How do we know the Bible is true?
2024-05-07 00:38:22
Do you have questions about theology, the Bible, or the church that you’re too afraid to ask? Tired of pastors and scholars using unfamiliar language or overly complicated explanations? Curiously, Kaitlyn is a weekly podcast hosted by author and theologian Kaitlyn Schiess that tries to make theology accessible, meaningful, and fun. Each week, you’ll hear a kid ask a theology question–sometimes serious, sometimes silly–and Kaitlyn will interview a scholar to help answer it (without all the academic jargon). Together, Kaitlyn and her guest discover that this one simple question opens up big theological ideas that can impact our lives, shape our view of God, and understand Scripture in a new way. Whether you're reminiscing about your own childhood curiosities or simply seeking a refreshing take on faith, tune in and rediscover the joy of learning with "Curiously Kaitlyn.”
Welcome to Curiously, Caitlyn, a podcast where we try to make theology make sense. I'm Caitlyn Schess, and every week on this show you will hear a kid's question about God, theology, or the Bible, and then I'll talk with a scholar who will try to answer it.
I don't know.
That doesn't make any sense.
Dr.
Brad East, thank you for joining me today.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
This is Brad East. He teaches theology at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas, and is the author of many books, including a couple about scripture, and two that are coming out later this year. The first is called The Church, A Guide to the People of God, and the second is called Letters to a Future Saint, Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry. So let's hear this question. I'm glad you get to hear it, because it is more than just the words.
You'll appreciate the angst, I think, from this kid.
So, basically, how do we know that God and the Bible is real? How do we know that what we're reading is true?
So this is one snippet of a much longer conversation I had with this kid about all the parts of the Bible that he also has some questions about, if we can know that they're true. But I thought you would be a perfect person to answer the angst underneath all of his other specific questions about Adam and Eve and David and all of his other things is just, how do we know that the Bible is true? How can we trust that the Bible is true? Before we get into that question, and we'll definitely bracket the how do we know God?
is real question.
But before we get into the Bible question, let's just start with what is the Bible? And where does it come from?
So I'll give you a theological answer and then maybe a sort of normal answer. Theological answer is that the Bible is God's Word. And what that means is that when we read or hear the words of the Bible, which are human words, God is using those words to speak through them to us. And so God is talking to us. That's what I'd say theologically.
More broadly than that, to bring that down to earth, I would say the Bible is a collection of documents. We call them books, but some of them are shorter than an email, barely a long text message in the case of a couple of them. But a collection of documents written over a very long period of time in multiple languages by dozens, maybe hundreds, but at least dozens of human beings who were leaders and teachers in God's people, Israel and the church, that God's people gather, kept and then maintained and preserved and began to use in worship and prayerful settings. And God's people realized that God was speaking to them through these texts, that there was sort of one voice in the symphony of voices. And this collection is a kind of portable library through which we hear both the teachers of God's people, but also God, the teacher, speaking through their teachings.
That's what I'd say for now.
This is going to come up a few times. So it's important to be clear about what Dr. East and I are talking about. Some of us have this vision of the Bible as falling out of the sky from God or God, inspiring individual authors to write exactly what he told them to write. But we know from the history of the church that the Bible comes to us a slightly different way.
Some of the Bible comes to us as stories that were passed down through generations, telling them out loud, and then eventually writing them down, compiling them together and editing them so we can see how all of the pieces fit together. Some parts of the Bible are letters. one person wrote at one time. Inspired by God. But some parts are compilations of various writings and stories from different places in time.
All of this, Christians believe, was a process guided by the Holy Spirit, so that what we have is the word of God. That's great. I was recently watching a video that Phil did, where he asked some kids questions. This was a long time ago. Asked kids questions.
And one of the questions he asked was, who wrote the Bible? And I loved these kids' answers. Some of them said very confidently, two people. Didn't tell us who the two people are, just there are two people that wrote it. But I loved.
there was one little girl who said, no one. And obviously that's not a true answer. But I loved that. to her it was like, well, we just have the Bible. I don't know a world without the Bible.
So it's strange to me to think that someone wrote the Bible.
It's like, yeah, that's great.
And we just encounter it in church. So let's move to the question, how do we know the Bible is true? And I think this child already experiences some of the angst that many of us experience. But again, for grownups too, I think part of the angst for this question is not just the kind of angst we would have about any book. Is this truthful?
Is this telling me something true? But a question I think a lot of Christians ask because they think, well, if I just can find an argument that tells me I can trust the Bible, then I can build everything from there. And so I have to start with this question. Is it true? Come up with an intellectual answer to that.
And then we can get into building everything else. So, first of all, is that how we should think about it? And then we can move more to the, how do we know it's true?
Yeah, I think I'm a pluralist about these things. And I mean by that, I think it's perfectly fine for many different kinds of people to come at these questions from many different angles. And so I definitely don't think that there is one or two or three correct ways to approach the question. Some people are thinking sort of very rationally, like I would love arguments. I'd love empirical or historical data.
And I can sort of build a foundation. that makes me feel, puts my anxiety at ease about the reliability of this text or these texts. But I know a lot of people for whom that just doesn't, that just doesn't, that has no purchase on their lives. It doesn't make them trust the Bible more or less. And it actually might make the Bible feel like Homer.
What Dr. East means here is that some of our historical and intellectual defenses of the Bible can make it seem like it's any other ancient text. I might have learned that it gives some accurate history or that it really was a text written a long time ago by these authors. But that doesn't mean it has any meaning for me in my life. It doesn't mean that God still uses it to speak to God's people today.
That just makes it feel like a million miles away from me. It has nothing to do with me. This is not God, the living God's living word to me. In which I hear the voice of the creator speaking to me, his creature, that it makes it feel like I'm in history class. And that's not where faith comes alive for me.
So first, I think, I don't think that there's sort of one mode of approach. I suppose that'd be the first thing I'd want to say. Second, I do think that there are all kinds of good reasons for the more rationalistic among us. I do think there are very good reasons. But yeah, to maybe the hint in your question,
I am wary of a sort of purely mentally or rationally or empirically, humanly built foundation. Because if at any point that becomes threatened, then the house of cards I've built on top of it comes tumbling down. And so what I want to lead with, maybe not to this child, but to listeners, would be any relationship to the Bible, let me rephrase that. Any Christian relationship to the Bible is going to be structured in a similar way to any Christian's relationship to the gospel, to God, and to Christ. By which I mean, it's going to be built on trust or on faith.
In my view, you're never going to get to the absolutely knock down argument that puts every question or even doubt to rest. I just don't see that happening for most of us, maybe for all of us. And so you're going to have to trust, just in the same way that Abraham and Mary trust in the promise of God, even though they can't see it with their eyes. It's going to come true later, but right now I'm going to say yes to this promise brought to me out of nowhere, out of the blue.
And just as Christians put our trust in a God, we can't see, in a risen Lord, we can't see, in sins that are forgiven, but that forgiveness is not something I can touch, taste, smell, etc. I think we have to approach the Bible with that same posture of trust. Okay, but that's kind of avoiding the question, okay? So, the preliminaries are out of the way. I'm lowering expectations appropriately.
I think that there are all kinds of good reasons for trusting the Bible. So, I suppose I'm going to answer the question indirectly, and then you pin me down on a particular reason or argument or two. I think it's a little bit of a stereotype that when people go to seminary or get their PhDs, the more theological education you receive, stereotypically in our culture, the more it strips away your confidence in the faith.
When I went to seminary, people made the, it's not seminary, it's cemetery for your faith, kind of jokes.
The more you study, you're like, oh my gosh, and you get these people who go to seminary or get a PhD in religion or theology, and they lose their faith, or they deconstruct, or they're ex-evangelicals or whatever. I had the opposite of that experience. I got my undergrad in biblical text, an MDiv, so four years plus three years, and then a six-year PhD in theology. And I wasn't exactly in bastions of fundamentalism. I was at Emory and Yale.
These are places where you're asking hard questions, etc.
, etc.
Every year that I spent studying this stuff, every additional book that I read, every new teacher, I got increased my confidence and trust and delight in this book, which I have devoted my life to. And so I suppose this is more of a personal testimony intersecting with the intellectual, that learning more about where the Bible came from didn't induce a crisis in me. It induced awe and wonder and greater faith. So that's just one way of answering it personally.
No, that's great. That's my experience, too. I give people the example all the time of you're scared to go down some rabbit hole. You're scared to ask this question because if you really explore it, you might discover something that destroys your faith. I think building the muscle of going down the rabbit trail and, over and over and over again, discovering that Scripture is better and God revealed in Scripture is better than I thought previously.
This story that I thought was violent and awful and immoral, I find some amazing goodness there that I wasn't expecting. It doesn't answer all my questions, but that process of continuing to look continues to bring me more joy. Speak, if you can, to the person. And I'm imagining this is true of this kid. He's going, there is weird stuff in here.
And what I would expect something to be that God gave to us to shape our life as the people of God, to be more straightforward than this, I would expect a systematic theology, or I would expect a straightforward list of rules. I would not expect stories that are sort of morally ambiguous and commands that sometimes seem contradictory.
Why should I believe that this is true? And maybe even underneath, that question is in what sense is it true? What does it mean for it to be true?
Yeah, that's the money question. So I think the first thing to do, particularly in a church context where you're maybe in Bible class or Sunday school, is to say we, and by we, I mean us, 2024 American Christians. You know, well, good. I do have a Bible next to me. We imagine that the Bible is this thing bound between two covers that I own a personal copy of in my mother tongue.
In order to sort of get our arms around what this thing is, we have to reframe what the Bible is, what its natural habitat is, and what it's for. And that's a lot of words to say this. The Bible exists in and for the church. And in particular, it has its home. The oxygen that it breathes is in worship.
And so that question can sometimes be, man, I'm sitting alone with this book and, like, it seems wacky and weird at times. And how am I competent or adequate to make sense of all of this stuff? But if you say, no, no, no, that's not what it's primarily for, though that's a very good thing to do. It's primarily when we, as the baptized, as followers of Christ, as the body of Christ, are gathered in his spirit to worship the Father, etc., that this book is open, the scroll is unrolled, and the words are read aloud. We've maybe put our bodies in a certain posture.
We've perhaps marked ourselves or gotten on our knees or stood up.
If Dr. East's description here sounds unfamiliar to you, you might go to a church that doesn't have quite the same ceremony or formality around reading the Bible. But the church has historically had certain practices for reading the Bible together, some of which he's talking about here. But even if you go to a church that doesn't stand for reading passages from the Gospels or kneel or move your bodies for different parts of Scripture, we all think reading the Bible together in the church is important, and Dr. East is describing why it's important.
There's a lot of ceremony here for good reason, because the living God, who created the heavens and the earth, who became incarnate in Christ, is addressing us through the words of his servants and ambassadors. And so it's not this kind of like puzzle box for me to put together. It's for us, as God's community, God's people, to receive with joy and for those words to work on us. And sometimes it might confound or confuse us. Sometimes God's going to speak like a lightning bolt into our lives.
And it may not even be clear what the relationship is between what God is saying and the actual words that were read aloud. But nevertheless, it happens. All of which is to say the Bible is not only the church's book. It's a liturgical book, meaning it's meant for worship. It's Christ's book, in which Christ meets us like in the sacrament.
He's present among us, in power, through his spirit, and he speaks to us. And what he speaks to us is his gospel.
A couple of things here. First, when Dr. East uses the word liturgical, you might be confused or you might think, well, my church isn't liturgical. As he said, this word just refers to our worship together. Even churches that don't follow a formal liturgy have a rhythm for their life.
together. We have songs we sing or words we regularly use that give shape to our life together. Kids are usually good at telling us what our liturgy is, even if we don't notice it. Because they pick up on all the things we do over and over again. Second, when Dr.
East talks about the sacrament, he's talking about communion. Christians have different ideas about what's going on in communion, sometimes called the Eucharist. But we all believe Christ is present with us in some way.
And if that's the framework, that this book literally exists for that. And it exists for other things, but that's its primary purpose. And it exists to do that. Then it also approaches how I come to it. I come to it both in that kind of trust and awe and wonder.
But I also don't approach it thinking, man, I've got to solve this theological Rubik's Cube.
It's no longer a problem to solve, but a gift to receive because it's announcing something good to me.
Yes, that's so great. I'm glad you brought up that, the church part of it. I was thinking, when this kid asked this question to me, of what it might be doing to the kids in my church. How they might be thinking about Scripture, knowing that we say every week when someone reads Scripture aloud, this is the word of the Lord, and then we respond, thanks be to God. And I didn't grow up in a church that did that.
But I have personally been quite thankful for the posture that it trains in me. But it also, I think, poses a big question for those kids who at first are just learning the words. And then later they think through what they mean and ask questions about them. And I think part of the underlying question of how do I know the Bible is true, is not just how do these disparate parts make sense together. And I have questions I don't know how to answer.
But also, I now know, especially as this kid grows up, right, he might read some scholar somewhere that has a story about how Scripture came to be. that is very human. And he might be tempted to either say, okay, I want to ignore that historical stuff because it threatens my faith. Or might say, this is just historical record of people coming up with things. Or even, in a better sense, historical record of people responding to some kind of divine thing or some kind of experience with God.
But in church what we say is this is the word of the Lord, thanks be to God. How can that be true? How can it be true that we, I think, want to hold that particular personalities in particular historical contexts recorded things, edited things, as you mentioned earlier, transmitted things. And yet we also, as a theological statement, say this is the word of the Lord. I think most people in churches today often think you have to pick one of those two things.
Yeah. Yeah, and you're right that over emphasis on one can lead young people, or any age people, but can form people over time to be scandalized when they learn that it's not just the one, it's the other. The nice thing about reading, as you know, reading into church history and tradition on this is that the church has never been, this has not been one of those controversial claims. The church has always known that human beings wrote the Bible and that God inspired their words. And it gets contested when we say, how?
Like, what do we mean when we say that? But it's full humanity and it's full divinity, divinity in the sense of coming from God as its ultimate origin and source. That's just, that's meat and potatoes theology in every century. That's not a kind of thing that Germans in 1823 discovered, you know. So I'll give, you know, if I'm speaking to that kid, or at least to that kid's imagination, I want to give him three analogies, all of which I think are pretty readily understandable by most of us.
So, you know, one is like when we think of an ambassador, you know, an ambassador for a president or a king or a country is not the same person. And his words are not the same words identically to, let's say, the king that he represents. But when the ambassador is on a foreign mission to another country, that ambassador is vested with authority. We could say ordained with authority to speak on behalf of the sovereign. And that's one way.
the church has always understood the words of Scripture, that these are ambassadors to us, that it's the embassy of Christ, not Christ himself, but Christ's representatives speaking on his behalf. And I mean, St. Paul uses this image or metaphor directly in his letters.
Dr. East is talking here about Second Corinthians 520.. When Paul uses this analogy of being an ambassador, saying, we are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.
This is a way of understanding how one person's words can stand in for another's. But they're both at the same time. You know, another theological example would be, you know, when an apostle performs a miracle. And I ask you, the child, the question, like, who performed the miracle? You know, did St.
Peter heal the man or did Christ heal the man? And if you're thinking on your feet, you say, yes, because St. Peter said the words, but it was the power of Christ, through him, that did the healing.
And that's another way in which we sort of readily understand. We're not confused. We don't think Peter is a superman. We don't think he has superpowers. We know that God used him as a kind of vessel or vehicle.
So that's the second one. And third, the one that the church has often resorted to, it's an analogy. So it's only an analogy. That's not a one-to-one correspondence.
That Christ is 100% human, 100% divine, every single thing that he does. It's not the God doing this and the human doing this. He's a single subject. He's a single person. And he's always acting humanly and divinely in everything that he does.
And what that tells us is that those two things are not opposed. They're not mutually exclusive. One is not elbowing the other for space at the table. They're not competitive. And once we understand that, then it both illuminates Scripture, but it also illuminates my life, that, just as in Scripture, just as in Christ, just as in St.
Peter and Paul, God can take up residence in me, and he doesn't have to get me out of the way for me to be fully me, nor do I need to nudge out God for God to be truly and fully present in my life. So those would be the attempts at trying to hold the two together. And then, if you have that in place and you discover that not only did human beings write the human words of the human text of the Bible, but also it took time, and there were drafts, and there was composition and editing and redacting. It was like, well, God was working through all of that. There's not like this God vacuum over the composition and transmission of Scripture.
God is present and uniquely active in all of it to bring it about over time to be exactly what he wants the canon to be for his people.
Yeah. Oh, those are so helpful. There's another part of this question that I want to talk about as well, which is, you know, I don't think that this six-year-old is exactly thinking this. He's mostly thinking, I think one of his other questions was like, who was there to write down what Adam and Eve did? So he's thinking of those kind of terms, which are great terms to think about.
And we did a whole episode with Drew Johnson thinking about Adam and Eve and procreation, because he had some very interesting questions about that. But I think, as he gets older, what a lot of us ask is, okay, so I'm in the church, and, as you've described, this is the word of God for the people of God. And that is great when it's a story in the gospel. And I go, I know that guy. Like Jesus is doing some amazing thing.
And I think increasingly people aren't having issues with like miracles. How could that have happened? We believe lots of weird stuff now. Like lots of things can happen. But what I find the most frequent issue with this question, including with MDiv students at Duke, is I come across a text that feels immoral.
And that's when I go, how do I know this is true? Which is partially, back to your earlier answer, is partially a question of am I just by myself reading this and making my own judgments about it? But to take seriously that question, I think part of it is, how do I know these things are true that either offend my moral sensibilities or demand things of me that I'm not sure I want to give? Like? this is where I think the rubber meets the road of like.
it's one thing to say, is it true that Jesus healed this man? I can believe that. Is it true that this is how James talks about the rich and I'm the rich? It becomes a different kind of question. So how would you respond to someone?
Maybe this kid grows up a little bit and starts to go, some of this just on its face? I don't think is true. How do I go about determining if it is true?
Yeah, okay. Let me try to mentally see if I can keep up with myself on this, try to respond to two or three versions of that question. One, I think, is sometimes dealing with what feel like sordid stories, especially in the opening books of the Bible, the first six or seven. You've got tales where you're like, not only this repulses me, but why is it here?
So I just read, I don't know if you've had a chance to see it yet, Marilynne Robinson's new book on Genesis.
It's beautiful. And she does such a good job of pointing out how remarkably and perhaps uniquely self-critical the Bible is, and for her, the Old Testament, and in particular, the Torah, the first five books of Moses.
Dr. East talks about the Torah here, the first five books of the Bible. Jewish and Christian readers of the Bible have used different ways of dividing up the different parts of the Old Testament, but both Jewish and Christian interpreters have viewed these first five books as kind of a unit, sometimes also called the Pentateuch, which comes from the Greek word. five books, so very literal, or sometimes called the five books of Moses.
And one way to try to intersect with that point, namely that, man, the authors of sacred Jewish scripture, who are themselves, of course, Jewish, are recording tales that don't make them look good, and possibly even their God, at least their God's involvement and entailment with these all-too-human, fallible people. The intersection there is. I like to tell my students that the Old Testament is your family history.
Through baptism and faith, you've been joined to this people. You're part of the one family of God. So it's not only the last 2,000 years that are your family history, which in and of itself is a hard enough sell, that I need to get you to care about this. Christianity wasn't born yesterday or the day of your birth, but also the 2,000 years prior to that are part of your family history. And, as we all know, our family histories are not always clean or pure or blameless.
But it's still my family. I can't look away from the fact that that's where I come from. And so you look back to the Old Testament, as well as the New, of course. The New has got plenty of stuff. You look to the scriptures as a whole, and you say, my people, right or wrong, not because they're always right, but because when they're right and when they're wrong, this is where I come from, and I have something to learn from people who thought it important enough to write this down for future generations in all the gritty and sometimes brutal detail.
Okay, I said I'd give you three, but that's really just one.
No, that's great. That's great. Let's go back to the other part of this, which is what this might demand of me. The example I gave earlier of James is one example, but the other example could be like, I'm seeing these stories of warfare. What does this allow or justify for me?
So I think the other part would be, this goes back to the, what does it mean for it to be true? Which I think some people think? for me to say scripture is true requires me to, maybe to have a certain interpretation of these things. But it definitely, for all of us, I would say, requires something of me. How do I know if it is true and in what sense?
it is true for me in terms of what I live, how I live, and what I do?
Yeah. No, that's the right question. I suppose there's like a 30,000-foot answer here, and there's the sort of on-the-ground answer. The 30,000 foot, I do think we should, I think it's the right posture to approach scripture, saying, how does this nail me between the eyes? How's the bullseye on me?
Not on my neighbor, not on my annoying co-worker, or not on the person that I'm struggling with, but how does this address me and challenge me? And yeah, maybe James 4 and 5 has me in its crosshairs, and I need to hear these harsh words about the rich, because that might demand change in my life, so on and so forth. So yes, we shouldn't presume, and maybe it goes without saying, but we should never presume that, because a text is hard, then we need to find a way to reinterpret it so it's not hard anymore. That's certainly part of what scripture is for. But yeah, for the other times and other passages where, oh, it's not really got me in its sights, it's actually more like I don't really know how to, what do I do with the Amalekites and Exodus,
you know, the run from 16 to 19.
Here Dr. East is referencing one of the challenging passages in the Bible for us, the account of Israel wiping out the Amalekites from the Promised Land. We don't have the time today to get into this passage or the slavery passages Dr. East also mentions, but stay curious about them, and we'll come back to them at some point.
What do I do with that? Does that require of me a certain ethic of warfare?
I suppose this is where coming down to ground level, I don't know is definitely my first answer. My second answer is when we have these very challenging texts, challenging either in interpreting their meaning on the face of the text, just in and of themselves, but also their import for my life or our life. That's where I think we have to, we need to have developed and participated in practices of reading that don't isolate us in my study or at my coffee table with my Bible opened alone. What do I need? I need the church.
I need not just the church as the worshiping community on Sunday morning, but I need to be reading this text or these texts with sisters and brothers in Christ whose names I know and whose lives I'm bound up with. I need the wisdom of two millennia and more of sisters and brothers in Christ who have, the faithful departed, who have read these in tried and tested ways that I can trust, at a minimum I can learn from. I can probably trust and approach with confidence that they've thought of things I haven't. They're from all over the world, all different cultures, times, places, languages, etc.
Those are all resources. Of course, over all of this is prayer. I'm praying as I approach Scripture. I'm praying as I'm reading Scripture. I'm praying with others.
I'm discerning. That, I think, can keep us from a kind of rash. I read the Amalekites or I read a passage about slavery, and it's like, oh man, what do I do? I mean, just this morning I was reading Exodus 20, 21,, 22, and there are these laws concerning slaves.
Not only does that not bear on my daily life, but it raises questions about the legality and morality of slavery that are troubling in the 21st century in America. Does this mean that the Bible condones slavery? Does this mean, you know, yada, yada. I'm yada, yada-ing past all the hard stuff.
But the point being, like, I was reading that this morning, but we want already operative in our churches and in our lives.
practices and habits and routines of reading where that won't induce a crisis, because I've got all the other stuff working so that I can talk about this stuff openly and honestly and work it out with others and have access, whether through my own study or through friends or through pastors, access to, okay, how is this understood? How do rabbis interpret it? How's the church interpreted it? How have, you know, for example, how have abolitionists interpreted it? Stuff like this.
Does this bear on today or et cetera, et cetera? And those are going to provide a kind of frame or matrix.
for avoiding every single hard passage in Scripture being a stumbling block, and that all I'm doing is stubbing my toes and falling and scraping my knees, rather than being blessed and edified by what I read.
Dr. East, one last question, which I did not prepare you for. I apologize. But imagine that this kid, who I got to be face-to-face with, is face-to-face with you, and he asks this question. What would your kind of most succinct answer to this 6-year-old be?
It doesn't have to encompass everything we talked about, but just imagine you're there in church with him. How would you respond to, how do I know the Bible is real or true?
I would say we can trust that the Bible is true, because the Bible gives us Jesus. And Jesus gave us a family of mothers and fathers, uncles and aunts, sisters and brothers, and they're not only those who are with us today teaching us about Jesus, giving us Jesus, giving us these words of the Bible, but they've gone before us. And if you see Jesus in all of these people around you, if you see Jesus in the stories that you've learned about the people who've come before you, and if you see Jesus in this book, then you just keep looking for him, and you can trust that you're going to keep finding him there.
That is a great answer. Thank you so much, and thank you for your time today and for taking this question seriously with me.
Yeah, thank you. This was good.
One of my favorite things that Dr. East said in this conversation was that the Bible is not a problem to solve, but a gift to receive. There are challenging texts in this book, stories that are confusing, instructions. we aren't sure we should follow, places that seem to contradict each other. But part of our problem isn't the text itself, but the way we approach it.
The theologian Karl Barth is one of my favorite theologians, in part because of how he talked about the Bible. He described the reader of Scripture as a traveler entering a new world, living with Abraham and hearing the call to a new land, wandering with Moses in the wilderness, listening with Elijah for the still, small voice, following Jesus and watching the echo of his life and his bumbling band of followers. But you cannot enter this new world unless you're expecting to find it. If you look for boring, irrelevant stories, you will find them. If you look for contradictions or confusing parts, you will find them.
And you might stop there. But if you look for the strange new world of God, you will find it. If we come with wonder, with the expectation that we will be convicted and surprised and amazed, we will be satisfied.
Curiously, Caitlin is a production of Holy Post Media, produced by Mike Strelow, editing by Seth Corvette, theme song by Phil Vischer. Be sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and leave a review so more people can discover thoughtful Christian commentary, plus cute kids and never any butt news.
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