it encapsulates the fullness of what it means to be humanity and trying to pursue god

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yeah beautiful i think that's good that was great that was it so this is uh this was our podcast on the bible everybody hope uh you enjoyed it got something from it so uh this has been the liturgist podcast number three thanks for listening i'm michael gunger i'm lisa pino i'm science mike [Music] peace