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The UpWords Podcast
What Is the Bible Actually For? | Jeff Dryden
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How do you read the Bible? Most of us assume we already know: we read to learn what happened, to understand what a passage means, or to find a principle to apply. In this episode, host Dan Hummel is joined by guest Jeff Dryden, professor of biblical studies and department chair at Covenant College, to ask whether Scripture is inviting us to something deeper.
Dryden is the author of A Hermeneutic of Wisdom: Recovering the Formative Agency of Scripture (Baker Academic), which argues that the whole Bible — not just its "wisdom" books — is written to shape our deepest loves and convictions, not merely to hand us information or timeless principles. Dan and Jeff talk through why biblical scholars are trained to tell us what a text meant rather than what it means, how that division of labor between biblical studies and theology leaves a formation-shaped gap, and what philosophers like Hans-Georg Gadamer and Michael Polanyi have to offer pastors and everyday readers trying to close it.
Along the way: why Paul is a far less systematic thinker than popular imagination suggests, what Mark's Gospel is doing to our idols of Jesus, and why "the Bible wasn't written to us, but it was written for us" is true — and doesn't go far enough.
In this episode:
- Why biblical scholars are trained to ask what a text meant, not what it means — and what gets lost in that division of labor
- Why the Bible is always "applied theology" — never abstract, formal theology — and what that means for how a sermon should be built
- Reading Mark's Gospel as an exercise in dismantling our idols of who Jesus is
- Hans-Georg Gadamer's idea of Wirkungsgeschichte ("history of effects") and why we can never step outside the tradition we read from
- Augustine's test for biblical understanding: if you haven't grown in love of God and neighbor, you haven't understood a word
- Why the historical-critical and grammatical-historical methods — liberal and conservative alike — share the same modern DNA
- What's next for Dryden: a forthcoming book on evangelical moralism and legalism as counterfeit versions of the gospel
About the guest:
Jeff Dryden (PhD, Cambridge University) is professor of biblical studies and chair of the department at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where he has taught for nearly two decades. He is the author of Theology and Ethics in 1 Peter and A Hermeneutic of Wisdom: Recovering the Formative Agency of Scripture (Baker Academic).
Mentioned in this episode:
- Jeff Dryden, A Hermeneutic of Wisdom: Recovering the Formative Agency of Scripture
- BibleProject and Tim Mackie
- John Walton, Old Testament scholar, Wheaton College Graduate School
- Scot McKnight and Hans Boersma, Five Things Biblical Scholars Wish Theologians Knew / Five Things Theologians Wish Biblical Scholars Knew
- Hans-Georg Gadamer, philosopher (Wirkungsgeschichte, hermeneutics)
- Anthony Thiselton, The Two Horizons / New Horizons in Hermeneutics
- Sandra Schneiders and Michael Polanyi ("personal knowledge")
- Augustine, On Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana)
- Johann Philipp Gabler and Wilhelm Dilthey, on the historical roots of modern biblical studies
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This episode was created by the SLBF STUDIO at Upper House.
Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour
Edited by Dave Conour
— Cold Open & Welcome to The UpWords Podcast
SPEAKER_00But the thing is, is like everything that Paul is doing is always applied theology. Even when he's talking in very abstract terms, it's applied to a particular group of people in a particular situation. So all of his theology is really shaped around what he sees are the fundamental challenges that these churches are going through. And everything he says throughout his letters is always applied. And that's true of everything in the Bible. It's always applied theology. It's never theology in an abstract, formal sense. And so we make an assumption that it is that, which is a misreading and a misunderstanding.
SPEAKER_01Welcome to the Upwards Podcast, where we explore the intersection of Christian faith in the academy, the church, and the marketplace. How do you read the Bible? For many of us, that's a question we assume we already know the answer to. We read to learn what happened, discover what a passage means, or find principles we can apply to our lives. But what if scripture is inviting us to something deeper? In this episode, Dan Hummel is joined by Jeff Dryden, professor of biblical studies at Covenant College. Together, they explore the difference between reading the Bible simply for information and reading it for transformation. They unpack why modern approaches to Scripture can sometimes miss its formative purpose, what biblical scholars and theologians each bring to the conversation, and why the Bible isn't just communicating ideas, it's shaping people. Let's join the conversation with Dan Hummel and Jeff Dryden.
— Introducing Jeff Dryden — How BibleProject's Tim Mackie Led to This Book
SPEAKER_02I'm here with Jeff Dryden, professor of biblical studies at Covenant College and author of A Hermeneutic of Wisdom: Recovering the Formative Agency of Scripture, a book by Baker Press that came out a few years ago. Welcome to the podcast, Jeff. Thank you. Great to be here. Thanks for uh inviting me. I'm excited for the conversation. I mentioned this to you before when I reached out to you. The way I came across your book was here at Upper House, we host a series of pastor seminars, and an instructor comes in that we bring in and they assign homework to the pastors. And so we had Tim Mackey from the Bible Project in just last month, and he assigned your book. And so that's how I found out about it. He had very nice things to say about it. Of course, he wouldn't assign it if he didn't. But uh one of the things he mentioned was that the approach for listeners, if you're familiar with the Bible Project, the YouTube videos on different themes in the Bible, he said, you know, a lot of the ways he thought about how to present the Bible and those were things that resonated when he read your book. And then I was just uh reflecting on that and thinking about how much some of the issues that we deal with here at the University of Wisconsin with students and faculty who are trying to integrate the Bible into their lives and into their thought, deal with the same things. So I look forward to a conversation here where we're we'll get into some of that and think about uh really how how what are the assumptions we bring to the Bible that maybe we don't even know about. Do you have any quick thoughts on Bible project? I don't know if you get asked about that at all, but uh are you familiar with it? Do you know anything about it?
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah, I'm very familiar with it. I think it's genius. There's very few things that I kind of recommend without a lot of reservations. And this is one of the top of the list, so I always recommend they're doing amazing work, and Tim's doing amazing work. And I don't know Tim, uh, but you know, we have obviously a lot of affinity and approaches to things. And to me, it's actually fascinating when I listen to him talk. We're from very different theological traditions and very different theological training, and we're on the same page, but it's just kind of because we both read the Bible, you know, like so uh that I that I uh I really enjoy. But yeah, no, I I think they're doing great work. I find it really fruitful. I like listening to their podcasts and right.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, they're they're in all the different media channels now uh as well. Yeah. Great. The affection
— Why Jeff Wrote A Hermeneutic of Wisdom
SPEAKER_02goes both ways. Uh awesome. Okay, but we want to talk about your book. So a hermeneutic of wisdom, before we get into some of the topics you bring up, particularly at the beginning of the book, just give us a sense of what made you want to write a book about the Bible and wisdom a few years ago.
SPEAKER_00This book has been probably, I guess it's been brewing for me since I was doing my doctoral studies. It came out of teaching a course. So I teach at Covenant College. I've been there for almost 20 years, 19, I guess, 18, 19, I don't know. But I teach a course there called New Testament Ethics, uh, which is a class that I invented, basically, because that's kind of my area of specialization. But it's really kind of working out things with students over the course of a decade of teaching that class that I was like, okay, now I'm ready to write about this. But that course is kind of it's an intersection of three different things. One is biblical hermeneutics, how do we read the Bible well? New Testament ethics, how do we think about the Christian life in some kind of loosely systematic way? And spiritual formation. What does spiritual growth really look like? How does it actually happen? How do we facilitate it? How do those things connect? My the core thing I was trying to get at, and I'm getting at in the book, is how the New Testament, I'm a New Testament specialist, how the books of the New Testament actually function as spiritual formation, that the point of the authors is actually to form us in our relationship with God, but also how that relationship develops and strengthens, but also how it gets implemented in our lives with others. And that that's the primary reason that all of the authors of the New Testament and the Old are writing. Like that's their primary motivation. Recognizing that and then trying to sort of develop, okay, well, if that's true, then what questions do we bring to the Bible? What are the things we're looking for? When we talk about different hermeneutical approaches or interpretive approaches, we're really talking about what set of questions do we ask and what are the things we're looking for. Part of the impetus for the book is I'm trained as a biblical scholar. Uh I studied at Cambridge, so I learned a reasonably conservative version of biblical studies. But biblical studies as a formal discipline doesn't care at all about how is the Bible a formative instrument. Like that's not part of the questions that we ask. It's a different set of questions, right? And so for me, part of the journey is just kind of a discontent with here's the normal ways in which I've been trained as a biblical scholar to read the Bible. I don't think that they're all that helpful in terms of the church and spiritual formation or any of those things. They can be really fruitful, and I'm still a biblical scholar. I do all the things that we normally do, but there's also kind of inherent limitations. And so I'm kind of bucking the system a bit in the book by doing that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that that definitely comes through, and that's I want to spend some time on that. You know, I think for people who aren't familiar with the academic disciplines that surround the study of the Bible and theology, they might be surprised to hear what you just said that biblical studies scholars sort of don't think about the application of their work, or they don't make the same connections that you might hear a pastor on Sunday make those connections, and you might assume that they're getting that from the scholarship or
— The Divide Between Biblical Studies and Theology
SPEAKER_02something. So give us a sense just of the division of labor between, I guess the two obvious ones would be biblical studies and theology, where something like ethics you would imagine that would be front and center. What is that division of labor and how is it represented in the typical modern university or seminary?
SPEAKER_00I've come to grow to now I'm just kind of blunt and honest when I tell people biblical scholars don't apply the Bible. That's not our job. There's not a lot of biblical scholars that are happy with that situation. They're not happy being constrained by it. At the same time, the way all of us are trained, our job is to tell you what the text mean in its original context. We do a lot of in-depth study in terms of languages in general and ancient languages and ancient history that are contexts for biblical texts that come from thousands of years ago, right? But our job is to tell you what the text meant, not what the text means. And so if you read what is what I would call a technical commentary of a biblical book written by a biblical scholar, no matter where they are on the theological spectrum, their job is to tell you through analyzing grammar and syntax and that sort of stuff what the text says and what it meant in its original context. That's what biblical scholars do. Anything they do past that is instinct and admirable, but it's not what we're trained to do. So I, as a biblical scholar, I got no training in ethics or theology or philosophy, or I I'm basically self-taught in terms of ethics. Ethics we don't ever talk about. Some theology. The place that I see it come out the most, kind of at a popular level and in church, is it's sort of this approach of like, well, we read the Bible, and our real question is, well, what are the ideas? Here's a biblical passage. What are the ideas in the text, and what are the ethical principles? So we turn it into kind of ideas and rules. That's the sort of decaf version of what biblical scholars do. It's just reducing it down to something in terms of a set of ideas and rules to live by. That's an offshoot of biblical studies and the kind of academic. The reason why all of this came about in the modern academy is the essence of that you begin with in the modern world is this idealized kind of idea of scientific knowledge. Knowledge is something that is impersonal, objective, and we're gonna apply that to everything. The way history gets defined in a discipline like biblical studies is like, well, it's the thing history is what everyone can agree on happen, which removes anything in the New Testament that has to do with God's action in the world or Jesus as anything other than a moral teacher of the first century. Those are history. Anything beyond that becomes an addition. It might be a nice addition that we want to add on, but it's an add-on. That's part of why this idea of coming at the Bible as something that has an intent to form me is foreign. I'm just supposed to be asking some historical questions about how this text represents an early Christian tradition within its historical context. That's what biblical studies do. Theologians ask a different set of questions. So in the academy of Bible and theology, you'd think Bible and theology people are talking all the time. They don't because they speak different languages. Um the place where I work, we're kind of an interesting bunch, but we have biblical scholars that read theology, and we have theologians that read the Bible. That sounds like it would be really obvious. It's that's a rare thing. It ought to sound a bit disconcerting that that's true, but it's just correct. They're very highly specialized academic disciplines, and they just they kind of speak different languages. If you start hanging around chemists and biologists, you're gonna find out those people don't talk either. Like, I mean, like they just live in really different worlds and they don't understand each other. You know what I mean? You know, you think, oh, it's all the same stuff, it's microscopes, whatever. But, you know, it's a similar kind of, as you say, kind of division of labor. So theologians are trying to ask more theological questions. Uh, usually they're trying to do more in terms of application of what does this mean for the church and that sort of thing. It's a bit more natural for them, but it's not really baked into biblical studies.
SPEAKER_02A few years ago, we hosted Scott McKnight and Hans Borsma here at Upper House, and they had co-written books, Five Things a Biblical Scholar Wants a Theologian to Know, and then Five Things a Theologian Wants Biblical Scholar to Know. And they were both on stage, they were very nice to each other, but they also were speaking very differently about the same topic, which was, you know, Jesus, the Bible, Christian thought. So uh that was one little microcosm here. Maybe we can link to the show notes on those events. I'm a historian of American religion, and I think I understand the same tension, though it might play out a little differently in my field. But I think of there's so many historians of even American history who want to create a line, and you're trained to do this between description and prescription, I guess you could say. And so you can imagine there's tons of historians who study slavery, for example, in the antebellum South. Most of those histories do not also sort of explain what we should do about this history. They try to understand it. And it would actually be conservative, you know, for it depends on I mean, this is always a debate in the field. You know, it if you do tip your hand, you're called activist or presentist or something, and that's usually not a good thing. So there's always a debate, and the traditional view, the the view handed on, you know, from the German historians of the 19th century uh up to the present is that you shouldn't mix those things. Is that sort of the say are we talking about the same thing here?
SPEAKER_00You're talking about the same thing. Biblical studies as a is a practice today in the academy, and again, this is it doesn't matter if you're what we might label liberal or conservative, it's just the discipline that we're all trained in. It's all based on 19th century German historicism and guys like Wilhelm Tilte and you know that kind of stuff. And so in American religious history, you can't really talk about Lincoln's second inaugural and say slavery is God's judgment on our nation for the horrors of slavery. Because you can't say that kind of statement as a historian.
unknownRight?
SPEAKER_00Then you're doing theology. Because he's saying God acted in the world, you know, like and the whether you agree with the statement or not, as a historian, you're not allowed to kind of endorse it or not. You can describe why Lincoln would say that, you know, kind of thing. So it's this it's a similar dynamic in that it is, yes, it's supposed to be descriptive and not prescriptive. We're just supposed to say what happened and what it's and that's just part of what I mean by in biblical studies. That's that translates into we're here to tell you what the text meant, not what it means. Again, I don't know a lot of people that are satisfied with that. And so I there's not a lot of people that I know in biblical studies who are content with not talking about what the text means, but it's not part of the discipline and it's not part of our training. And so how to actually apply the Bible is not something we're trained in. Sometimes it at that point, it actually depends on whether or not this biblical scholar has good instincts or not. But you're really asking a plumber to wire your house at that point. You know, like it's that's not something that we're trained to do.
— What's Missing When We Move from Text to Pulpit
SPEAKER_02That's a good analogy there. Maybe to push you a little further on just describing what what we're missing here with this division of labor. I could imagine someone saying, well, there's a clear workflow here. The biblical studies people study the Bible, tell us what it means. The theologians come along, tell us, you know, how to derive principles or universals from it, and then the pastors take all that and apply it to their local setting. What do you think is missing if I don't know, I I assume that's someone has argued that that's a good process there. What would be missing or what is missing if that is how we move from the biblical text into the pulpit where it would actually be trying to be applied?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that is a good description of the kind of overarching framework that the biblical studies and theology has worked in. It was actually laid out by a guy named Johann Gobler in the 1780s, you know, and so that kind of format division of labor, we do this step, this step, this step. There's a couple of problems that I see with that. The first is, and we you hear this all the time of like, well, how do we move from an ancient text that's from the ancient world to the present world? Well, we need to understand the ancient text, then we need to derive from the ancient text universal timeless principles, and then we apply those universal timeless principles to our contemporary setting. That sounds reasonable, it's how most people are trained to think, it seems kind of obvious. I would tell you that every book that's been written about hermeneutics in the last 50 years says that's a fundamentally flawed approach. And the fundamental issue is that the universal principles are actually not universal principles, they're what we think are universal principles, so they're actually part of what the things that we think are important, and they're not derived from the Bible. Doesn't mean that there are no universal principles, but they're the ones that we pick that we think are important, become the universal principles, and then we give the universal principles that we say we got from the Bible, we give them the authority of the Bible and then apply them in the church. And sometimes the universal principle might come from the Bible, sometimes it came from Oprah. Like I don't, I mean, it could be anything. They're just kind of free-floating, you know. So a lot of times we're just creating those things. That's the first major problem. The second one, and this is part of why my book is subtitled Reforming Formative Agency of Scripture. There's an assumption that's built into that. And again, this is the kind of, we're here to talk about what the text meant in the past. The assumption that's built into that is that if we're gonna apply the text, that's the thing we're gonna create. There's nothing inherent in the text that's about application. Whereas I think that's a fundamental error. It's a fundamental mistake about what the Bible is. And that in reality, the application is built into the text. It's just that we don't read it in a way that actually shows it. If we just ask the question, well, what are the ideas here? Who said what? When, where did this idea come from? If that's what we think the Bible is, there's no inherent application. But the Bible itself is always applied theology.
— The Bible as Applied Theology: Reading Paul and the Gospels
SPEAKER_00It's never a theology in the abstract. We have uh a very popular mythology about Paul that Paul's like the systematic theologian thinker sort of person. If you tell that to a theologian, they'll throw up. Paul is incredibly unsystematic. He's kind of very scatterbrained. He's an intuitive genius, but he kind of Paul isn't a logic chopping step one, step two. He's like step one, step four, step eight, you know. He just kind of jumps in the way that he connects things. Part of that is because he's writing letters to people who've already heard him talk for a year, you know, and he's just kind of reminding them of little bits. But the thing is, is like everything that Paul is doing is always applied theology. Even when he's talking in very abstract terms, it's applied to a particular group of people in a particular situation. So all of his theology is really shaped around what he sees are the fundamental challenges that these churches are going through. And everything he says throughout his letters is always applied. And that's true of everything in the Bible. It's always applied theology. It's never theology in an abstract, formal sense. And so we make an assumption that there is that, which is a misreading and a misunderstanding. But that misreading and misunderstanding also creates the problem of like, well, how are we going to apply the Bible? Well, we end up having to invent something. Whereas what I'm trying to develop is like, well, here's a method for actually asking the questions and seeing, no, they're actually doing this, and the application is actually already happening. It's already inherent in the text. If you can understand and ask the right questions and see, well, how is Paul applying theology to the Romans or the Ephesians or the Galatians or whoever? And then once you figure out how that application is happening, and we could ask similar questions in the Gospels. The Gospels are are never just trying to give us like a bunch of history and a bunch of theology. They're always doing, they're trying to form in us a certain kind of connection with Jesus in our lives. And that connection is complex. It's not very direct or straightforward. And each of the gospel writers is doing it a little bit different way. And so it's trying to figure out what they are doing. So the category that I use for my students is when we're come to the biblical text, we have two questions. The first is this what does the text say? And that's complicated enough. Okay. What is this author saying? You know? But the second question is this what is the text doing? What is the author doing? First, we have to actually understand what it says, but then we actually have to get to the next level, which is what the author is actually doing through this. Why are they telling you these stories about Jesus? Why are they arguing about circumcision? Why are they like whatever it is? There's a motivation and intentionality. They're already doing something. That's the application. So the text has already applied theology. It's just that we have to learn how to recognize what that is. And then we have to go through the process of translating, okay, well, this author is applying this story or this theology to this situation. Then what's the correlate? How do we define a find a correlate in our own world, those dynamics that are being addressed? And that's actually how you do application.
— "Written for Us, Not to Us" — Revisiting John Walton's Framework
SPEAKER_02So I I go to a church there where there's a con a common refrain from the teaching pastors that, and it's I think it's credited to John Walton, the Old Testament professor Whedon emeritus. The Bible is not written to us, but it's written for us. Yeah. Does that make sense to you in the way you're thinking, or does that still miss the appreciation of the form formative value of the text?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, I think it's definitely, I mean, I would agree with the statement, and I think it's the right kind of sentiment. I'm kind of like, okay, well, what does that mean? Uh I would want to flesh that out a lot more in terms of like, how does that actually change the way we read the Bible? But I think it's the right sentiment because of, again, we without doing it, most of us have been trained, most of us just from listening to sermons, have been trained this way to read the Bible. To take the Bible seriously is to ask this question: what is the theology in this text? What are the ideas? Most sermons are built around like, well, here's a text, here's the ideas, then somewhere at the end you have some kind of this, then we apply it in some way. That to me is an embodiment of kind of a some modernist assumptions about the Bible. It's reducing it to a set of ideas. We create application, you know, that sort of thing. I'm much more for understanding the Bible is applied theology all the time. It's always particularized, it's always directed at a certain group of people, and our job is to figure out what it's actually doing. But those aren't the typical questions we're trained to ask. But it also means that application is a thing that happens throughout the sermon, not just in the end.
— Historical-Critical vs. Grammatical-Historical Reading
SPEAKER_02That makes a lot of sense. One of the things you mentioned um a couple minutes ago is you said both, I think you said both conservative and liberal, wherever you are on the spectrum of theology, you're probably doing this wrong modern way of approaching the Bible. And I think that that's probably usually the division here is between the I I you you did this really well in your opening pages of your book, between the historical critical method, which would be more associated with a liberal approach to the Bible, but then also the historical grammatical method, which would be the more conservative approach. Yeah. They're both historical, and I guess that's the thing that combines them. Just explain a bit more why is this something that you do find with people who reject historical critical method or something, but yet they're still not approaching the Bible the way you would advise them to.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there's a couple different angles there. Both are implementations of that only exist in the modern world. Like no one read the Bible this way before 1700. Like you'll never find anybody uh reading the Bible in this mode of just asking historical questions, right? So it is a it's a modern product. I do think that what we typically call, yeah, grammatical historical versions is uh modes of reading that I'm not against that I think are helpful. It's a conservative version of historical critical, typically. Historical criticism is typically the kind of code word for modern German German liberalism, and it's sort of dismantling of the Bible and especially the gospel narratives and the historical reliability of the gospel narratives. There's been, especially post-Second World War, a lot of good scholarship, uh, especially British and American uh biblical scholars have done in terms of asking those historical questions and bringing what is a little bit more reasonable, I think, historiography to the table, and trying to argue for a basic historical reliability of the Bible and that sort of thing. And I'm all for that, and I think it's the right thing. But that's an apologetic exercise. That's not actually the mode in which we are supposed to be reading the Bible. We've sort of been infected with an idea of like that's the mode in which we're supposed to be reading the Bible. I don't think it's actually a healthy scriptural approach. Again, there's uh what people would call methodological naturalism. There's kind of naturalistic assumptions behind the historical critical approach. And grammatical historical historically is trying to do, like I said, it's an apologetic exercise, which means you begin in the place where someone else is. You begin with their methodological naturalism, and then you kind of make arguments and show on the basis of that that actually there's different ways of understanding the historical reliability of the Bible and especially historical narratives like the gospels. That's all good as a as an apologetics exercise. But sometimes there's not really an awareness of this is the whole point of apologetics. Like I worked as in a ministry doing apologetics for four years. In apologetics, you're not explaining things on the basis of why you think this thing is true. You're beginning with someone else's assumptions and trying to make it plausible for them based on their assumptions. And so limiting it to this kind of sphere is a thing that is you can say true things, but what most people recognize is you can't preach it on Sunday, like just bare historical grammatical readings of text. I think they can be healthy, and I think they can be healthy foundations. But again, you're kind of stripping away what is the agency of the text and what the text is actually trying to do. The Gospels are not written to are, they are historical accounts, and the it's very clear that the gospel writers signal their intentionality of actually writing something that would be recognized as a historical account. Luke is really, really, really over the top obvious that that's exactly what he's doing. Right. At the same time, their primary purpose is not just to give us a history of either Jesus or the early church. Their primary purpose is actually, and this is Luke's whole point, at the beginning of Luke's gospel, he you know talks about I talked to eyewitnesses, I went and found I did this investigation, I did this historical research. And then he says, so that you would be confirmed in the things that you already know, which is his way of talking about not just like you would know these things happened, but that it would actually deepen your faith. So all the gospel writers are doing this. They're trying to mold our spiritual lives in the ways that we understand and connect to Jesus and to understand the things within us that are actually impediments to the growth in that relationship. That's their agenda. So you can't just reduce it down to a bunch of events that happened or a bunch of ideas.
SPEAKER_01One of the themes emerging from this conversation is that the Bible wasn't given merely to increase our knowledge, it was given to form our lives. That same conviction shapes the work we do at SLBF Studio. If you'd like to learn more about our work, visit slbf.org slash studio. Now, let's get back to our conversation with Jeff Dryden.
— Does This Problem Cross Catholic and Protestant Lines?
SPEAKER_02We've been talking about these two competing historical schools of hermeneutics, and I paid attention to your footnotes, and you at various points cite some Catholic scholars who seem to be helpful to you as as you think about this. Is there a different dynamic to this? Like a is this a largely Protestant problem that developed because of, I don't know, certain things that the Protestants were bringing to the project of interpreting the Bible? Or do you see the same problem sort of across traditions?
SPEAKER_00It's an interesting question. It's funny because I'm kind of like, oh, did I? I wasn't even thinking about that. I'm sure that I did, but you see the same issues, the Catholicism didn't escape the modern world, and so you see the same dynamics among Catholic scholars. There's a bit more of history changed within the Catholic Church is something that's going to happen a lot slower simply because of the weight of history. You know, like you don't change 2,000-year-old traditions overnight. It's a lot easier to do that in the Protestant tradition, and especially the American Protestant tradition. You know, it's just sort of like we reinvent ourselves every 40 years, you know, and so and we have usually a deep suspicion of tradition and stuff like that. I do think there's more kind of reserves that the Catholic tradition has had in dealing with some of these questions and been less sort of enraptured with some of these things, but there's versions of it. Yeah, it it it affects the Catholic tradition as well.
SPEAKER_02Okay. I think the one I was just looking it up, I think uh the one that came to mind because I you cite her a number of times is Sandra Schneiders, who I believe is a Catholic scholar. So anyway, that was one of the things I was taking out. There's also like a footnote for Alistair McIntyre and and other things. So just sort of pulling on a couple of those threads.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, that's part of something that's going on that I'm trying to deal
— Augustine, Ordered Loves, and What Spiritual Formation Really Looks Like
SPEAKER_00with too, is it and this is more dealing with the third leg of what I'm trying to talk about is spiritual formation. Most of the traditions, there's a bunch of different kinds of avenues of what's loosely under the umbrella of spiritual formation today. But a lot of it is heavily dependent on Aristotle and Augustinian traditions. And so those things are obviously going to be more prevalent in Catholic traditions than they are in Protestant traditions. But I think Augustine has the right idea when he talks about, he has a short little book on Hermenics on Christian doctrine. But he has a very simple statement where he says, look, if you are reading the Bible and you think you understand the Bible, and you haven't actually grown in your love of God and love of neighbor, you haven't understood a word. Now, the fundamental assumption for him is that's the point of the Bible. Like the Bible is actually written to grow and foster your love of God and love of neighbor. It doesn't mean that's the only thing that it's talking about all the time, but it does mean that the point of the Bible is actually to reshape what Augustine would call the ordered loves or ordered affections. And that that's actually the fundamental category that I would use to understand, yeah, no, that's exactly what the Bible's doing. It's trying to reshape what in the Old Testament is simply called the heart, which is not simply the seat of emotion, but the seat of discernment and rationality. The Bible doesn't really understand this whole head-heart split thing that's completely obvious to us. So the Bible's trying to do what is a more kind of holistic spiritual formation where in terms of my affections and loves, my understanding and convictions, and my actions all start to coalesce. And it's trying to form them as a unity, but it's recognizing I'm pulled in a bunch of different directions, and the ways of the heart are mysterious, and often I have roadblocks that I don't understand in myself that are resistant to the truth of the love of God towards me, and that the Bible is actually written to unlock those things and to reveal those things and to show me something of where that is and to reshape my affections in another direction. That's the other piece that I think is important and essential in terms of trying to understand what is spiritual formation and how do people grow. And this is also part of why we've read the Bible, I think, historically, as a bunch of theological truths and principles, is that we had an idea that that's how people grow. Like the model of spiritual formation that I grew up with, and maybe this will sound familiar to you too, is like, well, you learn a bunch of theology and you learn ethical principles and you grow as a Christian being. Like it's a linear process of like amassing data, you know. I don't think anybody over 30 really thinks that's compelling. We're not thinking willing machines, and you it's not just input and output, and that's not actually how spiritual formation works. And it's all that messier process. And a pretty non-linear process. Like sometimes it just feels like it's not going anywhere, and sometimes it's like huge growth spurts, you know. Like, but I think that uh those two things marry together. We kind of had this idea of like what we need is a bunch of theology and ethical principles, and the Bible's gonna give us theology and ethical principles, and that's how we're gonna grow. I think real spiritual growth is something that's much more complex, but actually that the Bible's super realistic about and actually addresses in much more direct ways.
— Mark's Gospel and the Demolition of Our Idols of Jesus
SPEAKER_00I would give an example. It's Mark's gospel. Mark has a really, really fascinating idea of how spiritual formation works. First, we're gonna take all of your ideas about who Jesus is. Second, we're gonna put those in a box. Third, we're gonna crush them into dust because all of those things are idolatrous tools we use to control Jesus. Next, you're ready to meet Jesus. Now, Mark's gonna do all that through telling stories, especially stories of how the disciples are relating to Jesus, who are the people that we identify with and track through the story. And the disciples are gonna begin with doing what disciples do. They're gonna do the right thing, they're gonna follow Jesus, they're gonna leave everything behind and start following him. But the point the distance between Jesus and disciples begins in the calming of the storm. When first they're afraid that they're gonna die, and Jesus is, I think, hilariously asleep in the boat, they wake him up and he just tells the wind to shut up and the sea is calm. And it's a really fascinating way that Mark describes it because he just says they're absolutely terrified of Jesus in that moment. They're like, we're trapped in a boat with a guy who told the wind to shut up. Who on earth is this? And that's Mark's way of beginning this process of like most of your ideas about Jesus are idols, and you need to set those aside because they're just boxes you're putting him in. And that's what's happening, everyone's shoving Jesus into a box, and Jesus is breaking boxes all the time. But that's a way of understanding how like spiritual formation is a complex process. It's not just like I learn a bunch of new ideas about Jesus or something. It's recognizing my own idolatry and being able to actually see it and repent of it. But that's kind of actually typical of like this is the kind of things the Bible's doing all the time. But we've learned a mode of like, well, what's the theology? And what are the ideas and where's the principle and you know that kind of thing. But it makes us bad readers of texts, especially narrative texts.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and and a lot of your book is getting to the text and then you know reinterpreting them or repositioning them as you just did with Mark. It definitely provides a lot of energy to the text that even uh just uh curiosity about the text, I guess, for people who are very familiar with uh the gospel narratives or something, but they don't have this particular formational approach or wisdom approach to it. It can re-enliven the text in a way too that is very familiar on these more um theological grounds. Or maybe even basically I think a lot of maybe more evangelical leaning people when they think of the gospels in particular, it's really just about the facts of the plot line of Jesus' life, or particularly his ministry. And you know, that's the takeaway, is just being really familiar with where Jesus went when, as a way of knowing who Jesus was, uh, I guess. And yeah, I think you've said it multiple times. There's it's definitely part of the education of being a Christian is actually knowing what the gospels are relaying in a factual way, but it's only one level of it. And it and I think as you're you're arguing, it's not really the primary point of the gospels. It's not why they were written the way they were written.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Again, I think all of that is useful knowledge. But it's not reading the text. Like that's a different thing. One
— The Mercedes Museum Analogy: Knowing About vs. Participating In
SPEAKER_00of the analogies I use is at one point in my life I had the opportunity to go to the Mercedes Museum in Stuttgart to see the whole history of the automobile, at least the Mercedes version of the history of the automobile. And I found it really fascinating. I I started off as an engineer, so I have a kind of geeky side, how things work and stuff. And you can take a Mercedes from today and take it apart and look at what's inside of it and understand the whole history of where all of these different things came from. But that's not driving a Mercedes on the Autobahn. Like, those are two different things. Understanding the history isn't actually understanding what was this thing made for, you know, like it's actually getting in a car and driving it. And a lot of the ways in which we approach the Bible are more one step removed instead of reading it in a way that's more participatory. But it's not simply a question of like adopting a different mode, it's actually recognizing this is what the Bible is. It's reading it kind of in line with what the authors are actually doing. That's the thing I'm trying to emphasize in my book is that there's an intentionality in the text. The authors are doing something, and so it's trying to recognize what they're doing. It's not that we decide to use the Bible for spiritual formation. It's that the Bible is written for spiritual formation and it's learning to read it in accord with that recognition. But it does mean we kind of have a different set of tools and a different set of questions when we come to the text that are not simply what's the ideas.
— Hans-Georg Gadamer and the Limits of Modern Objectivity
SPEAKER_02Okay, I have one more big question. Going back to your discussion of Aristotelian ethics and sort of virtue ethics as being a really important pre-modern or or long, you've been with the church a very long time way of thinking about spiritual formation. I thought the other angle you were bringing was about postmodernism and the helpful way that people like Hans Gadamer, the philosopher, have helped you sort of think about these texts in the way that we've been talking about. So, what do people like Gadamer? He's just the one that comes to mind because he comes up a number of times in the book, who's uh critiquing modernity, but from after it as opposed to before it. What's he adding to the conversation for you, or what's he adding to your way of your approaching the text that helps you see this formational wisdom approach to the text?
SPEAKER_00Good question. Gotamer is he doesn't really fit in a modern or postmodern box. He's sort of at a transitional point. I mean, he's writing at a time in Europe that is at the cusp of the 50s, or when post-Second World War is really when you're gonna have something that's gonna start to look like postmodernism in Europe. In America, that's probably more like the 90s. So he doesn't quite fit in either of the boxes. He's doing a fundamental critique of like you can't take this idea of a kind of scientific model of human knowing, of like objective, it doesn't matter who I am. If I'm dissecting a frog, it doesn't matter if I'm a Muslim or an atheist or a Christian. You know, like it's the same frog, and I'm supposed to get the same conclusion. And I'm not involved in that process, and my own kind of convictions don't make a difference. He's saying you can't apply that idea to anything broadly called the humanities. It's just a misuse of that idea that we got addicted to that idea as kind of the universal form of how we think about knowledge and all human intellectual endeavors. And that became the model for the modern research university, beginning in Berlin and Johns Hopkins in America. You know, it's it's the model today. What Gautamer is trying to do is trying to humanize all the humanistic endeavors, the intellectual human. Endeavors and to bring to recognize we're part of that process. History is only a conception in the mind of the historian, and it is molded by who they are. No matter how much they want to talk about, this is just descriptive and not prescriptive. Who they are is going to actually come out in a thousand ways and how they understand history. Saying we want to be descriptive limits some of that, but it doesn't ever actually remove it. And it can be a good safeguard for us to as historians, trying to actually let history be history and not just project my own reality into it. But Gothamer would say it's also a bit of a fantasy and a fiction to think I'm actually doing that completely. And there's no point at which actually I am an objective observer. To some people, that sounds postmodern. I
— A Two-Minute Detour: What Postmodernism Actually Means
SPEAKER_00don't know what that means. One of the things I do talk about in the book, maybe I'll try and keep this to two minutes. What is postmodernism? Um, most people, if they've ever heard of postmodernism, think of it in terms of like it's about relativism and all everybody makes up their own truths, and that's never postmodernism. Postmodernism is about the social construction of reality, that we as different groups of people band together and have our vision and our way of embracing life. And sometimes that's defined by race, gender, political affiliation coming from this part of the United States versus that one, or coming from Europe or Asia, or but we all have our own grids. But those grids are collective, they're not individualistic. This is why we have identity politics in America today. This is a classic sign of postmodernism. Postmodernism approached to the Bible is actually trying to understand like using kind of sociology to read the Bible in different ways as tools of power and that kind of stuff. Godimer is not doing anything like that, but he is trying to say that
— Wirkungsgeschichte: Why We Never Step Outside Our Tradition
SPEAKER_00the ways that we engage in any process involves ourselves within it. His way of describing that is we're historically conditioned human beings. We live within history, we don't ever step outside of it. He would apply that hermeneutically in two important ways. The first is the principle of what he called, here's your big fat German word for the day, Wirkungsgeschichte. A history of effects is kind of literally what it means. But what it means is this whenever I come to the Bible and read a biblical text, I'm standing in a river of tradition. For most of us, it's some version of Protestantism. But what that means is not simply I give certain answers about what the text is, it's actually the questions that I ask the text come from my tradition. So it's the questions I ask as well as the answers that I give are part of our tradition. And I think all Gautamer is trying to say, that doesn't mean our knowledge of the text is illegitimate. What it means is we don't actually have any knowledge of the text apart from the tradition that we doesn't mean we can't see things that aren't part of the tradition, but we have to begin by recognizing we're within a tradition every time we come to the text. The second important bit from Gautamer that I think is critical is is he would say application
— Application Starts the Moment We Begin Reading
SPEAKER_00is something I'm doing as soon as I start reading. And that I cannot tell you what the text meant and then tell you what the text means. That's a nice idea, again, to kind of try and separate and insulate those things of like I don't just want to read my own things into the text, I want to let the text speak for itself. That's actually good. That's what we're trying to preserve when we kind of make that distinction. But he's also gonna say, but it's also self-deception to think I'm not actually applying the text as soon as I start reading it, and that that's actually gonna affect what I think the text meant. That application is part of the process from the beginning, as soon as I start reading. I think that's 100% right. But it doesn't fit within a like I'm gonna be objective and just tell you what the text meant, and then we're gonna switch gears. Kind of the question you asked before about like, well, can I just say what the text meant and then create our theology, have a universal principle, and then I get the application as step three, you know? And Goddard would say, as soon as you start reading, why are you reading the text to begin with? You want an application. Like you you you think it's relevant, you know, like that's the only reason why you're reading it. That doesn't mean we actually are necessarily railroading the text. But he would say that's our inclination is actually to railroad the text to be what we want it to be. But we only recognize that if we recognize application is happening from the start and it's happening the whole way through. He's just trying to be realistic in describing this is what the process actually looks like. He would say, I have to go through a whole process of wrestling with if I'm reading the Bible, we come to a biblical text, as soon as we read it, we have like I somewhere in the back of my head, all of a sudden, like 12 sermons I heard about this text throughout my life, this flood, and I'm like, oh yeah, I know what this text means. You have no chance of understanding it at that point, even if they were all really good sermons. You know, like he would call it pre-understanding. This is part of the mode of what's normal for when we read text and engage with it, is we come from a tradition that tells us what the text means, and sometimes it's right and sometimes it's wrong, and sometimes it's helping me, and sometimes it's not. But we have to go through a process of kind of surrendering some of those things and actually trying to open ourselves to the text might actually be saying something different than what I think it means. And that is a kind of learned habit. I find Gothammer really helpful in that sense of like he's very much a realist in describing like what actually happens when we read the text and how do we wrestle with it, and how do we give the text a voice to say something that may or may not coincide with my tradition?
— Gadamer's Companions: Anthony Thiselton and Michael Polanyi
SPEAKER_02Okay, last question. Are you aware of any work where the philosophy of someone like Gadamer making either his insights or similar ones, has been thought about critiqued from a theological perspective? He's a philosopher, he's making these observations. Is there any sort of work that subjects Gautamer to biblical or Christian categories to integrate it more? I don't know exactly what I'm I'm thinking here, but it it seems like that might be one way to think through it as a Christian is Gottimer seems to be making a lot of good points. Well, what would the Christian tradition observe about human anthropology and other things that he's sort of making claims about?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, good question. The only place that I know of would be kind of the works of Anthony Thistleton. There's a New Horizons and Two Horizons. Even in the titles, he's referencing Godomer. He's kind of the main person who's actually done some work of trying to connect biblical studies with Goder. I've got ten books in my head I'd like to write at some point, and uh that would be one of them. Uh, you know, uh there's a I think a neglect on uh trying to understand the importance of Godomer because he doesn't actually fit within a modern or postmodern world. Most of the folks I know are kind of committed to one or the other of those. He doesn't fit in either one of those categories. And so yeah, he he gets brushed aside a lot. Um, I think he has things that are incredibly important, especially for biblical interpretation and especially for biblical studies as a discipline and all kinds of things.
SPEAKER_02That's interesting. Another one of the you mention him in the book too, another of these thinkers that seems to fall through the cracks of the two big schools is Michael Pogliani. He's writing sort of at the same sort of mid-century period, and is definitely anticipating certain moves that become you know known as postmodern, but is also not a part of that same world.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And he's somebody who's doing something similar to Gautamer in talking about personal knowledge. When I mean by humanizing knowledge, that's Paliani's category of personal knowledge is the same thing, of what he calls a post-critical, something that is post-modern. Like it's not, I don't think it's at all what postmodernism became. Postmodernism, in a lot of ways, is not a very heavy critique of modernism. Some people would just say it's another form of modernism or another form of existentialism, or you know, because it accepts way too much of the modernist framework. And guys like Otomer and Poanyi, I think, are actually critiquing what are the real problems, and they're doing it in the ways that are actually fruitful and helpful. But they are talking about what is human subjectivity and knowledge, and how do we actually experience it as finite human beings and historically knowledge, beginning with Descartes, modern knowledge is always defined in categories that are absolute. You know something absolutely, you know it without doubt, you know, all that kind of stuff. That's divine knowledge, that's not human knowledge, that doesn't exist for any human person. The first person to say the emperor has no clothes there was probably Heidegger, um, you know, and just saying, we're people in time, we're limited and finite. This I don't know what you're talking about. So this is why I do find Pollyanyi and Gothamer helpful in that they are actually talking about human knowledge in this kind of epistemological sense. Gothamer's applying it more towards the questions of hermeneutics than Pollanyius. But I do think there's a lot of resonance between the two, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Well, the conversations range broadly and a lot of uh reading if you're a listener and you want
— What's Next: A Book on Evangelical Moralism
SPEAKER_02to follow up on all these things. It's been a great conversation. Jeff, thank you for the book. Thank you for the conversation today. And anything you're working on now that'll be coming out either on this topic or I don't know, other topics that are have caught your interest?
SPEAKER_00The book that I'm working on now is on evangelical moralism. It's on legalism and moralism in the church and how prevalent those realities are and how they function as sort of counterfeit versions of the gospel. But it's trying to understand that both theologically as well as from a spiritual formation side of how we simplify the gospel again into an abstract set of ideas, but in our hearts we actually have a totally different theology that we operate out of and trying to recognize the distance between those two and that kind of thing. So hopefully in the next year or two, that might see daylight. So uh we'll see. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I can definitely connect the dots in my head of this book and the book here.
SPEAKER_00There's some bits of things that I talk about in there that that this is an expansion of. So yeah.
SPEAKER_02That's great.
SPEAKER_00Thank you.
SPEAKER_01Thanks
— Outro & Where to Learn More
SPEAKER_01for listening to the Upwards Podcast. If this conversation challenged the way you think about reading scripture, we'd love for you to share it with a friend, leave a rating or review, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Those simple steps help more people discover these conversations. Also, consider visiting slbf.org slash studio to find other podcast offerings. That's slbf.org slash studio. Until next time, keep looking upward and living with purpose. Go in peace.