Jesus Jargon: Biblical

Hey friends, thanks for joining us and welcome as we kick off a new podcast,
Jesus Jargon, the ways that Christians use certain word and language.
This has been a podcast that’s been a while in coming as Michael and I have various conversations
around the office and through the weeks.
We have come to this idea that there are ways that Christians talk about things that are
both helpful and unhelpful and there are some keywords that get used in Christianity
at large that don’t always mean what we think they mean and probably the best example of
that is the one we start this series with,
biblical. What does it mean that we call something biblical and on the surface that sounds like a very
easy answer.
Well, it’s in the Bible,
but as Reformed Christians,
as Presbyterians, it is actually not that simple.
There is a lot more to consider as we talk about what it means that something is biblical
in our faith tradition.
Yeah, you’re not going to find any Christian who doesn’t affirm that being biblical matters.
Now, you’re going to see variances in terms of how people interpret that,
but it’s one of those truisms,
one of those sort of words that we use that is intended for everybody
to get on board because ultimately no one,
especially a person of faith,
wants to land on the side of not being biblical.
We just innately know that the Bible has a particular special and authoritative place.
Now there’s some different theologies that we may talk about that sort of undergird that,
but I think we need to pause here at the beginning of the conversation and just sort of peel
back a little bit of what we mean when we start talking about being biblical because
ultimately being biblical for some means,
I think just simply,
is it in the Bible?
If you went and did a search of the Bible,
can you find that particular word or can you
find that particular phrase?
And it is very tempting.
It happens a lot,
especially if you’re like in an undergrad theology program or maybe
you’ve just done some study yourself.
People who want to sort of make a case and then they pull out a list of Bible verses
that seem to support whatever the argument that they’re making at that time is.
Well it says in 1 Samuel 3,
well yeah, mine says in Philippians 2,
and then you just essentially
start making a pros cons list of verses that support one side versus verses that support
another and there’s almost this sort of de facto,
the side with the most Bible verses wins.
And that form of Biblicism,
I think is a very unhelpful frame and we’ll talk a little bit
about why that is,
but I think at its most common level,
people are thinking when we
talk about something being biblical,
we mean it’s in the Bible.
Yeah, or the implication that it somehow encapsulates a particular strand of biblical truth.
You know,
I’m always a little suspicious,
to be honest, when I hear a preacher or a
church claim that they have biblical preaching,
because the reality is that every pastor who
stands to preach on any given Sunday is preaching something from the Bible.
They start with a Bible reading.
Nobody’s doing Dr.
Seuss, nobody’s doing, you know, a tale of two cities.
We stand and preach from Scripture and preaching is therefore almost inherently biblical,
but when it’s used that way,
it almost always means I know the truth of what the Bible says
and that’s what you’re getting.
You’re getting it straight from the Bible to you through me,
but I’m not influencing
it all.
I’m not shaping it at all.
This is biblical because I say it is and that always,
to be honest, it makes me a little
uncomfortable.
I don’t think that I would ever claim that my own preaching is biblical,
though I believe it to be and hope that it is.
But the way the term is used would make me a little reluctant to stamp it that way because
it generally comes from a very certain perspective and it often means a very particular thing.
Yeah, growing up,
I was in church families that would regularly use terms like a Bible-believing
church or a church that teaches the Bible,
which of course has the suggestion that there
are other churches who don’t teach the Bible,
and maybe that church is out there.
I’ve not yet found that personally,
a church that as believers in Jesus Christ who don’t
teach the Bible, but there’s in that this sense that the encounter with the Bible is
one that is very teaching-heavy.
This is my experience that often the preaching sounds a lot like it came from a commentary
or from scholarly sort of notes about the topic.
Oftentimes the teaching has a lot of breakdowns and it talks a little bit about the original
languages, maybe some grammar talks about some of these more nitty-gritty type things.
And the danger of that as a style of biblical scholarship is I do think it encourages a kind of elitism,
a kind of passing away of other things.
What I mean by that is I have some friends who go to churches where the sermon is much
more like a teaching encounter every week.
It might even be 30 to 45 minutes.
And the impression that I think they often walk away from is we heard the Bible message.
And when we think of biblical as essentially finding the message,
we flatten the historic
sense that the church has generally brought to the Bible itself.
When the church determined that a thing was scripture and not just exhortation or encouragement
or devotion, when the church said this is scripture,
the church historically meant that
that contained so much truth that it was beyond the human ability to encapsulate in one simple thing.
In fact, some early theologians talked about the many senses of scripture and they would
talk about how you could read the scripture literally,
how you could read the scripture allegorically,
how you could read it symbolically,
how you could read it with different types.
And we won’t get into what all of that means,
but the point is at this juncture to say that
when the church has come to scripture historically,
we recognize that because it is authored by
God in a real way,
we should expect it to be beyond the human’s ability to condense
it into a simple statement.
And because of that,
I think Christians who think of biblical as finding that one strand
and sort of following it throughout an entire sermon,
throughout an entire teaching series,
that that is the measure of biblical.
The temptation in that move is then to say that we are the only ones who are biblical.
To say it differently,
we become prideful of our own interpretation of scripture.
We latch onto our perspective and we fail to recognize the multiple senses of scripture
that I think we would be wise to entertain.
So, “biblical” should be broad,
though historically I think churches that tend to use that term
tend to think of it as being very pointed.
Yeah.
I think if you’ve given the Bible any serious reading,
you understand that it is a huge
book.
It spans centuries.
It spans regions.
It spans cultures,
languages.
And the truth is,
the Bible is big enough that if you look for something,
you will likely find it.
You can find in the Bible,
the New Testament, for instance, is full of calls to peace, peacemaking,
to be peaceful people externally and internally.
If you are inclined to want to look in the Old Testament for the opposite,
you’ll find calls to war.
You’ll find calls to attack.
You’ll find calls to, you know,
be at odds with people and conquer others.
You can find calls to strict moralism,
and you can find places in the Bible that celebrate unethical behavior,
deceiving people, tricking people,
even murdering people.
You can find in scripture calls to universal love for all,
and you can find separate by
tribe and by ethnic and by,
you know, various ways of segregating people.
Whatever you want to find in the Bible,
it is probably in there.
And if you treat each thing you find as the thing the Bible says,
then it’s going to make
it very difficult.
In other words, that would be one way.
And I think the simplest way to call something biblical is to say,
“I found this verse.
The Bible teaches that we should fill in the blank.”
But it is very likely that that’s only one thing the Bible says among various things.
And so what it means to be biblical is a much bigger discussion than,
“Is there a verse
or several verses in scripture that say a thing,
and is that thing in keeping with all
of what the Bible says on that topic?”
And that is a much different—it’s a much more nuanced.
It’s a much more complicated.
And I think it’s a much better way to approach the scripture.
And fortunately, in our tradition, we’ve kind of inherited that from our fathers and
mothers in the faith who never said that a single verse,
right?
The people throughout American history who said the Bible condones slavery, well, yes,
you can find passages in the Bible that seem to do just that.
But Presbyterians,
at our best, were able to say,
“Well,
if you’re trying to argue
that the whole of the Bible advocates for the way that we treat others when we enslave them,
you can’t justify that.
There’s no way you can say that’s what the whole of the Bible says.
That’s not, quote-unquote, “biblical.” Yes, there’s a verse here and there that indicate that if you rip them out of their
context, but that doesn’t make it biblical.
And we’ve been pretty good about acknowledging that.
Yeah, and there are different sort of strands of the Christian family.
You know,
on the very, very conservative side of the Christian church,
there are some who
believe that the scriptures as a book must all say the same thing,
that if you found
that the scripture had any kind of variance,
that it said one thing in one place and a
different thing in another,
there are some Christians who would be very concerned that
the entire scriptural canon,
the authority of scripture itself would be called into question.
And in some cases,
they might even argue would collapse.
So there is this group that would argue that biblical means that the Bible is consistent
throughout every word and page.
Interestingly, as often happens, the exact polarity of that,
you will have atheists,
people who are on the other side.
They’re not people of faith,
and they’re often using the Bible against Christians.
They work on the same logic that if they can find in the Bible places where there are variances
or where the Bible seems to contradict itself or places where teachings seem to take different paths,
there’s often this argument made.
I’m sure, Clint, you had this said to you as well.
People who say, well, if this is true,
then doesn’t that bring down the faith?
As a person from the Reformed tradition,
we can’t help but smile at that because there’s
a kind of arrogance on both sides.
There’s an arrogance on the side that says that we as people are smart enough to find the error,
the chinking God’s armor that brings down the holy scriptures.
There’s a kind of arrogant pridefulness even in that Christian conversation,
and it’s certainly easy to see on the other side.
If you don’t believe in God,
you’re not really engaged with the scriptures.
The idea that you after a Google search found the one thing that brings the faith to a screeching
halt with people who’ve been reading it their entire lives,
who’ve been subject to some
very hard teachings and been trying to resolve what that might have to say about us,
both of those are very wrong-headed kinds of ways in my estimation of making our way into what
we should mean by biblical,
though I want to be clear that statistically I think there
are quite a few people who would fit both of those camps in terms of what they think
of what the word “biblical” means.
Yeah, I’m always kind of amused when I have those conversations and someone says,
“Did you know the Bible says this?” And I mean,
I’m always tempted to say,
“Well, that’s not the half of it.
I know things the Bible says that I guarantee that you don’t know.”
I mean, the idea that you’re going to surprise Christians with what’s in their most sacred
book is a little bit ludicrous,
and certainly there’s some arrogance in that.
But it is from this perspective that the Bible is this seamless golden tablet in which everything
makes sense, and anything it says is binding on the rest of what it says.
The Bible is much more like a family conversation,
and there are parts of the family text that
have said a thing,
and other parts of it have said a different thing.
And these aren’t necessarily – they’re not problems,
they’re simply differences and different emphases from different places and different times.
Sometimes they’re telling the small story of Israel,
whereas we move into the New Testament
and we tell the larger story of all of the idea of the gospel for every people, every person,
and it is just a matter of perspective.
And when we don’t allow the Bible that level of complexity,
when we try to flatten it,
when we try to simplify it,
I think we actually make it more difficult to be “biblical.”
By trying to force it to be something that it isn’t,
and that it was never and isn’t intended to be.
And I think we lose something.
I always am a little bit intrigued when I’ve engaged in serious conversation with people
who have a very limited, very literal,
“the Bible says this,” and I begin to ask them.
It often becomes clear that they haven’t really read as much as they think.
They don’t know as much about the Bible as they think they do.
I remember a professor once in seminary in a conversation with a student.
The student very confidently declared that the Bible said something about an issue, and
the professor retorted by saying,
“You can believe anything you want.
Don’t try to make the Bible agree with you.”
And that’s a danger that we all face.
The Bible is big enough.
I don’t mean this to sound arrogant,
but I know the Bible well enough that if you ask
me to make a biblical case to support just about anything,
I probably could.
I mean, you’d have to shoehorn some things,
you’d have to take some things out of context.
But the truth is,
I would have a pretty good chance of being able to make the Bible say
whatever I wanted it to,
and if that’s where I start,
then I’ll ultimately fail.
Because the point is not to get the Bible to agree with me.
The point is to understand what the Bible is saying to me.
And again, we are fortunate that our Presbyterian ancestors really started there.
We had this Reformation cry to return to the Scripture and to understand it,
and they didn’t mean individual verses.
They meant the whole of the witness of this book we call Bible.
And so we are benefactors of their wisdom.
You know, as is with any word,
and I suspect we’re going to see this in the series as we
go as we pick some of these jargon, very specific words,
it tends to be that one group gets
to define what that word means,
and the other group tends to respond in opposition to it.
So those who talk about being biblical tend to be those,
I think, who are thinking about the Bible literally.
And so people who are seeking to read Scripture with a greater sense may sort of move away
from that word “biblical” because of that.
And if that’s true,
to whatever extent it is true, it’s very unfortunate.
Because the Reformers,
they argued,
and they really, I don’t think I’m exaggerating to
say, that they stake their lives on this reality that the Scripture alone should be
the source and foundation of Christian life and morality.
I mean, when the Reformers came to talk about what we needed to do to reclaim some of the
life and vibrancy of the early church,
they argued that the foundational building block
of the Christian life must be the Holy Scriptures.
And so for them,
the Scriptures are the authoritative foundation upon which any life-action-choice
movement of the church must be made.
We cannot, as a church, the Reformers would say,
make an entry into a new place or innovate
some form of worship or do something differently in the life of the church.
If we cannot find that securely rooted in Scripture.
Now,
that said,
the Reformers were doing that with a scriptural interpretation,
with an understanding of what the Bible said and meant,
especially of the early church.
That was radically different from the interpretation happening in the Catholic Church,
the place where many of those Reformers would have went to school to study Scripture.
They were at odds with,
as they came to Scripture and read books like Romans,
that they walked away from that with a radically different understanding of what it meant.
So the Reformers were open-eyed.
They were in no way sort of arguing that Scripture had one particular reading at all times and
all places.
In fact, they would say that they were recovering some of the readings that the early church
had taken for granted.
And because of that,
I think we see an aspect of the authority of Scripture that we sometimes underestimate.
And that’s the fact it’s communal.
It’s read in a body.
It’s read by people.
And we should never be tempted by this idea that the Scripture is this golden book,
this holy writ, that if we could just suddenly read autonomously like robots,
that we could then get the pure gospel out of it,
that it was not ever intended to be that way.
I don’t think the Reformers could be read or argued to have ever suggested that possible.
It’s rather that we as a church community seek to read the Scriptures faithfully.
And I just want to make that point.
That does not mean that we take them less seriously.
The Scriptures are authoritative.
We give them a place that nothing else can occupy as we seek to live faithfully.
But that doesn’t mean that there’s some golden thread that we can hold on to that settles
it for all time.
I think whereas the Catholics tended to trust the question,
“What does the Bible mean to
priests and cardinals and ultimately the pope?”
The Reformers taught instead that what does the Bible mean is discovered in the exercise
of Christian living and Christian community.
And so imagine that Michael or I stand to preach some Sunday,
and we take passages from
the Scripture that advocate violence.
And those would not be difficult to find.
And if we use them in maybe an irresponsible way,
one could easily make a biblical claim.
We could put together Scriptures that would support being violent,
being aggressive,
attacking our enemies.
Now hopefully those we were preaching to would have enough understanding of the entire message
of Scripture that they would begin to raise questions.
That would be a sermon straight from the Bible.
But in our context,
we couldn’t call it biblical because it would be out of step with what
we understand.
The whole of the Scripture teaches us about peace,
about love.
Ultimately we see that through Jesus Christ,
which is the lens we have to evaluate all
of Scripture, or that it is the lens to which Scripture pushes us.
And so we could,
in that instance, preach a sermon directly from the Bible that,
by our standards, we couldn’t call biblical at all.
And this is the complexity of being reformed.
It demands from each of us a life lived with the Scripture.
It’s not enough to simply have the Bible.
We need to be in it.
We need to be using it.
We need to be trying to understand it and memorize it and interact with it in such a
way that we are able to begin to discern that bigger question of biblical rather than,
“Oh yeah, that’s in there or not in there,” because those aren’t big enough answers for the task
to which we think we’re called.
And the Reformers very interestingly had a real emphasis upon recognizing our own unique individuality,
that there’s this whole section,
especially if you read some of John Calvin’s early work,
the Institutes is included in this,
where he talks about the importance
of the knowledge of self.
And that may seem like it really doesn’t fit in a conversation about being biblical,
but it does in a very substantial way,
because in any relationship with the Bible,
you always have the text.
And by the way,
let’s not simplify that either.
Whose interpretation of the text?
Very few of us read the original languages,
and even those don’t have the original writing.
We don’t have the original copies.
We have those things that have been transcribed and handed down.
So you have someone’s interpretation of the best reading that they could have possibly
given in English of what that original text said,
and then you have a person.
You have you, me,
someone else.
We’re sitting there and we’re reading the thing.
And we’ve had different life experiences.
We’ve had different amounts of Bible training, Bible memorization.
We’ve had different theologies that we’ve been taught.
Some good,
if we would be honest,
some bad, some not helpful.
And regardless of what that is,
we bring all of that into this unique interchange relationship
with the text, and then that doesn’t include the other people surrounding us in Christian
community doing the same exact thing.
The people who believe that the Bible is simple,
that it can be boiled down,
that you can hold
onto the golden thread,
I’m most cautious of those individuals because in most cases
it represents a lack of self-awareness.
It represents a lack of understanding that they’re flattening their own reading of scripture
into the reading of scripture.
And I want to be very clear,
all of us pick up the Bible and we open it and we have times
where it’s purely a devotional reading.
It’s us finding in it the word that God has to say to us that day.
I have no critique of that.
I think that when we come to the Bible for the purpose of finding that word that we believe
is the word, capital W,
we’ve lost a sense in which scripture stands above us,
where scripture speaks to us authoritatively,
and we must confess our own weakness and inability
to understand and grasp the depth of what scripture seeks to offer and how it seeks
to point us to Jesus Christ.
To be biblical truly,
I think, requires us giving up some of our preconceptions,
giving up some of our confidence that we have the answers,
and allowing the text to challenge
the presuppositions that we have.
That’s the only way that we’re going to swim the depths of what the scriptures have
to offer, and yet I don’t think that is the sense of biblical that people often bring in a conversation.
This could easily be misunderstood,
so I want to be very careful and ask you to listen carefully.
We do not trust the Bible because it’s the Bible.
We trust the Bible because we trust God.
Our trust is ultimately not in the text or the translation or the book,
but it is behind
those things in the one who has given us that book and guided its process and its use in the church.
If we look to the Bible and say we trust it as if we trust God,
then we really are in
danger of making the thing itself an idol.
Our trust is in the one who guides us through the words.
Not as much in the words themselves,
and that’s a very subtle difference,
but it is monumentally
important in the history of the Reformed church.
It has never been enough for Presbyterians to say the Bible says.
That’s the beginning of the conversation.
When someone uses that phrase as if it ends the matter rather than begins it,
we generally understand that we’re coming from two very different places,
and it’s going to be a different
conversation.
We have to realize that we start from different vantage points.
The responsibility that puts on us is that Presbyterians,
to be honest, have gotten a little lazy about Scripture.
We’re not alone in this,
American Christians, mainline Christians.
We often don’t know our Bibles as we should,
and that makes it more difficult to understand
what is biblical in this large sense of the word.
What does it mean that we call something biblical makes it necessary for us,
makes it mandatory for us, that we are able to engage in that conversation.
That means that we are regularly seeking to listen to Scripture and be guided by it.
If I don’t bring much awareness,
if I don’t know much Bible,
if I’m not familiar with
the Bible, if I can’t figure out where the books of the Bible are,
it is very unlikely
that I’m going to navigate a conversation that demands of me assessing whether something’s biblical.
We have to do a better job of being people of the book.
We call ourselves that,
but we often don’t live up to it.
This is, I think, really important because it doesn’t mean we simply memorize proof texts.
It means that we understand this thing that we’re interacting with,
that we are listening
for God’s word in,
and that we are using to direct our faith,
our church,
and our action in the world.
And that’s a much bigger enterprise than memorizing some verses and being able to spout
them when we need them.
To be biblical in that sense demands a great deal more of us than we have sometimes given.
Yeah, I don’t want in any way,
I want to be careful,
I don’t mean this critically.
I don’t mean this with any edge,
but I do think that we at some point must be honest
with ourselves.
If we find ourselves where our really major,
or maybe even only,
encounter with Scripture
is through the preaching in Sunday worship.
That’s a dangerous place to be.
It’s an unhelpful place to be at best because fundamentally the preacher’s job is not the
kind of engagement with the scriptures that we’re talking about right now.
The preacher stands up and tries to have a word for a body.
But in the Reformed faith,
that body is called and is responsible for the learning growth
and maturation of faith that happens outside of that worship context.
There’s a sense in which the sermon is supposed to help guide us together forward.
But so many of us find that to be the place where we get our scriptural knowledge and
interpretation and the danger of that is that ultimately we don’t really know our Bible.
The sermon isn’t intended to deliver scriptural content.
It’s not trying to flush out what that text meant and why it fits in the way it does into
the biblical canon and how the church has understood it and how we should understand
it speaking to the issues that we encounter.
That’s not what the sermon is trying to do and yet so many of us,
that is where we invest
our time to understand the scriptures.
And this happens whether you’re young or old.
I’m not sure that there’s a particular age demographic that that’s more of a temptation
for than others.
I just think as Reformed people,
we must at some level recognize that the Reformers assumed
a responsibility.
And by assume, I don’t mean that they said that implicitly.
It was explicitly stated and hence the Reformed printing of Bibles,
the education so that
folks could read the understanding that the elders of the church would be called from the church itself.
I mean, we literally structured our church families around the idea that we would seriously
study scripture with one another.
And then out of the growth of that study,
we would therefore have the public proclamation,
the worship of those who come together with that work.
And if we have laxed on that individually or communally,
I do think we should hear that
critique.
We should be moved deeper into the text because Christians who do not know the Bible should
not be a thing.
Yeah, absolutely.
It is the greatest tool we have to hear the voice of God is to regularly and seriously engage the scripture.
It is not simply to learn what it says.
It is to learn what God wants of us.
It is to engage in spiritual discernment and be led forward.
And if someone stands under the guise of biblical preaching and gives us things that may be
in the scripture but are not according to the faith,
we need to be able to discern that.
We need to be able to work that out and put that in conversation with the whole context
of scripture in a way that we’re able to kind of ascertain what the full story,
what the whole picture is.
And so I think there’s a great opportunity for Presbyterians to re-establish ourselves
as serious students of scripture,
as serious readers of scripture.
We’re not a church that does a great job of people bringing their Bibles to church because
we have them in the pew and you don’t need them and we put the reading on the screen.
And sometimes those things,
as we sort of try to be helpful,
maybe have a fact that
isn’t as helpful as we hoped.
But I think the encouragement for all of us is that this is a lifelong process and wherever
we are in it,
there is always a chance to get started,
an opportunity to go deeper.
You will never outlearn the scripture.
You could memorize every word and you still won’t understand all of it.
But it will constantly speak new things to you.
And this is the promise of the book that we call Bible and that we sometimes take for granted.
I want to offer a word of encouragement.
I have had conversations with folks following a Bible study and often the conversation goes something like,
“Thank you for that.
I really appreciated that study.”
It just feels so different.
The Bible just is so hard to understand.
They’re generally thinking about ancient context,
people who we have a hard time relating to.
We live in houses with electricity.
We drive cars to get places.
We go to the grocery store to pick up our food.
Some of the dietary laws,
some of the things that we just take for granted in scriptures,
that is so far from our lived experience that we sometimes find it overwhelming to really
come to them.
And I just want to encourage you that there’s no particularly blessed person to read the
scriptures or maybe said more clearly.
One person isn’t better off than another.
You can go to seminary and come out and read the scripture and be way out of left field.
You can not have a single day of formal theological education and you can read the Bible with
clarity and insight and wisdom.
Because the Bible is fundamentally not some secret box that you have to find a special
key to unlock.
It’s not like that.
The Bible is read by men and women of faith who have not only learned with their head,
but they’ve been formed in their hearts and spirits to know,
to reactively be able to
encounter scripture in helpful, generative ways.
Scripture is not just mental, it’s communal.
So you don’t need to know Greek to be able to study and know the scriptures.
You don’t need to understand ancient contexts and know all of these special words to be
able to read the scriptures and find them meaningful and deeply formational.
I just want to encourage you that if for you there’s maybe a dark cloud that hangs over
the scriptures, maybe it seems like a really hard thing to get into,
then that’s an opportunity
for you to start simple,
to start at a place in the Bible that’s accessible,
maybe to grab a guide.
There’s tons of books that Clint or I could recommend to carry with you into your study
and reading of scripture.
Maybe the most simple way to start would be to just simply go with the reading through
the Bible that we did,
that we can link from the previous series of the men and women of
faith.
You know, however you encounter the scripture,
I just encourage you,
you don’t need to have
special credentials or abilities to be able to find truth in scripture for the Word of
God to be that foundational building block of your life.
Men and women of faith have done that for centuries with zero education,
and so don’t make that a barrier to coming to the text.
In some ways, I think our understanding of scripture frees us to read it more frequently
with less pressure, at least,
because rather than looking for the one golden truth that
stands out in each and every word,
we are listening.
When we read scripture,
we’re essentially trying to hear what God says to us in it,
and that makes each reading an opportunity to listen,
and the only way to do that is open a book,
and if some part of it doesn’t speak to you or is confusing to you,
then perhaps that’s not the part you need that day.
Perhaps that’s fine.
Go back to it again,
and you will find,
sooner or later, you’re going to gravitate toward
parts that convict you,
that help you.
You’re going to see things that change your perspective and broaden your views and help
you understand not only the scripture itself,
but more importantly, what it means to follow Christ,
and that’s not a test,
that you don’t get a 94% or a 38%.
That’s just a conversation.
It is a relationship with God through this book that we have,
and that frees us up to
know it’s not about what I bring to it.
It’s about being humble and being ready for God to show up and meet me there,
and when that happens, I will be blessed.
We will be blessed,
and that’s not every time.
Every time you open the Bible,
lightning doesn’t strike you with some new revelation,
that in fact it takes some work,
it takes some patience,
it takes some consistency,
it takes some effort, and that’s okay.
But what it demands is that we have to open it and put ourselves in a position to benefit
from it on a regular basis.
And if we don’t do that,
we will struggle to be formed and fashioned in the ways that
scripture was intended.
As I have grown,
as I’ve continued to grow in my own faith,
I’ve been astounded to find
how far down the scriptures go,
immeasurably beyond what I can see,
the insight of the
writers of scripture to point us to Christ.
Just look at the four gospel writers alone.
That’s just four books out of the whole witness of the scriptures,
how they can point us to
the truth of Jesus with just a few words and admit,
“Hey, listen,
entire books could be
filled with what Jesus did,
but this is what you need to know.”
To have faith in the living Christ.
It’s astonishing when you step back and you look at the scriptures as a whole and you
recognize the formational ability that these books,
they can only rightly be called scripture.
It’s not just a book.
If you’re a person of faith and you look at these texts,
they’re not just words on the
page that were written like a novel.
It’s not like that.
If you come to the text and you submit to them,
they will shape you.
They’ll shape how you view the world.
They’ll transform who you believe God to be and that will change how you act in the world.
And I really just think we’ve got to be very careful to not be Christians who only encounter
with scripture our people’s favorite Bible verses that get posted on Facebook.
We have to be very careful to not be people who read the Bible in bite-sized chunks because
that’s not how it was intended to be read.
It was intended to be read as a whole,
as a whole canon and in community.
I think there’s some people who have a fear that what if I come to the Bible and I read
it, I’m listening for the word of God,
Pastor Clint, and I hear something that’s wrong.
Well,
the reformers admitted, yeah,
we start with sin.
That’s a reality built into us.
So we would be shocked if we came to scripture and that sin didn’t affect our reading of
it.
So how can we be confident when we come to scripture that will be guided rightly?
Community.
We have other people reading scripture with us.
We have those who are studying scripture at different levels,
both academically and pastorally,
that together in this larger voice,
we can trust the spirit of God to speak.
We can trust God will guide the church in our reading of the text.
So therefore we don’t need to be afraid when we come.
We should read with humility,
but we recognize that God’s going to lead us forward.
So once again, I do think you’re right,
Clint. There’s this kind of freeing nature to come into the scriptural text,
but we should be
very careful to not do that and bite sized chunks that may just agree with whatever we
sort of came to the text with.
We should be willing to be challenged.
And, you know, as with all things in the faith,
that’s a hard position to hold.
It’s hard to remain open to correction and transformation,
but that’s what we’re called
to do as people of Christ.
Unfortunately,
the Christian history is full of examples of people who are teaching,
preaching,
quoting,
and using the Bible without being biblical at all.
And again, the responsibility that gives us is as people in the Christian community,
as followers of Christ,
to submit ourselves to the word,
both the small W word,
which means the scripture,
but ultimately because that small W points to the large W word, which is Jesus.
And as we encounter Jesus in the writings of scripture,
we are moved to become biblical,
not because we’ve memorized our favorite verses,
but because we begin to
understand the overall vision of what God demands and invites in our world,
in our church,
and in our life.
And we begin to hear the scripture lead us to that path that takes us to who we are called to be.
And that ultimately is what we mean when we say biblical as Reformed Presbyterian
Christians.
It is big,
it is grand,
it is complicated,
it is hard,
it is beautiful,
and it is far
more a tapestry of the various voices and understanding than it is a single line,
than it is a magic formula.
It is discernment,
it is exploration,
and it is understanding.
And these are things we only find within those pages.
And as we do,
we are all better off for it.
Yeah, and there’s no golden formula that will tell you,
is this a biblical reading?
Is this a faithful reading of the scriptures?
But I do think a litmus test that can be very helpful is,
to what extent does this
reading that I have of this text illuminate and resonate with the reality of God’s
revelation in Jesus Christ?
Let me say it more simply.
If you’re reading the Bible and your reading leads you in a way that would shape you and
you would not look like Jesus Christ by what you do or by what you say or by what you believe,
then that is an invitation to reconsider what the text might mean.
Jesus is ultimately the incarnate revelation of God.
We mean that God took on flesh.
This is what God looks like as God walks the earth.
And when we come to the text,
as we seek to be biblical people,
we will never be led
beyond or differently than the Savior himself.
And so our reading of the text should always be subject to who God has revealed.
Now, it’s not that simple.
I don’t want to make it sound like that,
that just does it.
No, I mean, ultimately, it’s scripture who teaches us who Jesus is.
So there’s a nuance that even comes to that.
But friends, I do think we can rest with some confidence that as we read this whole story,
as you look from Genesis to Revelation,
Jesus Christ is the ultimate interpretive
move, that he is the one that we will be fashioned and formed into.
It is his likeness that we invite the Holy Spirit to continue to work within us to make possible.
And so our reading of the text should always be subject to who he is.
I also think it is a moment for caution when you encounter preaching or teaching that is
presented from the perspective of “I know what this says and you need to know what I
know.” There are times that may be accurate.
But again, from our perspective,
a better approach is,
“Here’s what I find to be true in scripture.
Let’s look at this together and listen to see if it speaks to us and calls us in a direction
of service to Jesus Christ.”
The idea that the one person went to the mountaintop,
found the one truth and brings it
back and everyone else must agree with it,
is historically a suspicious and sketchy model of
preaching and teaching the Bible.
And when you encounter it,
you should be cautious.
I’m not saying there aren’t moments where a preacher is moved to be out front in that
manner.
But if that is a regular way that the gospel is presented,
I think it is worth being aware of
that because that has generally not been a formula that Presbyterians and Reformed
Christians have said we feel
real confident about.
Well, we hope that this conversation is helpful as we seek to flush out a little bit of what we
might mean when we say the word biblical and maybe even what we should mean when we talk
about being biblical Christians.
This may have inspired thoughts, comments, questions.
We’d love to engage that.
Feel free to let us know.
You’ll find a link to the church website.
We’ve got a contact form there.
Start the conversation.
Go into the comments of wherever you’re watching the video here if that’s convenient.
We seek to read scripture together as community and ultimately we’d be happy to engage in the
place that this may have inspired thoughts or questions for you today.
Yeah, thanks for listening.
Let us know as we start this series.
We definitely want to be guided by some input and some interaction.
So let us know if you have thoughts.
Maybe there are words that are confusing to you.
We will do our best to get to them and we’re grateful for you listening.