Via Media Podcast, Episode 21 How to Read the Bible Alastair Roberts September 26, 2019 https://www.beesondivinity.com/the-institute-of-anglican-studies/podcast/2019/how-to-read-the-bible Announcer: The Institute of Anglican Studies at Beeson Divinity School welcomes you to Via Media, a podcast exploring the religious and theological worlds from an Anglican perspective. Here is your host Gerald McDermott. McDermott: Welcome to Via Media. We have Alastair Roberts as a guest today. I’m pleased to report he’s our first return guest, our first repeat guest. It’s quite a distinction. So, welcome again, Alastair. Roberts: Thank you very much. It’s an honor to be on again. McDermott: I should introduce him again to those of you who didn’t hear him the first time, but who might have heard him and don’t remember. Dr. Roberts did his PhD at Durham University in England. He’s talking to us from England today. He works for the Theopolis Institute with Peter Leithart and the Davenant Institute. He’s the author of several books on scripture. The first called Echoes of Exodus: Tracing Themes of Redemption Through Scripture. Crossway published that in 2018. And he’s coming out with a new book on how to read scripture with the Theopolis Fundamentals series. He is Mr. Podcast. He’s a regular participant in Theopolis podcasts. Also in the Mere Fidelity podcast. And he’s got his own podcast called the Adversaria podcast. So, we are lucky to be able to have Alastair on our Via Media podcast. Now, Alastair, I want to talk to you today. This is our third podcast in a series we’re doing on how to read the Bible. Particularly because you have this book coming out on how to read the Bible. By the way, what’s the title of it? Roberts: Well, provisionally, How to Read the Bible. McDermott: Well, that’s a great title. (laughs) I want to talk to you about what you have in there, because you’ve told me some things about it and they’re all very intriguing. The first is you start out by talking about the strangeness of the biblical text. Now, Karl Barth famously talked about ... wrote once fairly early in his career about the strange new world of the Bible. But you don’t quite mean the same thing, I don’t think, that Barth did. What do you mean when you talk about the strangeness of the biblical text? Roberts: Well, to start off with, when we’re talking about the Bible we’re not just talking about the text. We’re also talking about a physical object: a book. When we tend to talk about the Bible we have in mind a very modern entity which is the mass produced, privately owned, printed bound text that we read in our personal devotions, for instance, or encounter primarily within the context of private reading practices, silent reading. Whereas if you are someone in the early years of the Church or even up to and beyond the reformation, what the Bible was - they would probably give you a very different answer. Many of them would not think primarily of the Bible at all, they’ll think of the Holy Scriptures. What we think of as the Bible is a very modern development after a series of technological changes; the development of the printing press, the development of the Bible into a pandect where all the books were held within a single set of covers in a set order. And that shapes the way that we conceive of what the Bible is, what it means to read it, the context in which it’s to be read, et cetera. If you were to look at the Bible, even think about a Gutenberg Bible, we think about Gutenberg and the printing press as the advent of a new order of textuality, and in many respects it was. But even one of those texts – to produce one of those on vellum would take the skins of 180 calves, or the equivalent of 300 sheep. That’s a very different concept from the modern Bible, which is formed through a series of further developments; the steam printing press, the development of certain types of paper, cheap India paper, and a number of further developments more recently in terms of the digital text, which has allowed the Bible to take on new forms, for instance, Reader’s Bibles that we didn’t have in the past. So, that’s part of what I want people to think about; to think about the Bible not just as text, as the scriptures contained within the book, but the book itself and how the book trains us to relate to the text in particular ways. Now, if you were to ask someone in the Early Church about the scriptures they’ll be encountering them primarily within the context of the life and worship of the Church. That would be the context of the reading of the text. When Revelation talks about “blessed is he who reads and he who hears the words of this prophecy,” it’s referring to a book that’s read aloud and heard in a congregation. It’s not the private reading of text that we have in our minds. For instance, when we read about the Berean’s, we think they all went back home and consulted their private Bibles, individual Bibles, in their own closets, but it’s not like that at all. It was presumably a matter of communal deliberation over the text with some people who are trained scribes and asking questions, and deliberating as a group about whether what Paul said was in fact true. So, I think that’s the first step that I want people to take. McDermott: Right. To understand that scriptures, which is a slightly different concept from the Bible, plural rather than singular, because they were encountered primarily in worship. And one book at a time, at least as they’re being read in worship. One book of the Bible at a time. Which leads me to this question, it might sound more provocative than it is, and I’m thinking about this particularly because a lot of our audience would call themselves evangelical Anglicans. Some are reformed Catholic Anglicans, but for both of us most of us were raised with devotion to the daily quiet time, which is you could say a sacrament within the evangelical world. My question is, based on what you’ve just told us Alastair, is there a danger in some of the ways in which evangelicals have regarded and used the daily quiet time? Roberts: Maybe you could think about it with the analogy of Shakespeare. It’s good to read ... sit down and pick up Hamlet from the shelf and read Hamlet. But it’s very different to go and see Hamlet performed upon the stage. Likewise, it’s great that we are able to explore our personal Bibles and reflect upon them. It gives us a better understanding of their contents and also of the performance of the reading of scripture, the singing of the Psalms, et cetera within the context of the Church and the liturgy. But if we allow the private reading of the text to not just supplement or inform, but to supplant the public reading of scripture and the public performance of the text, the public singing of the Psalms, et cetera then we’re losing something very important. We’re losing the center of gravity of the text. We’re losing something about the binding of the text, too. If you asked people in the Early Church, where is the Bible? I mean, they didn’t have a single volume containing all the books, the binding of the text was the liturgy and the life of the Church. If you lose that I think the text ends up becoming something different, just as if you lost the world of the stage and just focused upon private reading of plays it would not be quite the same thing. Even though we kind of recognize that there is a great deal of merit to reading those Shakespearean plays just in private and exploring them on the textual level – there are certain things that allows you to do that the public reading by itself may not do. But it informs the more primary reading and encounter with the text, it shouldn’t supplant it. McDermott: So, lest our listeners get the wrong impression, you and I are certainly not saying that Anglicans, Christians, should not read the Bible at home. What we are saying, I think, is that scripture is best encountered within the worship of the Church liturgy and sacraments and it’s there that it takes on a different, and you might say a higher character. It is there that we can better understand it than if we restricted our encounter with scripture to private reading at home. Yes? Roberts: Yes. I would say also within Anglican practice there has been the encouragement to approach private devotions in a way that always orients them and connects them with the communal life of the Church. It’s not just a matter of a private reading practices. We are following the daily office and we’re reading certain texts along with other people, and so for that reason alone I think we’re having a unification of our private reading with a more communal reading. So, both inform each other. I don’t think that they’re separators, they can often be within evangelical practice; within Anglican practice the encouragement is to put them together. McDermott: Yes. Now, you mentioned the contents of the Bible and I know in one of your early chapters you have a whole chapter on the contents of the Bible. Let me ask a question that’s been asked of me in the past by people who struggle with the contents of the Bible. They say why is the Bible so diverse with so many strange ... using the word “strange” again ... kinds of books? I mean we’ve got books of history, and poetry, and law, and wisdom, and we’ve got letters, and we’ve got these things called gospels, which are biographies in a sense and yet they’re not modern biographies by any stretch of the imagination – why didn’t Jesus, God just give us a shorter book that was more straight forward telling us who he is and how to get saved and how to live? Like a catechism. Roberts: (laughs) It’s a good question to ask, and it’s certainly one that I think has presented itself to many Christians as they’ve looked through the Bible. The Bible can be quite forbidding for people as they start to read it particularly when they hit the latter half of Exodus and get into the mire of Leviticus. It’s very difficult to escape from that and make your way through and read this Bible as a text that belongs to us. It’s a text that speaks into our situation. We’re not used to reading about laws of sacrifice as something that relates to our lives. We want timeless truths, theological doctrines and propositions, and that’s what we’d expect. I mean, if we were writing the Holy Scriptures ourselves that’s probably what we would have in there. But it’s not what we have. So, I think the first thing we need to do is pay attention to what God has given us. And see that there is a diversity, but there’s both a unity and an order to that diversity. The diversity is something that can exhibit a progression over time. The diversity is also something that encourages us to read certain parts of scripture alongside each other in ways that inform each other. So, if you’re reading a particular biblical passage in Genesis you’ll often find that that passage is echoed on a number of further occasions within later books. So, if you’re reading the story of Jacob and then you read the story of David alongside that you’ll see that they’re constantly playing off of each other. And reading them alongside each other yields insight. Likewise, if you’re reading the law and you read the law in Exodus and then you look at it in the latter half of Exodus and you see the case law and things like that and how that’s unpacking some of the principles of the law and relating them to very specific situations. Then after that you have the development of the tabernacle and that’s playing off the creation story. And get to Deuteronomy and Deuteronomy unpacks the law even further, showing how each one of the laws can be refracted into a great deal of specific case law and dealing with particular cases, showing you how the law and the principle that underlies it expands out to address different areas of life. Then you move beyond that into the wisdom literature and you see the wisdom literature is not detached from the law, but nor is it just giving us the law again. It’s addressing the moral principles that you find in the heart of the law in a very different way to the life of the people of God. So, if you’re reading the law you’ll have the commandment not to commit adultery, and then that will be expanded in different ways within the laws of Deuteronomy. But when you get to the Book of Proverbs it’s showing you how adultery works out. What are its long-term consequences? What is its insipience? What are the consequences in terms of the character that develops in people who give themselves to that sin? Now, that’s a different way of approaching more principles, but there’s a development there. We can think about the way that children as they’re growing up they move from a very clear “do this, don’t do that” set of principles to the unpacking of those principles as they realize the inner rationale. And particularly as time starts to prove how these things work out. Then you have other parts of scripture that play off each other in different ways. If you read the books of the gospels alongside each other you’ll find they’re telling the same stories but yet they’re telling them in very different ways. And the ways that they tell the stories are theological. So, if Matthew tells the story in a way that focuses upon the parallels between Jesus and Moses, Jesus and the bringing of the law, and goes through the whole of the Old Testament in outline it helps you to understand something about who Christ is. So, he begins at the very beginning with the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, which draws our mind back to Genesis, and then he gets, at the very end, he virtually plays out the final verse of the Old Testament and the Hebrew ordering with the decree of Cyrus to rebuild the temple. All the kingdoms of the earth have been given to Cyrus and then he says go up to Jerusalem, build this temple, and then may the Lord your God be with you. And in the way that Matthew is telling the story he’s playing all that in the background to help you to understand who Christ is. Luke tells the story in a different way, and John and Mark likewise. So, I think the diversity is, on the one hand, it’s a genuine diversity. There’s some really unusual stuff in scripture. Things like the Song of Songs, or the Book of Job, or the story of Jonah. These are unusual books that challenge us to read them in a wise way. They don’t instantly open up. I think that’s one of the things I want to highlight within this book, that the scripture invites wise readers, and we often want a book that will have all of its secrets and its truths up front. But yet scripture calls for meditation and reflection and rumination. We’re supposed to chew over scripture. It reveals its truths. Like a dog chewing on a bone, just to get out the marrow. It’s not something that comes instantly. Rather, it’s reflecting long periods of time. I think that is a way of reading scripture that we’ve often forgotten. McDermott: Yes. You use the phrase in your book, “close attention.” It calls for close attention. I think of the Book of Leviticus, which most Christians would say if any book should have been left out of the Bible is Leviticus. Incomprehensible to Christians. Totally useless to Christians. And yet in my last 30 years of working with Jews I have discovered that many of the Rabbis said that Leviticus is the key to the whole Old Testament. Certainly the key to the Torah. That you can’t understand the Old Testament without understanding Leviticus. If we reflect, as my Jewish Christian friend in Jerusalem tell me, on the fact that the Old Testament was Jesus’ Bible and that you can’t understand Jesus without the Old Testament, because Jesus ... one way of thinking about him was he came to embody the Old Testament, the law, and to show us the inner meaning of the law, and therefore you can’t understand Jesus without understanding the Old Testament and the law, Torah. Therefore, if Leviticus is the key to Torah, it’s the key to Tanakh, the whole Old Testament, then Leviticus is also the key, at least a key, to understanding who Jesus was. And this all takes close attention. The searching out, the rumination as you put it, the chewing on the bone as you put it, of years and years. Roberts: Exactly. One thing I’ve found, particularly reading a book like Leviticus, that there is deep wisdom within that book that does not come easily. You have to dig deep. But it will often be surprising and arresting what comes out of it. So, for instance, if you read the book you’ll notice that there is the pattern of a new humanity being set up. The new Eden of the tabernacle and the placing of the priests within that context, and then a fall with Nadab and Abihu bringing in this strange fire. Then a series of judgments after that, that are related to ... if you look back at Genesis with the judgment upon the serpent and the judgment upon the woman, the judgment upon the man ... as you read through Leviticus you see the same pattern playing out. First of all, there’s the judgments concerning what animals you are supposed to eat and not eat, which are clean and unclean, then there’s the law concerning the woman and childbirth just as you have in Genesis the judgment upon the woman in that context. Then after that there’s judgments concerning skin and leprosy and things like that; connected with the sweat of one’s brow, returning to dust, and then the judgment upon the house, and being cast out of that. Then after that you have the establishment of the day of atonement to reset, to reboot the system, to turn it off and on again. That is just one example of the ways in which Leviticus opens up the rest of scripture. Then I found this recently reading that strange passage in Genesis concerning Judah and Tamar. Then realizing that that’s playing out, almost beat by beat, many of the things that we find within the story or the ritual of the day or atonement. That just amazed me. Why is that taking place? But yet there’s a mystery there to be uncovered and I think scripture was written that way. It was written for people who are paying attention, who are reflecting in depth, and as they reflect in depth, I think it reveals things that will surprise. McDermott: Alastair, our few words here about Leviticus calls to mind the bigger question that Christians repeatedly ask and it’s a huge question. And that is how do we understand the relationship between the Old and the New Testament? Why do we have both testaments? Why is the New Testament not enough? Now, you and I could go on for hours about that, but can you give us a short answer to that question that you would give to a Sunday school class that has two minutes left? Roberts: (laughs) Well, when we look at the New Testament in many ways the New Testament is the old, died, and risen again. There is a transformation and a relationship to the old, but the old does not disappear. It’s not just ... nor is it just assimilated into the new. This is something that Remi Brague writes very thoughtfully about in contrasting medieval Christianity and Islam, and talking about the way that Islam assimilated past revelation. Whereas Christianity digested it. It had it as something always distinct from it. So, there’s an otherness to the Old and New Testament. But yet they’re constantly in correspondence with each other. You can’t understand the one without understanding the other. So, the reading of the New Testament transfigures the Old. Paul talks about this, for instance, in 2 Corinthians 3 & 4 where he gives the example of the veil upon the face of Moses. And he plays upon the word there. Moses is both the man, as we have in the story of Moses going on Sinai and having to put a veil upon his face when he came down. But it’s also Moses the books. I’ve described this as like walking this long itinerary through woods and rocky terrain and not being ... walking towards this great mountain, and occasionally you can get a glimpse of the mountain peak through the trees. But as you follow that itinerary all the way it will lead you to the mountain and you climb up, ascend the mountain, following the path until you’re led up to the real top. At that point the whole of the terrain opens before you. And it’s laid out. You see the entire itinerary that you have walked as a unity that has led you to that point. So, you’re standing within it, but you’re also seeing the whole of it. And in many ways the New Testament enables us to get a different vantage point upon the Old Testament text. So, it’s transfigured. But yet we see that was always the Old Testament text all the way along. And there, I think, it’s helpful to recognize the import, both of following that itinerary very closely and step by step, and also having that vantage point from above where it takes on this transfigured appearance. I think often Christians have been in danger either of so focusing upon the steps in front of them that they’ve missed the bigger picture and how it’s a unity and how Christ’s glory is revealed in it. On the other hand, many have looked out from that mountain peak and just wanted to air lift themselves to that point, rather than following the itinerary of the text and seeing how the text itself will lead them to that point. There, I think I’ve found it very helpful to read certain Jewish writers who have been focusing upon the interconnections within the Old Testament text itself. I think of someone like Rabbi David Forman or someone like Robert Alter, who recently published a translation of the Old Testament that is very stimulating on that front. A lot more attentive to the literary character of the text than many Christian commentators can be. McDermott: Let’s talk about interpreting the Bible. What can we modern interpreters of the Bible, even postmodern, learn from the patristic and medieval periods and the ways that the Fathers of the Church and the medievals interpreted the Bible? Roberts: I think many people, when they think about medieval and patristic readings of the Bible they think it’s just weird. They read Origen or Augustine, and they think these sorts of readings are just a reach – they don’t make sense. And sometimes that may seem to be the case. But when you read them in a bit more charitable and attentive manner, you realize that they’re reading the text that way because they realize that there is a dominical warrant to read Christ, to see Christ, in all the scriptures. And they’re very careful to read the Bible in a way that recognizes that. Now, the movement from the literal to the figural or the allegorical sense is not always done with the sort of rigor that we might like. But I’ve found that the patristics and the medievals have been a challenge to me to read the Bible as scripture. Not just as a historical text. But as a revelation of Jesus Christ. As a revelation of who God is and what he is doing in history. I think working through the literal sense to the allegorical sense and the medievals talked about the four senses of scripture and I think that movement is a very important one because it recognizes that this is our text. It’s the text that’s written for our example. And in that respect they’re trying to capture something of how the apostles and Christ himself read the Old Testament. Even if you’re reading the Old Testament you’ll see the Old Testament using itself in that way, because the Old Testament isn’t just a series of events that took place one after another. Rather, it’s a unified witness to the work of God. For instance, if you’re reading I Corinthians 10 Paul can say that all our forefathers passed through the cloud and the sea. They were baptized into Moses in the cloud and the sea, all drank the same spiritual drink from the rock that followed them, which was Christ. They all ate the same spiritual food, et cetera. You think, where is he getting this from? But that’s a way of reading the Bible that I think often we’ve forgotten, but yet it’s a faithful way of reading the text. The patristics and the medievals were very concerned to read the Bible in a way that really got the richness out of it, that wasn’t merely satisfied with a bare moral example, or a bare set of historical records, but to see this text as the living and active word that looks us directly in the eyes and speaks into our situation with authority and power. And that, I think, is something that’s within the disciplines, I think, that particularly after the reformation have become more clear – the disciplines of grammatical historian reading focusing more upon the literal sense of the text. Within those disciplines we need to strive for exactly the same thing. McDermott: Let me close with on question. You talk about the different between reading the Bible and trying to get answers to propositional questions in propositional ways; statements about reality that we can learn from the Bible. Rather than digging deep for the mysteries of scripture that are revealed partially by scripture. Can you give us an example? Let’s take the story of the transfiguration, which you talk about in the book. Can you just tell us a little bit in these last five minutes about how we can dig deep and uncover mysteries in the story of the transfiguration? Roberts: Yes. If you’re reading the story of the transfiguration in, for instance, Luke’s gospel you can see that the way that Luke tells his story frames the transfiguration in a particular way. So, the story is framed among other things as an event in parallel with an early event which is the baptism. So, on both of these occasions there is a phase of Christ’s ministry beginning and it begins with the witness of someone and then there is the witness of God alongside that. God the Father to the Son and the heavens opened and God is speaking into the situation. And then there’s the phase of ministry and then it ends with death and themes of resurrection. In the first one it’s the witness of John the Baptist and then the baptism of John and the witness of the Father at that point. That phase ends with the death of John the Baptist and the question is, is Jesus, John the Baptist, raised from the dead? In the story that follows it’s the witness of Peter to Jesus as the Christ, and Jesus turns his face toward Jerusalem at that point going to die. And there you have the story of the transfiguration. And the transfiguration sets things up for that next phase with the witness of Peter attended with the witness of the Father. So, even on that front you have a particular way of understanding it within the framework of Luke. Beyond that, Luke plays upon the background of the Old Testament. He’s playing upon the background of the story of the Exodus. So, in that chapter you have the story of the feeding of the five thousand. And it’s playing off the story off the manna in the wilderness. Jesus had led the people into the wilderness, he feeds them miraculously with bread in the wilderness, they’re divided up into groups by his disciples, much as the people were divided under Moses and all the elders under the advice of Jethro. Then they come to the mountain. The mountain is the mountain of transfiguration. On that mountain they see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Now there’s an Old Testament story that is very much like that. It’s the story of Moses upon the mountain. Now, when Jesus goes down the mountain, at the other end, there’s the failure of his disciples in his absence and there’s this demon possessed child and the child is taken to the ground, thrown to the ground by the demon, and literally shattered. All of this is playing upon the Old Testament background of the story of Moses descending from the mountain, the failure of Aaron in his absence, the throwing of the tablets of stone to the ground and shattering them, and then the way that Jesus addresses his disciples at that point, “a wicked and perverse generation, how long will I be with you?” It’s playing upon that same story. Now, on the mountain Jesus talked about the fact that he was about to accomplish literally an exodus at Jerusalem. That gives a framework to understand again what’s taking place. But when we think about the transfiguration in the light of the Old Testament theophanic events it helps us to understand there are great many different events in the Old Testament where God appears in some human or some glorious form. Whether that’s appearing to Abraham at the oak of Mamre. Or whether it’s things like the burning bush. Whether it’s God appearing on Mt. Sinai to Moses, appearing to Ezekiel in the chariot vision, appearing to Isaiah in the temple vision – whatever it is, you have these series of events and within the story of the transfiguration there’s a harkening back to that. There’s a harkening back in other ways like the question of Peter, should they build tabernacles just as the plan for the tabernacle was given on Mt. Sinai. Just as the word of God was delivered on Mt. Sinai. God declares that his son is his word, that you should hear him. And so it’s playing off that background, but also transforming it. It’s giving us a framework within which to understand what Jesus is doing. An old framework that is both taken up and contrasted. So you see similarities and also differences. You also see that Christ, the one who is revealed in person as the glory of the Father, is the same one as we have encountered throughout the Old Testament. He was the one who the train of his robes filled the temple in the story of Isaiah chapter six. And the story of John, John’s Gospel, John explicitly connects that with Christ in Chapter 12. Then he’s the one who appeared on Mt. Sinai. He’s the one who appeared to Abraham. He appeared in the burning bush, et cetera. So, it helps you to read the Old Testament as the story of the revelation of Christ, and see the unity of what’s taking place there. It also helps you to see that from that vantage point everything else takes on a different aspect. For the people who never went up the mount of transfiguration, Jesus going to Jerusalem had a slightly different character from those who were up there and saw his glory. They knew that he was in charge of, in control of everything that was taking place subsequently. Whereas for those just seeing it on the base of the mountain they may not realize what Jesus was doing. But yet when we see the scripture from the perspective of the glory of Christ, and see the glory of Christ throughout the scripture, it gives us a united vantage point from which to understand everything. So, Peter in his second epistle can take up that event and say we saw his glory on the holy mountain and therefore we have the prophetic word made more sure. The prophet stood on their mountains, as it were, and they looked forward into the future, the great distant horizon, and they saw certain things there and described the features as they went down from their mountains and described it to the people of Israel. But they stood on a higher mountain still, seeing the glory of Christ, and they can declare that the second advent of Christ is certain, because they’ve seen the glory of the King. The question of the unveiling of the kingdom is just a matter of time. Now, I think that helps us to read the scripture more generally. It gives us an example of how scripture uses other scripture to tell its story. And it also gives us a framework within which to see the glory of Christ at the very heart of the scriptural text. McDermott: Whoa. Well, that’s very, very rich. For our listeners, if you want to read more of Alastair Roberts, his book is coming out very shortly from Theopolis. “How To Read The Bible.” And where else can our listeners go, Alastair, to read your work? Roberts: I’m not writing that much at the moment. But if they want to hear me, I do a very regular personal podcast called Alastair’s Adversaria podcast. I’m on the Mere Fidelity podcast and I’m on the Theopolis podcast. So, any one of those would be a good place to hear me regularly. McDermott: And our listeners could also listen to the first episode that we did with Alastair on March 28th, titled “Theology of the Sexes.” Well, Alastair, thanks again. Roberts: Thank you very much for having me on. McDermott: And let me thank you listening audience for listening in today. Announcer: You've been listening to Via Media with host Gerald McDermott, the director of The Institute of Anglican Study Studies at Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. The Institute of Anglican Studies trains men and women for Anglican ministry, and seeks to educate the public in the riches of the Anglican tradition. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Via Media.