An hour of talk and an hour of talkback (Q&A) with Dr. Mark Gignilliat on the topic of “How to Read the Bible.”
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Last night went okay, and so maybe it'll go better tonight. I don't know. We'll we'll see. I'm glad to be with you all. We we're grateful for your church.
Collin Hansen:We think about your church a lot even tonight. Been thinking about your pastor, Joel, Brooks. He's speaking to the mayor of Birmingham and other civic leaders, and it's, we're just grateful for your place in the city and I and that that means a lot to us. It's good to see my neighbor, Kurt. And, my wife is with me tonight here for moral support and general, uplifting and also if I go off this rails theologically, she'll give me a little sign and I'll come back in.
Collin Hansen:We're talking about the Bible tonight, and, it's a big topic and I'm I'm gonna come at this. Someone someone asked me how to go last night and I said, well I think it went fine. I threw a lot of spaghetti against the wall and hopefully some of it stick stuck stuck and I'm sure some of some of it fell down as well. I I'm gonna do that again tonight. I'm gonna toss some things at you.
Collin Hansen:I want to talk about some big picture ideas when it comes to the Bible. I wanna step back and before I even get into anything, talk a little bit about how it is is how we know and how do we construct knowledge as Christians. This is a big deal to me because, and I mentioned this last night, I had the opportunity of speaking to a group of, skeptical slash agnostic slash some atheist teenagers from Mountain Brook 2 Thursday nights ago. You know, this is the kind of email that you get or at least I get these emails, like, will you come speak to this group? I'm like, oh, okay.
Collin Hansen:I'll do that. And don't don't give a lot of thought to it. Just sort of show up and then all of a sudden, boom. I mean, it's game on. And these these kids came ready to fight, and I wasn't really ready to fight.
Collin Hansen:And and, this one very precocious and smart teenage boy who had read every Richard Dawkins book that had come out and had mastered all the Richard Dawkins' arguments, which I kinda find tiresome, but he got them all. And and then we start going back and forth, and and he got extremely frustrated and understandably so because the way in which I approach the construction of knowledge and the way in which he thought about how one conceives of the knowing process was was very different. And so I told him and I'll sort of tell you all as well. I mean, I I come at our understanding and how we even can know something on the basis of certain basic beliefs that I don't argue for. For example, when someone asks a Christian, and I'm borrowing here from a Dutch theologian named Herman Bavinck, when someone asks a Christian, why do you believe that to be true?
Collin Hansen:The answer that a Christian gives is because that's what the word of God claims. And then when the follow-up question is, and how then do you know that that's the word of God, a Christian cannot necessarily give a salutary answer to someone that does not share the same belief structure that the Christian does. We can talk about this later on if you want to. So I'm I'm working within the classic Christian tradition that constructs belief on the and understanding on the basis of faith. There was a medieval theologian by the name of Anselm who wrote and if any of you remember sort of, I don't know, cultural perspectives 101 in college or the history of the western intellectual tradition.
Collin Hansen:If you took a class like that, you probably read some Anselm or you were introduced to Anselm because he introduced what's often referred to as the ontological argument, namely, how do we know that God exists because there is nothing greater by which we could conceive, therefore God is. If that helps you believe in God, well, God bless you. It wouldn't help me at all, but that was Anselm's argument. But Anselm also constructed a theory of knowledge that's built on the tradition that comes before him that I think is really built on the core of the bible, and this is how it goes. How do we know?
Collin Hansen:We know because faith leads to understanding. Or another way of putting this is, I believe in order that I might understand. Now, do you do you see how this is ordered here? I believe in order that I might understand. Faith seeking understanding.
Collin Hansen:In other words, faith, confession, belief, what you do on Sunday when do you guys worship? Sunday nights or all the time now, I think. Right? You're kinda busting at the seams. Whenever you guys come together to worship, what you're doing together collectively as the body of Christ, what you're doing in an embodied way and by the way, I hope you do realize, and I'm sure some of you are quite savvy on this, that, you know, a lot of very interesting thought is going into the importance of what it means to engage into the Christian tradition with our bodies, not not just our minds.
Collin Hansen:I told this joke last night and I don't have great jokes, but here here's, you know, here it goes. You know, the Lutheran tradition tends to view the church as a hospital for sinners. The reformed tradition in which you guys I think are somewhat aligned with I think. The reform tradition tends to view the church as a school for Christian doctrine, and the Episcopal tradition where in God's strange providence I happen to be located, views the church as a country club. Alright.
Collin Hansen:That's that that's that. I I that's there's a lot of truth in that actually. But, but but whatever however you view the church, I mean, it's very important to recognize that the way in which we engage existence in an embodied way, The cultural liturgies that you're a part of, whether you know it or not, what Eugene Peterson and James k a Smith call, the liturgies of the mall and the liturgies of the hospital. I mean, these institutions that kinda shape the ways in which so many people think about the world, these becomes almost sacramental physical realities that shape the ways in which we understand and think about the world, by the way, in way more and penetrating ways than we even know. We're we're we're embedded in an embodied existence.
Collin Hansen:And what you do in church on Sundays when you stand together and all of you raise your voices and praise and in worship to God, or when you sing together, or when I hope I don't I don't know what your liturgies look like, but when you confess your sins together do you all do that? I don't know. When you confess your sins together, when you confess together what you believe, I believe in God the father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen. When when you confess that together, when you are are vocalizing and standing and kneeling and walking forward to receive communion and coming together with God's people and going back to your seat, that is shaping who you are. And Anselm would say, and by the way that shaping of who you are is properly basic.
Collin Hansen:You don't have to argue for this. You don't have to sort of build toward it. That is properly basic for the ways in which you construe all of your understanding about life and God and reality and how you can know. So I'm real slow to give a kind of rationalized apologetic account of the bible when people come with their guns loaded because frankly, the Bible creates all kinds of problems that if you come from it with the perspective of unbelief, you can exit the back door with that unbelief fully secure. I mean, that's just and we'll be honest about that later.
Collin Hansen:Right? And I'll talk about whatever you wanna talk about. Remember, that is something that we need to sort of think through. Where do I locate belief in the ways in which I think about my construction of knowledge and my construction of how I view all of the world. And from a Christian perspective, we say belief is properly basic to everything that we say about God, the world, and how we can even know.
Collin Hansen:How do you know something? C h Spurgeon, 19th century Victorian preacher in England, he said, defending the bible is like defending a lion. You don't defend a lion. What you do is you go to the cage and you open it up and you let the lion out. That's what you do, right?
Collin Hansen:And I think that's a similar thing to be said about the Bible. I mean the Bible does its work because of what we confess the Bible to be. Alright? So I'm that to me is a it sounds like prologamana. It's a little bit of revving of the engines.
Collin Hansen:The car of tonight's talk is just in 1st gear. I'm about to shift it into 2nd, but that's how I think we have to get out of the gate. How is it that we can even know? We know because God and the kindness of his love for us has opened up our minds and allowed us to believe. And by the way, I'm sure that some of you who are here on the agnostic to the atheistic spectrum of belief on this, you hear this and you go, that is cocoa or cuckoo for cocoa puffs.
Collin Hansen:Right? And I get it because I hear myself saying that I go, you realize there's there's a kind of craziness to what you're saying. Yes. But I would also say there's an inherent circularity to what I'm saying that's necessary within a construction of how we believe and how we know. So in the q and a time, if you wanna talk about that, you fire away and, I'm I'm I'd be happy to.
Collin Hansen:So that was all engine revving. Now I wanna turn to the bible. My wife on the way out the door, she's like, do I need my bible tonight? I said, well, we're talking about the bible, but I don't know if I really need our bible. So I mean, we'll just anyway, I've been with Episcopalians long enough now to know that people just don't carry their Bibles around.
Collin Hansen:They'll have their prayer book, but don't worry about the Bible. You know it's true, don't you? Oh, you're if you're here, don't tell anybody I said that back at the church. Martin Luther tells an incredible story. Luther, the 16th century reformer from Germany, he tells a story about, having a dream.
Collin Hansen:And in this dream, he is before god. And god gets onto him and god says, Luther or Martin, why didn't you listen to me when I was talking to you? And Luther responded by saying, well, when exactly did you do that? I never heard you talking to me. And god said, you heard me every Sunday.
Collin Hansen:And Luther retorted in his dream, I didn't hear you. I heard this country preacher kinda babbling away. And god said to him, exactly. It was in the folly of those human words of the preacher that I was communicating to you my very word. This is the scandal of what we're talking about tonight.
Collin Hansen:This is the scandal of having some kind of belief structure that actually confesses that an infinite God and you philosophically sophisticated ones in the crowd, you know this is a problem, and I get it too. But there's a huge problem for us as Christians when we confess that an infinite God, not contained by time, not contained by space, recognizing that space and time are actually created entities that God himself creates, and he enters into space and time as an act of self giving, but God is never constrained by space and time. He is god. So how can this infinite being communicate himself, his word? Because we do know that his word is himself.
Collin Hansen:2nd person of the trinity, the logos is the word of God. And God communicates his word via the medium of human written language. It is incredible. These words, these black words on a white page. So to get us to that, I wanted to read Psalm 19 and let this sort of frame some of the conversation tonight.
Collin Hansen:Okay? Psalm 19. The heavens are telling or declaring the glory of God. The firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, night to night declares knowledge.
Collin Hansen:There is no speech, nor are there words. Their voice is not heard, yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In the heavens, he has set a tent for the sun which comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy. By the way, you just can't beat the the Psalms for imagery. Isn't that beautiful?
Collin Hansen:So the sun comes out and the firmament, the blue stuff up there is like a bridegroom, like, with its canopy. It's just gorgeous. Its rising is from the end of the heavens and its circuit to the end of them, and nothing is hid from its heat. Now, so so these first six verses of Psalm 19 are in the classic Christian tradition, the classic theological tradition, the one that you're in that stream I I'm pretty assured, identifies this as what we call general revelation. In other words, this is the heavens declaring that God is.
Collin Hansen:This is the kind of attestation that the world and the beauty of the world, the metaphysical aspects of the world that go beyond what we see before us, but help to explain that there is anything. Now the heavens shout out about the glory of God. I don't know, I mean, some of you and I imagine because you come to a church that's in this part of town and you're artsy folks, I imagine. Right? I mean, I don't wanna sort of project on you, but I assume you're kinda artsy and you know all the cool music.
Collin Hansen:I'm I mean, I, that's just I wish I was like you all. I do. I I walk into the Octane coffee shop and the music turns off. I don't know why. It's like, like and then go out.
Collin Hansen:But for those of you who sort of in art and literature and music, you know there's a there's a necessary metaphysical side to these things. There's something about beauty and the engagement of beauty, which is a reflection on the created world that whispers to us from beyond. I, to j r r Tolkien, the Lord of the Rings and you know, that I I really wanted to like those books. I read them, and the movies were fine. I'll I'll never read them again except for my children.
Collin Hansen:That's just that's a reflection on me. But, Tolkien was asked I do think, by the way, what Tolkien pulled off in the Lord of the Rings is an enormous human achievement. I mean, he's creating a sort of whole world. And someone asked Tolkien, how do you feel being a creator like that? Middle earth and I mean, even device his own language system.
Collin Hansen:It's incredible. Tolkien being the good catholic that he was said, I'm not a creator. I'm a sub creator. Because there's only one creator. There's only one entity that can from nothing speak and then matter appears.
Collin Hansen:And because that's the case, all of the artistic work that we do in this world, all of the taking words, nouns, and verbs, and adjectives, and predicating them together and modifying them together to create sentences that build on top of one another, to create prose that's lilting and beautiful. I I just finished reading a a novel that was translated from French into English called the heart. Anybody read this thing? Just blown away by the pros. I mean, it's just beautiful, read this.
Collin Hansen:It's an incredible book about a heart transplant following through all the kind of things that go on and it's been fascinating. I mean these words are beautiful. Musical notes that come together to form something that elevates us to something other. All of this engagement with beauty and aesthetics and poetry and dance and the list goes on of whatever artistic expression you can think of, all of it is a reflection of the sub creative activities of humanity that necessarily have built within them a kind of metaphysical reality that whispers to us from beyond us as apes, you. I'm talking to you.
Collin Hansen:I'm whispering to you. There's this philosopher, talked about him a little bit last night. I'm I'm growing a little bit of a man crush on this guy. His name is Arthur Schopenhauer and got big fat white lamb chops. His pictures, he's looked incredibly doleful.
Collin Hansen:I wanna look like that when I get older and I think I'm quite well on my way. He's, he was a late 19th century philosopher, that shaped names that you might know more like Nietzsche and even Adolf Hitler. Nietzsche called went to the school of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer raises the question in the late 19th century, doleful as he was, is life worth living? That's the question that philosophers have been asking since the Greco Roman period, since Aristotle and even back into the Socratic time of Plato.
Collin Hansen:I mean, is life worth living? And the answer that the Greeks tended to give, whether through stoic or Epicurean responses was yes, life is worth living despite the fact that all of life is suffering, and how one has a good life is by avoiding pain and maximizing pleasure, right? And not necessarily maximizing pleasure in the sense of hedonism but in the sense of avoiding a life of pain. Cicero is a classic example of this. If you've read any Cicero, I mean Cicero was stoical in his views on attaching himself to any any entity or any person too much because if they're taken away, then you know you can get, you can hurt, and we want to minimize the opportunity for any pain in our lives.
Collin Hansen:And Cicero was a rather good stoic until his daughter died. Then his daughter died and he just grieved enormously and he couldn't sustain it. So this has been a question that's been raised all the way since, you know, the Greco Roman times. Is life worth living, even going back into the ancient or eastern world? And here comes Schopenhauer onto the scene, late 19th century, and he says, is life worth living?
Collin Hansen:The answer, no. It's not. Why? Well because all of life is suffering. What do you mean Schopenhauer, all of life is suffering?
Collin Hansen:Well what he means by that is all of life is suffering because we are caught in a continuum. If you catch me on Monday, Thursday, and Saturday, I think Schopenhauer is exactly right. Okay? And what he says is we live in a continuum. What is the continuum?
Collin Hansen:The suffering that we have because we desire something. I really want this that I don't have, and because I don't have it, I'm suffering because I don't have it. But what's the other side of suffering? The flip side of the same coin. The boredom and dissatisfaction that comes when you get that which you really desired.
Collin Hansen:Alright? We call that, at least in our home, the Christmas night depression effect for our kids. Alright? All the presents are open. All the anticipation's over.
Collin Hansen:I've got all that I wanted. Now we're just gonna bury ourselves in pie and eggnog. Right? It's that kind of thing. So Schopenhauer presents a rather compelling view of the complexity of life, but he says something that I think is fascinating, and that is there's one experience that humans have where we can transcend that problem.
Collin Hansen:And his answer by the way, this is not a Christian worldview. This is Schopenhauer. His answer is, when you engage music, when you hear music, when the bow hits the violin and then the cello comes in and then the oboe and the flute and the clarinet, and they all come together in this symphonic point and counterpoint, and they elevate the music, and you get lost in something that lifts you out of that continuum of suffering. That's what I think we're talking about on the metaphysical side of art and aesthetics that reflect the goodness of creation that flows from the hand of God. I'm not arguing that people are gonna go hear a Bach concert and now I believe in Jesus.
Collin Hansen:Okay? That's what I'm saying. But there's something about the engagement of beauty in this world that whispers to us from beyond, and that's what I think Psalm 19 verses 1 through 6 is telling us. The heavens declare the glory of God, they shout to you. Now if John Calvin walked into the room, and I like Calvin, like, you know, I tell people often it's a horrible joke that when I was 5 years old, I asked Jesus into my heart.
Collin Hansen:And when I was around 19 years old, I asked John Calvin into my heart. You know, it's it's I've it's a bad joke. But if Calvin were to walk in here, besides our evening being over at that point, he, if that happened, he he would step in and say, that's right. The heavens declare the glory of God. The heavens witness, general revelation witnesses to the reality that God is.
Collin Hansen:But he would follow that with a rather depressive statement which I believe to be true, and he would say, and that knowledge is just enough to make humanity culpable, to make humanity damnable. It's not enough knowledge to redeem anyone. General revelation is not enough. We cannot build from a construction of this world and sort of build up to a knowledge of God. I tell my students at Beeson this all the time, there is an infinite gap between proof and persuasion.
Collin Hansen:An infinite gap. You have all the proofs you want, and I think we should do that as best as we can. Some kind of rational account of why we believe what we believe, but the move between that and persuasion that that's true and it's true for me, that is an infinite gap. In fact, let let me think about it this way. Say some 18 year old who took philosophy 101 and now they're smart.
Collin Hansen:Right? And and they've dumped the Sunday school simplicity of their faith and and then they go and they hear a really smart Christian win a debate against an atheist. And now this atheist kid is turned up and he becomes an agnostic. And then over time he becomes a theist and he says, you know what? I now believe that there is a god.
Collin Hansen:Again, Calvin would say, that's just enough knowledge to make you culpable. Because that's a far cry from saying, and by the way, that God's name is the father, the son, and the holy spirit who's revealed himself by the power of the spirit and the person and work of this Jewish man that kicked up dust in the 1st century world in Palestine who we call and identify as Jesus of Nazareth, fully God, fully man, not a schizophrenic, but in a single subject, and we confess that to be true, and we put everything on the line for that belief. That means moving from God to that is a very long way. Okay? So what we need is special revelation.
Collin Hansen:We need God to speak. I didn't do this last night and I'm completely off script. But I wanted to talk last night, and so I'll do it now, about, Immanuel Kant. You know, Immanuel Kant, the great philosopher of the 18th century and the early 19th century, there in Coburg, presented a theory of knowledge that I think has a lot cash value to it even to this day. And that is you and I can only talk about reality from the standpoint of our existence, from the phenomenal engagement that you and I have with the world.
Collin Hansen:I can look and there's Kurt. I can talk to him. There he is. There's a beam. Hot lights, I'll tell you.
Collin Hansen:And you you know what? And so I I've got my world of experience that with the categories of my mind that help me shape my understanding of reality as I perceive it. But to break into the noumenal world, the world of reality as it really is, I can never do that from the standpoint of the phenomenal world. And and then Kant would go on to say, and therefore, we can never have true knowledge of the thing itself. Whatever that is, true trueness, true horseness, true you ness.
Collin Hansen:You never have true knowledge of that. All I can know is the reality that I have with you in my mind, and there's a lot of truth, I think, to what Kant says, except for the fact that as Christians, we confess, you are right, Immanuel Kant. We cannot build from our phenomenal world and construct up to it. By the way, they did that in Genesis chapter 11 of the tower of Babel, and it didn't go well. If you read that story, right?
Collin Hansen:We can't construct an edifice of human knowledge, a a human tower of Babel rationally conceived, and build our way up to God. We can't do that. But God in his great mercy and his kindness has come down to us. That's the part Kant would not have affirmed. But we do as part of our Christian belief.
Collin Hansen:God speaks, he talks and he reveals. And that's where we go on the next part of this psalm. Psalm, flip the page, bing. Right? That's from the old picture books.
Collin Hansen:Verse 7, the law of the Lord is perfect. Oh, boy, our time is flying. Reviving the soul. The decrees of the lord are sure making wise the simple. The precepts of the lord are right, rejoice in the heart.
Collin Hansen:The commandment of the lord is clear, it enlightens the eyes. The fear of the lord is pure. It endures forever. The ordinances of the Lord are true and they're righteous altogether. They're more to be desired than gold, even much fine gold.
Collin Hansen:They're sweeter than the honey and the drippings of the honeycomb. So we move from general revelation, the heavens declaring the glory of God, to now special revelation and that is the law of the Lord. God has spoken. God has instructed us. God has talked.
Collin Hansen:God has revealed himself. And how has he revealed himself? He's revealed himself as creator and redeemer. He's the one who speaks and in an act of inner trinitarian self communication actually creates space. I don't I can't get my mind around this neither can you, but he creates space so that matter can be.
Collin Hansen:And he speaks and there's the world, and God creates. And also from that inner trinitarian, eternal life of communion, where God, and you know this by the way, God never was in his eternal life of communion with the father and the son and a mutual relationship of love by the effective power of the holy spirit. God was never needy in that. It was never like God said, boy, this, you know, the 2, you know, the the one person of the trinity saying to the other 2, you guys are great, but, you know, some humans wouldn't be bad. It kinda adds to the mix.
Collin Hansen:And there's some old spirituals that say this God sat and he was lonely and so he spoke. God was never lonely. He didn't create from the necessity of anything outside of himself. There was nothing outside of God's own being that can strain the creation and the redemption of the world. Nothing.
Collin Hansen:It was an overflow of love. It was an act of eternal kindness and self giving that God's inner Trinitarian of life of love turns to an outer expression of that love by the creation of the world and him setting himself onto humanity and saying, and I'm gonna redeem fallen humanity as well. God has revealed himself. He has spoken. And how has he done it?
Collin Hansen:He does it through his own instruction in the law. He does it primarily in the bible. And here's David saying, and that is sweet. I mean it enlightens the eyes, it's pure, it makes simple people wise. It's the instruction of God, and then he uses these beautiful metaphors.
Collin Hansen:It's better than the Bible. The instruction of God, it's better than gold. I mean, it's better than honey. It's better than sticking your finger in that viscous substance and putting it on your tongue, which I do that regularly in my house. I'm kind of on a honey phase right now.
Collin Hansen:Just incredible. Right? And and here, David says, god speaking, god talking, God communicating to us through the creative agents that gave us his word. It's better than gold and it's better than it's better than honey. So the question that we need to wrestle with before we ever talk about how to read the Bible.
Collin Hansen:That's my task tonight with the last 3 minutes that we have. Right? So the question that we raised before we ever asked to my mind how do we read the bible? The prior question is, what do we say that the bible actually is? What is it?
Collin Hansen:I teach languages for a living, it's part of the way I pay the bills. And those of you who are linguists and you know language, and I really don't consider myself a linguist. But, those of you know this, you realize that languages are language itself is a kind of flexible beast. Right? So for example, when I say the the phrase word of God or house of the king or chair of the mayor.
Collin Hansen:Right? I mean, when I say the what we call a genetidal phrase. When I give you a genetidal phrase with an of descriptor in there, I mean it's almost sky's the limit on what that might mean. I mean, it could mean, the word which is about God. It could be the word whose sources from God.
Collin Hansen:It could be the word which has as its content God or its goal. I mean there's a there's a flexibility here. But at the heart of all of these genitive relationships is possession. That's what I wanna focus on right now. Raising the question, what is the bible?
Collin Hansen:The Bible is the word of God in the sense that it's God's word. It's his. He gets to dispense with it as he wills. He oversees it. He supervenes in the life of the word.
Collin Hansen:He's the one who is declared by an act of self giving that this human medium, and we're gonna talk about that in a second, this creaturely document, black words on a white page. That that's the means by which he's gonna communicate to you the very presence of Jesus by the power of the holy spirit. And it's in his purview, it's under his providential guidance that he's gonna do it that way. Why is the bible the word of God? Because God says, this is my word.
Collin Hansen:God says, this is from me. 2nd Timothy 316, all scripture is God breathed. All of it comes from God. It's inspired from God, given to humanity as a gift from God, and he oversees it. One of my favorite texts describing this is Isaiah chapter 40.
Collin Hansen:Now I'm comfort comfort my people who handles messiah people can sort of hear the lilting side of that. Comfort comfort my people says your God. It's beautiful. This is on the far side of Israel's judgment. Now God is pouring out double grace on them.
Collin Hansen:Double pardon, double love, these are his people. And then you move on and it says, oh and by the way, the grass withers, the flower fades, all flesh is grass, but the word of God remains forever. This is something you might not have known about the book of Isaiah. After chapter 39 in the book of Isaiah, there is not one named prophet in the rest of the book, including Isaiah himself. No prophet shows up.
Collin Hansen:Think that's intentional. Why? Because Isaiah 40 is telling us, prophets, their flesh just like grass come up one day, cut down the next. But the word that the prophets give us, they last forever because they're mine. Right?
Collin Hansen:So this is the the kind of the scandal of the bible. Right now I'm gonna put it out there and we can talk about it as you want to. The scandal of the of the bible is we confess number 1, and this is a prior confession. This is gonna shape how I talk about the second point. But the first point is the Bible is God's word.
Collin Hansen:Through all the faceted character of the Bible, it's God's word. I mean think about it. You've got law, you've got story and narrative, you've got proverbs, general maxims for life, answer not a fool, answer a fool, raise up a kid the way he should, and you go, wow, that's all great except for when it does work out that way, but it's great, right? You've got a book like Job, which is a kind of anti wisdom book. You've got poetry.
Collin Hansen:You've got didactic literature. You've got discursive literature like Paul as he builds an argument from Romans chapter 9 into Romans chapter 10, into Romans chapter 11, and then he starts Romans chapter 12 with a therefore that's built off of everything that comes before, and you better get your notepad out and start diagramming something because that's didactic literature. That's left brain stuff. Me even Peter in the bible says, have you read Paul? He's kinda hard to understand.
Collin Hansen:She's got all that there. So in all of the diversity and the complexity and the profundity that the Bible and its creaturely character, we confess that God has given us that. But we also confess, and this goes back to the early 20th century in a figure named BB Warfield who's kind of the father of, I guess a conservative evangelical view on inspiration. Warfield argues very clearly and helpfully for what he calls an organic theory of inspiration. In other words, we don't need to think of the prophets or David when he's writing Psalm 51, or Moses when he's doing his work or Matthew or John or Paul or Peter or whoever.
Collin Hansen:Whoever the authors are the bible, we don't need to think that they went to just into some tantric state.
Connor Coskery:You know,
Collin Hansen:it's like the eyes kinda rolling back and, you and you read about this kind of thing from the prophets of in the Mesopotamian world. And and Warfield says, we don't need to think about the prophets in that way at all. God uses them in the full force of their personality in all the knowledge that they have. I mean, think about this. Think about Luke's gospel.
Collin Hansen:Remember what Luke says? Oh, by the way, I've done a thorough investigation of the sources. And I've done a lot of interviewing of eyewitnesses. I just want you to know that. So what's Luke saying?
Collin Hansen:Luke's saying, I'm I'm kind of a scholar. I I work that way. When I interviewed eyewitnesses, I looked at all the sources that I have, and this is the faithful account, Otheophilus, of what I have come to know in my study of the life of Jesus. And Warfield would say, God used Luke and his particular giftedness to do his work. I'm just gonna put it right out there for you.
Collin Hansen:Peter could not have written Paul's letters. I don't think he could have pulled it off. I just don't think he had it. But Paul wrote those letters with all the gifts that he brought. The poetry of David, the wisdom of Solomon working within.
Collin Hansen:Do you get the point? In other words, how much of the bible is creaturely? How much of it is human in its source? The answer is all of it. From Genesis all the way to the maps, as one of my colleagues would say.
Collin Hansen:Right? The whole thing is. And that's the beautiful scandal of the bible. God has sanctified. He set apart the human agents that wrote these words with all of the differentiation that we have here with all the variegated kinds of literature, the different genres that are here, God sets them apart and says, I claim these works by the power of my holy spirit in both their genesis and how they were written, and the way in which they were received and collected and shaped.
Collin Hansen:I'm setting this apart to be my unique means by which I communicate my very self to humanity. And that's why you have letters for that Paul wrote in very specific occasions to the church at Colossi, or the church at Ephesus, or the church at Rome. And I imagine you hear sermons on Sunday mornings from Romans. Or what are you guys in right now? You guys doing a book and John.
Collin Hansen:Right? Here's John. You know, and there was a big fuss John scholars for years. I think this sort of moved away now, but they thought there was a Johannine community. And the Johannine literature reflected the particular theological outlook of the Johannine community that was shaped by that particular 1st century world.
Collin Hansen:And and now but but you read John and you're and pastor Joel or whoever's preaching to you is preaching John as if that has something to say to you right now. I mean that's craziness. Right? John's gospel written in the 1st century world is speaking right into the current moment to you on Sunday morning. Why?
Collin Hansen:Because God says, this is my word and it's not locked in time. It's born out of time. But it's not locked in time. I've set it apart to be the unique means by which I continue to communicate myself. So we'll talk about that more if you want to.
Collin Hansen:So because, and let me see where my time is. Oh, plenty of time. So because this is the case, because the bible is God's word, because we confess that in its creaturely form, God uses these documents to communicate himself in the multiplied and variegated ways in which he does here, that puts you and I in a very important posture. And that posture is one of dependence on the operative work of the Holy Spirit. This is a reformation principle and it's one for me that has been life giving and frankly helpful with some of the intellectual hurdles that one might have with the bible, and that is this.
Collin Hansen:We confess the necessary conjoining of word, that's this, and spirit. I cannot have the one without the other. Can I may I hope this isn't provocative because it's completely orthodox what I'm about to say, but maybe you never heard of this way? But I'll tell you without the operative work of the holy spirit to open minds and hearts to read these words as God's very own word. Without the operative work of the Holy Spirit, the bibles that you care and would carry in whatever leather bound form you do, those bibles are black words on a white page.
Collin Hansen:The necessary conjoining of word and spirit. God has given us his word and he's promised us his spirit. And for all the weirdness of the bible and and let let me you you do you read it? Right? I mean, there's weird stuff in there.
Collin Hansen:And you've got crazy texts like God trying to kill Moses and then Zipporah, his wife, whips out a circumcision kit on the spot, circumcises her son, rubs the blood on Moses. God's not angry no more. Next verse, they meet Aaron. They're on their way to Egypt like, what in the heck just happened? Alright.
Collin Hansen:I'm lost. You know, our Genesis chapter 32. Here's Jacob by a river all by himself in an act of enormous courage and his wife and kids and everybody else ahead of him. So well well played there, Jacob. And, he's by himself at the river Jabach, and and, and he's wrestling with God.
Collin Hansen:And here's the scandalous part, Jewish interpreters in the medieval period, read this in very crafty ways to avoid this problem. What's the problem with that text? Well, Jacob's got God in a full Nelson. God can't get out. Right?
Collin Hansen:Now I'm I mean, you've got weird stuff in the bible and it comes to us in that way. And for all of the challenges that we have culturally with the Greco Roman world or the ancient and eastern world, what's a cow of Bashan? What's a lily of the valley? What's a rose of Sharon? And what's the significance of that?
Collin Hansen:What's Megiddo and how is that important? All these kinds of things. The Christian tradition has never treated the bible as if it has a problem of being something locked in the past. Because it's understood that the gap between the ancient new eastern world with the greco woman world and the early 21st century world is a gap that is collapsed by the promised presence of Jesus through the operative work of the Holy Spirit, and that puts you and me in a position of enormous dependence on the work of God to make the bible happen. I don't know how else to say that.
Collin Hansen:I'm very sophisticated, but I'll just say it. The bible does not happen without the operative work of God. And that's why we come in to church and in our personal bible study, and in our family time, whatever you do that, and we do that like once a month if God helps us. Right? Whenever you do it, you hope and you trust because God has given him himself to us in a promise that he's gonna do it again.
Collin Hansen:He's gonna show up again and communicate the gospel of life to us again through this document. So you want to know how to read the Bible? Here you go. You read it in an act of dependence. You see, I bet if I were to poll you before this lecture started tonight, and I, you know, I teach I teach Hebrew to students.
Collin Hansen:God bless them. Right? We parse verbs together in a class. I mean, how boring is that? We would do that.
Collin Hansen:Parse that verb, wrong, next, right? And you know, just do that all the time. You know, so I I mean, we we we get this. But we, I think if left to our own devices, we would think that the ant the first answer to the question of how we read the Bible is gonna be a methodological answer. I'm gonna give you a method.
Collin Hansen:I'm gonna tell you. You do this. You observe. You listen. You ask questions.
Collin Hansen:You write this down that you diagram, Kay Arthur inductive study Bible, whatever, you know, however you do it. And all of that is great. I'm not I'm not downplaying any of that, but it's not the way the Christian tradition has put its first foot forward in answering that question. The answer that Augustine gives us, and Anselm gives us, and Luther gives us, and Calvin, and Cranmer, and a homily of on reading the bible from the late 16th century, every one of them would say, do you wanna read the Bible and avoid error? Do you wanna come to the Bible and be a good reader of it?
Collin Hansen:The kind of reader, by the way, that the Bible anticipates having. Then you come with a spirit of humility. You come low. The virtuous reader that says, I'm coming to the Bible. Weird as it is, this is what Augustine says, this is what Karl Barth says, that the Bible in its least assimilable and most difficult parts has more important and better things to say than the best of our theological constructions.
Collin Hansen:I'm gonna believe that's true, even in the weird stuff. And I'm gonna come, I'm gonna submit my mind, I'm gonna submit my emotions, I'm gonna submit my will, I'm gonna submit my intellectual autonomy at the foot of the bible. And an openness to doing what God tells me to do there. Responding to the gospel and being free to live in the freedom that comes from that. That's what the Christian tradition says is how you avoid error in reading the Bible.
Collin Hansen:I just don't think that's the way in which we would typically answer that question getting right out of the gate. I tell the students at Beeson, and this was a shift for me. Right? That the most important character trait of the reader of the Bible, whether it's a preacher, whether it's an elder, whether it's a home group leader, whether it's you on the porch in the morning. Right?
Collin Hansen:That the most important character trait of the reader of the bible is responsibility, not necessarily accuracy. Because our understanding of texts, our ability to engage them, our ability to read them in fuller ways because you know that as you become a deeper person, you bring deeper questions to the Bible. And in that act of interlocution as you grow, well, the primary character trait is that of of responsibility. And the most important tool that you take to the task of reading the bible more than any bible study methods course you take and take everyone you can. I'm not downplaying that.
Collin Hansen:But the most important tool that you take as a reader of the bible, given what we confess the bible to be, is prayer. I mean, it's like the nose on our face. How anticlimactic is that? But how life giving and important it is to recognize that prayer is the essential character trait of the reader of God's word. Karl Barth in a very helpful turn of phrase said and he goes on the offensive here, not only is prayer the most important character trait of the reader of God's word, but it's also the primary means by which we avoid being disobedient readers of God's word.
Collin Hansen:That's going on the offensive. Wanna be an obedient reader? We go with humility and prayer. Remember what Mark Twain said. Right?
Collin Hansen:I thought this is I think Twain was brilliant. It's not the parts of the bible that I don't understand that bother me. It's the parts that I do that bother me. And I think this is where the Christian tradition comes in and says that's what submission to the authority of the bible because we're submitting to the authority of Jesus looks like. I'm gonna let my mind, I'm gonna seek to allow my affections, I'm gonna seek to allow by God's grace, my will, my chooser to be shaped by the authority of God's word and not vice versa.
Collin Hansen:And Cranmer and Luther, Calvin and Anselm and Augustine and the whole of the biblical tradition itself would say amen to that. Alright? Well, let's take a break. Right? Is that what I'm supposed to do?
Collin Hansen:Okay.
Speaker 3:To your point on the most important character characteristic of a reader of the bible is prayer. And this might be my methodical mindset trying to grasp hold of this, but, in what ways? I mean, what, when you approach that prayer, is it are you asking for certain things? As how is that prayer exercised in a way to, be most effective when you're reading it? Or how does how is prayer of, you know, around, the reading of the bible, so as to be approached?
Collin Hansen:Yeah. Good question. My my sense of that is and I'm I'm very shaped on this particular subject matter by the 20th century theologian named Karl Barth, and I'm a have to talk about him if anybody wants to press into that. But Barth, described the theological task as prayer and labor. So what what does it mean to do theology?
Collin Hansen:Or to your question, what does it mean to read the Bible? It's prayer and it's work. But it's not prayer and work a I prayed, and now I'm into it. It's it's That that's a rather mechanistic view on what's going on. Instead, I think Barth conceives of the entire project of the labor of bible reading as itself done within the posture of prayer.
Collin Hansen:So in others, I I think we probably have to have and I I'm I'm a bad prayer. You know, I really need to go to church. I I heard Jim Gaffigan, interviewed. You know, he opened for the pope, when the pope visited the US and had a great interview with Terry Gross. I mean, if you haven't heard, it's well worth listening to.
Collin Hansen:And and she said, you you know his his show, the Gaffigan show that he's done? Anyway, he plays a nominal Catholic on that that goes to church but kind of in a begrudging way, and and Terry Gross said, but you're not really that kind of Catholic. I said, no. I'm actually a pretty serious Catholic, and I go every Sunday. But he said, but I want you to know.
Collin Hansen:I go because I know I'm really bad, and and I need God's mercy. That's why I'm there every Sunday. And so I would say, you know, I need to be in church praying with other Christians because I I need help in my prayer life. So but I think the point about prayer is not so much a certain kind of prayer that one makes as it is a posture that, you know, toss out a Latin phrase, which is gonna be obscure, but but all of this is done, coram deo. All of this is done in the presence of God.
Collin Hansen:My whole activity because why? I mean, this was asked last night. Someone asked a really penetrating question that was kinda personal last night, and and I was like, I'm still thinking about it. But, but but the the the question is, I don't I don't want to make a division between my heart and my mind. I don't wanna live with that kind of at least I don't wanna live with that as a, at least I guess on the abstract level as as a necessary reality.
Collin Hansen:That I'm thinking for Jesus, I think this way. But then I wanna feel for Jesus and have an affection for him, that's over here. That kind of dichotomy, is dangerous. And frankly, with the kind of work that I do and people who are ordained in ministry and they do God for a living, there are real dangers involved in that. I live with that.
Collin Hansen:I struggle with that. I'm not clean on that issue. But I think instead of trying to think of it in terms of, I want you to pray this. Lord, illumine my mind. Make sure my heart is clean.
Collin Hansen:I can you know that. And I hope you do all those things. I don't I don't know what you're gonna say, you know, but I'm coming at this from a posture saying, when I'm reading this, it is beyond my purview and beyond the abilities of my human control to make this happen. So, God, I'm coming in anticipation, joyful anticipation that you're gonna do it. And by the way, that does not mean a this is not a kind of displacement of the use of your intellect, the use of your skills, the bettering of your skills.
Collin Hansen:Come take a class of beasts, and if you wanna take Hebrew, come take it with me. Right? I mean, that that will make you a better reader of the Bible, I think, And it could cut off a few years of purgatory for you. I mean, if if Hebrew is gonna be the language of heaven, might as well learn it now. I mean, why not?
Collin Hansen:Or else you're going to purgatory. So I'll see you in, you know, 10000 years. So I'm joking about that, by the way. You don't know me. I don't believe that.
Collin Hansen:So I A posture
Speaker 3:a posture of receiving. Receiving.
Collin Hansen:A posture of receiving. A posture of openness. A posture of yearning, of hope. Romans chapter 15 verse 3, God wrote these things in the former times for our encouragement. God wrote these things in past times to meet us in this time.
Collin Hansen:We recall, this is all with the Psalter. We recall the mighty deeds of God to encourage us in the dryness of the moment now in anticipation that he will do it again in the future. It's that kind of continuum that I think we're drawn into. And if you don't think of the Bible and engaging God as a dramatic and dynamic activity, then I think that's where we need to have some sort of click, on how we conceive of what the whole task is about. I think that's what I'm trying to get at.
Collin Hansen:I don't know if that's what you're asking. I see that hand. I grew up fundamentalist so I love saying that. I never get to say it. I I went I was I preach at a Baptist church in Madison.
Collin Hansen:Is that right outside of Huntsville? So I preach at a Baptist church there, and this was a kind of quasi liberalish kind of Baptist church. It wasn't, you know, the kind of Baptist church I grew up in, which is a real Baptist church. And, and, and I've met with the minister before I preached the sermon, and she said, would you like offer the call? This was I was at Red Mountain Church at the time, so in a Presbyterian church.
Collin Hansen:And I said, offer the what? And she said, the call, you know, what if you wanna invite people to come forward and to get saved. And I said, I said, ma'am, I'm a Presbyterian. We're not really worried if people get saved or not. And she she she looked at me like anyway, it didn't go over well.
Collin Hansen:So I see that hand. Yes.
Speaker 4:What would you say to someone who who claims to, read the Bible daily and pray daily that the Lord would reveal himself to them, but knows that the Bible is not real and not true?
Collin Hansen:Yes. That is, that's a question that touches a deep nerve for me actually. You know, I have a friend that I went to seminary with a groomsman who he's now back in the faith but went through about a 15 year period where he just could belief couldn't be sustained for him anymore. There's a lot to that question that would demand a certain kind of knowledge of the specific situation involved. Okay.
Collin Hansen:So in other words, there's no cookie cutter answer to that. This is a pastoral issue that would demand a relationship and a certain kind of knowledge of what's going on in the particular. So to give a generalized answer to this is a really dangerous thing, but I'm I'll give a generalized answer. My generalized answer is and this again is because of what I confessed to be true about God and because I'm hopeful about it. And that is, and this comes out of the Westminster Confession of Faith, God can reveal himself to humanity in a saving way any way God wants to.
Collin Hansen:I mean that's why he gets to be God and we're not. Right? I had a southern baptist missionary speaking to the faculty at Beeson Divinity School and we're this is a non charismatic group. They don't believe in the gifts of tongues and that kind of thing. You know, so we're talking about a pretty conservative lot here and he said in his 20 years of ministry to Muslims in the 10:40 window, he never met one convert from Islam to Christianity that did not convert because they had some dream where Jesus appeared to them.
Collin Hansen:And I would be foolish to, in any way, cast aspersions on that. God can do whatever god wants to do in extraordinary ways especially in emergency situations like that. But the ordinary way that God communicates his self giving and his gospel word to humanity is through the preaching of the word and the offering of the sacraments in the life of the church, what we call the means of grace. It's ordinary but it's extraordinary. I would say to the person and that and what an honest thing to say.
Collin Hansen:I'm reading the bible and it's not does nothing for me. There's nothing going on here. Right? My answer would be, do that kind of wrestling. Do that kind of doubting.
Collin Hansen:Do that kind of angsty existence as you think through these things. Inside the sacramental and teaching life of the church, not outside of it. Put yourself in a position where God can by the power of his spirit open up your heart to believe. I'm gonna give you this this is gonna you're gonna think I'm b s ing you. Alright?
Collin Hansen:But it's one of my favorite stories from my church where I go to, and it was one of those stories that happened. I was teaching a class walking out the door. How long have you been here? I've been here since I was 3, and the guy's 70, that kind of thing. You know?
Collin Hansen:A lot of that at the Advent, and we're walking out and I just and then we start chatting. And he's and I said, well, how long have you been in the advent? He said, forever. He says, but I've only been a Christian for about 15 years. Well now my ears are perked up.
Collin Hansen:I'm like really? I'd like to hear that. And this gentleman with a deep and sincere faith, like you could just see the joy of the lord on this man's countenance. He said, I came to church every week for years. And when we got to the apostle's creed or the nicene creed, I wouldn't say it because I knew I was being dishonest.
Collin Hansen:I just didn't say it. I couldn't say I believe in god the father almighty. I could not put that in the first person. And so for years, I'd come to church and I'd go and listen to the preaching, and I I I wouldn't take the sacrament. I would go to Sunday school, and I did all of that, but I wasn't a Christian.
Collin Hansen:And then one Sunday, I said it and I became a Christian. And I believed that Nicene Creed, that Apostle's Creed, that's I believe that to be true. God regenerated that man's heart. Right? And where was he?
Collin Hansen:He was in church. Now he put he was now I don't know if he had that strategy. He probably went to church between us friends here. He probably went to church at the advent because, you know, he's got a membership of the Birmingham country club and he's on the rotary and you go to the advent. It's kinda what you do when you're in that, you know, I just, maybe so.
Collin Hansen:But he was converted there. So I think my answer to that would be, you know, to put yourself in a position, you know, and there's so many stories about this. You know, c s Lewis saying I was the most reluctant convert in all of England. I came kicking and screaming. Just God can do amazing things so I would put yourself in the position, especially if you're a genuine seeker to put yourself in a position in the sacramental and preaching life of the church to to, to receive his ordinary yet extraordinary revelation.
Collin Hansen:I think that's my that's my generalized answer. You wanna press back? Thank you. It's a great question. Really is.
Collin Hansen:Great question. It touches me deeply. I it's a great question.
Speaker 5:I'm kind of a plant, but you talked yesterday about, inerrancy and the the term inerrancy and the way we should receive it. Would you kinda give some of the same information about that term and its value and its lack of value or whatever it has in today's community and the way we should understand what it means when we someone says the Bible is inerrant and asks us whether we believe that?
Collin Hansen:Okay. So when you hear the word the Bible is inerrant, I'm curious. I'm doing a little poll here. How what how many of you that means something to you? Like, you know what that's about and you get some of the cultural how many of you are like well, okay.
Collin Hansen:You don't have to raise your hand, you don't. Okay. This is a kinda hot theological debate within, particularly within American evangelical life. K? And by the way, that's my mama.
Collin Hansen:Okay? I know that I'm talking this is my team that I play for. I I consider myself an evangelical, and I happen to be an American. So I'm I'm in this conversation. Inerrancy is a claim, that the bible does not make any errors in anything that it claims, whether it's historical or scientific or whatever it is.
Collin Hansen:And this has created all kinds of debates and struggles within the life of the church. I mean, for example, Paul, was Paul Ptolemaic or Copernican in his view of the world? You know, was the earth at the center, or was the sun at the center for Paul? Does Genesis chapter 1 and 2 present for us a kind of scientific model of how the world came to be? And I mean, all these questions are raised that, and you know this.
Collin Hansen:I mean, in the 1960s and the '70s and the '80s, I mean, these these were hot conversations, and they still are. So I'll say a few things about this. Number 1, I do believe that the Bible and everything that it claims is true. Where I get nervous about the term inerrancy is that it tends to function on the level of counterfactual. It pushes the bible in the corner to where the bible has to be It pushes the Bible in the corner to where the Bible has
Connor Coskery:to be defensive, and now the Bible typically has
Collin Hansen:to answer questions, especially modern questions that maybe the Bible's not all that interested in answering. And so that's where for me, there's a couple of things that I have to clarify. And I should say on the front end, I can sign a statement that says inerrancy with good cons in good conscience.
Connor Coskery:I I
Collin Hansen:can do that. But I would prefer having a big long conversation about that, so that you know what I'm talking about. Because what I'm talking about are 2 things. Number 1, I would never personally link the authority of the bible to a conversation about its inerrancy. And that was really kind of what happened in the seventies and the eighties in American evangelical life, and that makes me very uncomfortable theologically.
Collin Hansen:Because the Bible is authoritative because God says it so, not because I can cross every t and dot every I to make it line up with whatever questions modernity wants to ask of it. Did Jesus die on Thursday or did Jesus die on Friday? Did, Judas Iscariot die, by throwing himself off a cliff, or did he hang himself and die, or did the tree branch break and he fell off a cliff? I mean, that's what you know, why do we do this? Is David squeaky clean, the book of chronicles, Or is David a rip roaring mess, the book of Samuel?
Collin Hansen:And which one's true and which one's false? And it's as if the bible kinda looks at these questions and goes, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm I'm not interested in answering the questions in the way in which you're framing them. So to me, the Bible is authoritative in the life of the church because God deems it to be authoritative from beginning to end, not because of whether or not it's inerrant or not. I'd say that first of all.
Collin Hansen:And the second thing I wanna say is, I'm not working with any preconceived notion of what error actually is. Now this is where my logic is circular. I I I'll grant that to you but this is where my logic is circular. The bible if the bible is doing it and whatever it's doing and whatever it's claiming, then it's not an error. So that means that my conception of error has to change.
Collin Hansen:For example, if I find out that, no, the troops of Sennacherib of the Neo Assyrian kingdom that came down all the way up to the gates of Jerusalem that were killed were actually 225,308, not a 180,000 as it says in the bible. I will sleep fine tonight because truth doesn't have to equal precision. To me, that's very important. Moreover, and this is another thing, to claim that whatever the Bible claims about itself is true is not the same thing as saying and it's self evident what the Bible's claiming here, here, here, and here. There's multiple room for debate regarding what the Bible is claiming about multiple issues.
Collin Hansen:Your church does not ordain women. I don't think. Are you guys no. Don't ordain women to the ministry. I don't think you do.
Collin Hansen:I I maybe you do. But I don't think you My church does. You know, well, guess what? There are kind of bible verses to support both. K?
Collin Hansen:What's your view on divorce and remarriage? Well, God bless you on that because the bible's complicated on that issue. What about the bible's view on child rearing? Your particular method. What does the bible have to say about letting your little girl cry it out at night?
Collin Hansen:Right? Yeah. Then that nothing. Zilchow. Right?
Collin Hansen:So, I mean, I'm just saying that, you know, we have to to to claim that the Bible is true and what it claims about itself is not the same thing as saying, and I'm assured and confident that I understand in every situation what it's claiming. Think there's room for interpretive debates and a parameter of options for trying to come to terms with what the Bible is claiming in the totality of its witness. Now I'm gonna be provocative here. Every heretic in the life of the church had a bible verse on his or her side. When I'm feeling a little naughty at Beeson, I'll tell my students, you do realize that the exegesis of the bible is the first road to heresy.
Collin Hansen:Right? Why? I mean, Arius, Proverbs 8's on my side. These statements where Jesus says, I don't know something. I mean, all of that's claiming that the second person, Jesus, whoever he is, cannot be this God in the same way that God is.
Collin Hansen:Got Bible verses there. And the Orthodox tradition that I put myself in, and you do too because you wanna go to heaven, do you all, they respond by saying, you can't pick 1 verse to the exclusion of the totality of the biblical witness. You've got to know the mind of the Bible and its totality. That's the beautiful and hard work of Christian theology and Christian preaching. So that was a long answer to the the inerrancy thing.
Collin Hansen:I I don't think inerrancy I mean, and boy, I didn't say it this way last night, but I'll say it now. It doesn't do a lot positively for me when it comes to my doctrine of the Bible. But my confession about who God is and the relationship of the word of God to the word of God Jesus of Nazareth, those to me carry a lot of freight to build a sort of a proper trinitarian account of what the Bible is and how God is using it in his divine economy. I'll repeat it.
Speaker 4:Allow me to play devil's advocate. Sure.
Collin Hansen:I'm
Speaker 4:actually devil's advocate here.
Collin Hansen:Yep.
Speaker 4:And say that in one of your statements was that
Collin Hansen:I retract it.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You're right. You're saying that the the Bible
Collin Hansen:Yeah.
Speaker 4:The fact that god used man's word and sanctified it.
Collin Hansen:Yeah.
Connor Coskery:And
Speaker 4:spoke through all these different guys, various the bible. My question is, where does the buck stop? Because there are so many pieces of literature about god that are inspired through humans. Is it just like from cover to cover that's the bible in your view? How do we take all this modern writing on god and who he is, and how do we share
Connor Coskery:the world?
Collin Hansen:Yeah. That's a good question. And it's and it's frankly one of questions that, you know, in the late 19th century, the early 20th century was all centered around. What do we mean when we say that the Bible is is inspired? You wanna tell me that, I don't know, Jane Austen wasn't inspired in some way or George Eliot or TS Eliot?
Collin Hansen:I mean, you know, what's going on? So it's a good question. Couple of things to say here. Number 1, the claim about the Bible and the books that we have in the Western Christian tradition, these 66 books, it's not necessarily a claim about the quality of their literary achievement. I hope this isn't offensive to you, but Cicero is better than 2nd kings.
Collin Hansen:TS Eliot's poetry is probably better than David's. And I was I'm not making a claim about the literary quality here as that is the kind of rationalized account for why this literature is special over against the other. This is a question about canon. This is a question about a recognition that in the life of the church, and I'm fully Protestant here and I swallowed all the Protestant Jews, k, on this one. But the Christian church has recognized, number 1, with the old testament, it receives as canonical that which is unique and special to the synagogue as well.
Collin Hansen:That's important to me. The synagogue, the why? They're the they're the trade. They're the heirs. They're the receivers of God's covenant, and Paul's very clear on this.
Collin Hansen:So the fact that and but you know this true. The New Testament and its compositional history, the early church never operated without a canon. Despite the fact that we wrestle with when was the New Testament all figured out? No. Well, despite that question, the Old Testament was assumed as canonical from beginning of the church's existence, in the apostolic period.
Collin Hansen:I mean, even Jesus on the road to Emmaus, proves his own identity and significance on the basis of the law of the prophets and the Psalms. Hans von Compenhausen, 20th century Bible guy, he said, the problem in the early church was not what do we do with the Hebrew scriptures now that we have Jesus. It was actually the reverse. How do we understand Jesus And what's happened to us in this apocalyptic unveiling of Jesus of Nazareth, how do we understand him in light of the assumed and interior authority of our Hebrew scriptures? And it was the old testament that provided the early church the grammar book and the ABCs to begin to talk about Jesus and his relationship to the identity of God.
Collin Hansen:And then when it comes to the new testament, the new testament books that are received as canonical, recognizing that there are fuzziness, there are fuzzy issues at the margins, but these books were received not because they were determined to be canonical, but because they were recognized as apostolic and canonical. There was a pressure that was put on the early church in a recognition of the unique character of the fourfold gospel, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Do you realize that the codices, the book form that we all take for granted now, most likely had its genesis in the world so that the fourfold gospel could be put together and housed together and traveled together. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It's incredible actually.
Collin Hansen:Then you have Acts functioning as a bridge into the Pauline letters and then you've got these general epistles that a lot of people debated. Is James in or is James out? But what about the shepherd of Hermas, in or out? So there's some debate that went on in the early church, and I and I and by the way, these are debates that are alive and well between Protestants and Roman Catholics to this day. This this is not necessarily a settled issue on the scope of the canon.
Collin Hansen:Now a Roman Catholic would say 2nd Maccabees and Tobit and Ecclesiasticus thumbs up. Protestants, and I put myself in this category because of the Jewish thing, tend to go thumbs down. So it's an alive issue, but the recognition of these books as canonical and inspired has to do with the kind of recognition of their authority. Something that something that is pressurized and internal to them because of their unique location in Israel's life and because of their unique witnessing cap capabilities to, the person work of Jesus. John's gospel ends rather fascinatingly.
Collin Hansen:Many other things that Jesus do so much that could be written to the sun and back. You remember the statement right? Now I for years read that as a superlative. In other words, if I just had the time and if I could just afford the papyrus, we could just go on for hours. Right?
Collin Hansen:Right. That's that's kinda how I was gonna talk. I I don't think that anymore. I actually think that that's a statement of negation, not a superlative. And and we see this now in our time.
Collin Hansen:Right? We gospel of Judas, that thing was talked about in the early church, but we never saw it. Bingo. Here it is now. Right?
Collin Hansen:Gospel of Mary Magdalene, gospel of Thomas, all these gnostic gospels floating around. I think the ending of the gospel of John is the ending to the 4 fold gospel and it's a statement of negation saying, you know what? Jesus did do lots of other things and books could be written about it. But these are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God. It's a statement about their unique role and the special privilege status that the 4 fold gospel had to communicate Jesus and his gospel.
Collin Hansen:So I I mean, it's a great question, and it's an alive question. I'm not not it's an alive question. It's a dynamic one, but it's, it's a fascinating one.
Connor Coskery:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Can you unpack the statement you made near the end of your talk that it's more important to approach scripture with responsibility than with accuracy? Can you just kinda go into that a little bit more?
Collin Hansen:Sure. And and I don't mean to downplay, was there some baggage with that? I I don't need mean to downplay the importance of bringing the best of our critical faculties and tools to the text so that we try to be accurate. Now, I mean, it's so I'm not downplaying that. But what I mean by that is our understanding of certain text change over time or at least have the potential to.
Collin Hansen:I'll give you an example of this. I had a certain reading of Romans 7 that in my twenties, I I mean, I argued. I was on I was a youth pastor for 5 years, which by the way sure is my election. But, I was a youth director for 5 years, and I talked talked with and and my pastor preached through Romans. He preached Romans 7.
Collin Hansen:He followed a certain interpretation, which now I actually think is right, but at that time, boy, he and I just would get in. I was like, no. Peter, you're wrong. I mean, that is not the right reading. I've got colleagues who think it's not the right reading even to this day, and I've I've shifted my view on that.
Collin Hansen:I I don't I think that Paul is saying something different than what I used to think he was saying. Why? Because there's a lot of the bible that's hard. There's a lot of the bible that's obscure. You know, Augustine beautifully said in his book on teaching Christian doctrine, he said, the bible is clear enough for children to be able to read it and to make some sense of what God's about in the gospel.
Collin Hansen:My kids can read it and get some of it. But it's also complicated enough to give people like me a job. Right? All these years later. So I mean, I think that's what I mean by the sort of responsibility.
Collin Hansen:You bring the best of the tools that you have in service to the word. You think of yourself as a servant of the word. I say that to my students about preaching. You know, I I don't wanna downplay the importance of rhetoric and using a good story and crafting a good argument and outline. All of that's very important, but the question that you have to ask as a preacher is, does the word serve my words or are my words serving the word?
Collin Hansen:That's an important question for a preacher to ask, I think. Why? Well, because that's an act of responsibility. I'm a servant to this, not vice versa. And I'm open to being corrected.
Collin Hansen:I'm open to learning. I'm open to being challenged, and I'm gonna try to do the best I can with the tools that I have, trusting that God, like Luther's dream, can use the lips of a bumbling creature to communicate his very word to humanity. That that I think that's what I mean by that.
Speaker 7:You you mentioned earlier, some of the passages of, the Bible where, we we just don't know why they're there or what necessarily they mean. And and, I I was wondering, you know, when you when you do your day to day bible reading or whenever you do that, you can sometimes come across these passages and
Connor Coskery:I'm I'm
Collin Hansen:not great at
Speaker 8:it, Josh.
Speaker 7:Week to week. But what role do you think that commentary should play in in regular scripture reading?
Collin Hansen:Okay. Good question. And, you know, Augustine, by the way, had, I think, the best answer to that, the first part of your question. Why are these weird parts in the Bible? You know what his answer was?
Collin Hansen:To keep us humble. I I think it's what a wonderful answer. To keep some when you figure out Exodus 4, send me an email. I'd like to know. I've got some instincts there, but it's certainly not unpacking everything that's going on Exodus 4.
Collin Hansen:And the list of that can can kinda go on. What are what what's Paul talking about baptism for the dead in Corinthians? Well, let me know when you figure that out. Right? So the obscure parts are certainly there, but your second the second part sort of the role of commentaries.
Collin Hansen:I mean this is, you know, this is where Calvin makes a distinction between, pastors and the doctors of the church. A pastor is someone that's a servant of the word in a localized setting like Redeemer Community Church. Whereas a doctor of the church is someone that does his or her work for a larger audience. In other words, the teaching ministry goes beyond a localized level to a larger audience. And I see commentary literature at its best as a species of that kind of doctoring activity.
Collin Hansen:So it should be used as a gift. You know, it it, it's it's the teach of the role of teachers in the life of the church. And it's teachers, I consider myself a teacher.
Connor Coskery:I
Collin Hansen:mean, I'm just, that's my, that's how God's hardwired me. And those are the gifts that he's given me,
Connor Coskery:and that's what I get to do for a living.
Collin Hansen:I mean, I can't believe it, but I get to do it for a living. And so that teaching gift in the life of the church, God gives some to be teachers, he gives some to be apostles, some to be preachers, some to be this. I mean, those commentaries can be gifts of Christians who are using their particular giftedness to serve the larger church. So I would say use them. I mean, open up a commentary.
Collin Hansen:You come across some weird metaphor in Psalms? I mean, pull one off and say, well, what is that talking about? Probably more realistic are these study Bibles. I mean, I have all these little quotes at the bottom. It's a good thing to remember.
Collin Hansen:The inspiration in your study Bibles immediately stops where the footnotes begin. I just want you to remember that. But I mean, they can be very, very helpful. So I'd say we use all of those tools. Now that was my positive claim.
Collin Hansen:Here's my negative claim. You know, most commentaries that we pull off the shelf today are so driven by historically conscious matters. Uncovering Greco Roman worlds, parsing Greek verbs and Hebrew verbs, and telling you a little bit about Mesopotamian religious myths, and all that can be very helpful. But when it comes to pressing into the subject matter of the Bible, pressing into the the dynamic of what who God is and what God is communicating about himself into the life of the church in these moments, I will say most modern commentators, I don't care evangelical or not, tend to be really anemic at that, not good at that. And that's where I would encourage you to go to the tradition.
Collin Hansen:I mean, pull Luther off the off the shelf or Calvin off the shelf, or in the 20th century, Carl Barth off the shelf. I mean, pull some of these theologians who are doing their work not for the academy, but they're thinking in intellectually robust ways, but they're thinking about the bible as an act of theological engagement. And that's a resource that made that tribe of bible commentary writing increase in droves because it's hard to find.
Speaker 8:I mean, I'll give
Collin Hansen:you an example of this. One of my first preaching opportunities was in my early twenties. I was gonna preach through Hebrews 11. I was a Bible major undergrad, so I'd taken some Greek, and I was so excited, man. Just chomping at the bit.
Collin Hansen:Got my greek bible out, got my lexicons out, got my my my my my MacArthur commentary, f f Bruce, you know. I mean all these big big names are all here and I'm starting to work through it and I had a crisis. I'll never forget it. Big crisis. Because I realized that all I could do in my sermon was describe the bible.
Collin Hansen:Faith is this and Abraham was this and that's that. I might tell a story or a little, but I knew that I wasn't giving anything that was exhortative. There was no thus saith the lord. There was no dynamic moment of bringing this text from an aspect of just mere description into a prescriptive account of what this means in the life of the church now. Right?
Collin Hansen:But know how to do that. And I'm gonna tell you what, f f Bruce didn't help me zilcho on that. Right? So I think that's a real challenge for us to think about what Commentaries can actually do. And finding good ones is hard, I think.
Collin Hansen:Yes, sir.
Speaker 7:To to take that question further, what would you say in terms of
Collin Hansen:The question was and tell me if I got this right. Number 1, how does our situatedness you know, where we're located, how does that shape the kinds of questions that we bring to reading the bible?
Connor Coskery:And what
Speaker 8:was the other part? Situationist.
Collin Hansen:Yeah. Okay. So and how do you apply it, right, given that? So, and I didn't talk about this last night, but I and I'm glad you brought this up because I didn't wanna talk about it tonight. And it's the category of wisdom.
Collin Hansen:And it goes back to the the issue that I talked about earlier with divorce or remarriage and kid raising all that. I mean, you do realize, right, that the Bible doesn't come to you with a neatly packaged doctrine of anything. That doesn't mean I don't believe the Bible is doctrinal from beginning to the end, but in a nicer you wanna know about your view on the identity of God? Here it is. Page 373 through 392.
Collin Hansen:Right? It doesn't do that. It takes a lot of wisdom, to know about applying the Bible and that certainly morphs and changes over time. It's the importance of the community of faith. It's the importance of your elders and your pastor.
Collin Hansen:It's the important of your small group coming together to seek the mind of God collectively. Now I'll give you an example of this, and this is telling on myself, and it's a good confession. Actually, I'm I'll feel much better after I get off my chest. But, you know, I was an elder at Red Mountain Church for 4 years. I had undergrad degree in bible.
Collin Hansen:I've got a master of divinity degree and I've got a PhD in bible. I mean, I am a bible geek from beginning to end. And they asked me, would you consider being an elder? And I had a little pastoral experience too. I said, and and you know, I I I promise you, this was not on the frontal lobe.
Collin Hansen:Okay? It wasn't. But I'm sure somewhere in my subconscious, I thought, you know, I actually have something to bring to the table here. And, so I come to the first meeting, and I I do what you're supposed to do when you're a new elder. You know, I didn't say anything the first meeting.
Collin Hansen:I just listened and didn't say but, but I knew I'm I'm ready. I'm getting revved up. I'm a start contributing. Okay? And we had pastoral crises that arose, it seems like, every other week, but big ones.
Collin Hansen:Big ones, right, going on. And I remember hearing these and thinking, I have no idea what to say about that. And then, a doctor, friend of mine, 20 years my senior, been in the church for a long time, a lover of God's word, He starts to talk into the situation, and it's insightful. It's has an incredible perspective. It's laced with wisdom.
Collin Hansen:Then the guy sitting next to him is a real estate agent in town. No MDiv. Begins to think through, well, what about the scriptures here and the situation from this angle? And all of a sudden, it's like I'm seeing it, the activity of the wisdom of God in the group dynamic of the life of the church, thinking through how to apply the scriptures in this complicated situation. We need that.
Collin Hansen:You know, there's no individual soul interpreter. We need that, and we're better together wrestling with this and the kind of friction that comes from that. And I think all that's very important. Our situatedness, you know, well, we can't escape it. You know, my wife and I have talked about this this particular interpretive issue from our dating days.
Collin Hansen:Right? Because we come from a world that treated the Bible as an objective reality and treated our interpretation of it as an objective reality as well, and those are 2 very different things. Alright? In other words, that is not me. Alright?
Collin Hansen:It's not me. It's something other. But I can't even begin to talk about it with bringing all of me to it. Alright? My south side living, I have embedded there.
Collin Hansen:My white middle classness and all of that. My privileged upbringing. I mean, I bring all of that. And I think as a southerner, I mean, I'm from the south, so yes, we are shaped by the world in which we're in. And if we don't acknowledge that, what we end up doing is making objective statements about the Bible that are really back handedly subjective, but we have no idea about that.
Collin Hansen:Instead, and this goes back to what I call an authority dialogue model. Instead, we go back to recognizing, well, how do we what do we do with that? We trust the work of the spirit. That's not a that's not a cop out. That is the whole shooting match.
Collin Hansen:We trust the work of the spirit to work in the situatedness of our lives, and to bring to bear his word because he's promised to do so, knowing that we can be open to correction next year and the year after and the year after that. The other thing I'd say too is as we become deeper people as we age, I mean, there's just certain things about I mean, I don't care how smart you are, but there's just certain things about life. Aristotle talked this way, frankly, that and wisdom that can't be gained without living and getting older and growing wider if your with your hair. Now that's demand. And hopefully, we become deeper people as we age because we've read more, we've suffered more, we've hurt more, we've had fuller life experiences.
Collin Hansen:We and the list could go on and on. So, yes, we are moving targets. That's not. I mean, that's there. But we can't engage that without bringing the moving target that we are to it in the hopes and the trust that God works through that reality, not in spite of it, but through it.
Speaker 8:Is belief or disbelief in all or nothing approach to scripture where if you hold that this one verse, this one passage, this one paragraph in Romans is untrue, does that mean that the entire Bible is untrue or vice versa?
Collin Hansen:Yeah. There's a lot of layers to that question, and it's a it's a good question. I I don't think of it in that way, and it was hard I have to kind of shift my own approach to the issue, because that that that's a there's a kind of counterfactual here involved that I I wouldn't frame it that particular way, but, let's put it this way. Right? Oh gosh.
Collin Hansen:This is gonna get me in trouble. But maybe you wanna say something like, okay. Well, what if we find out with irrefutable evidence that the splitting of the Red Sea never happened? Now by the way, that kind of evidence will what does that even mean? But let's just say, it did not happen.
Collin Hansen:Right? The the fleeing of the Red Sea never happened. In fact, it was a hyperbole, from the kind of mythopoietic worldview of the early ancient Israel. All scholars argue this all the time. Right?
Collin Hansen:Now, mythopoietic worldview, and really they kinda got sloppy wet walking through a creek, and God saved them because he sent a rainstorm and whatever. I mean, all that stuff's out there. Right? And we find out with irrefutable evidence, I don't know what that mean. That that's not true.
Collin Hansen:Does it follow then necessarily? Therefore, Jesus did not die and raised from the tomb. I would say that's a nonsecular. It doesn't necessarily follow. Now there are people who can treat that kind of thing as a slippery slope.
Collin Hansen:If it's not there, then it's all gone. I think, you know what? First of all, I don't like I I don't believe that's true. K? But I don't like that it's too brittle.
Collin Hansen:And and maybe that just shows that I've swallowed the blue postmodern pill. I don't know. But to me, that kind of thinking is so binary and brittle that it just demands a certain kind of flexibility. Let's let's have some flexibility here. If this didn't happen, then Jesus is is false.
Collin Hansen:Well, you know, there are bonafide detractors to Jesus. If we find Jesus's bones, that's really bad news. Right? Bad news. And so I'm gonna say that there there are there are bonafide detractors to this thing.
Collin Hansen:But whether or not one area that can be proven this particular part of the old testament, that could never have been that way. Therefore, if I can't believe that, then I'm certainly not gonna believe this. I just feel like, gosh. That's so do I do that to anybody? That's that's a rather brittle way of viewing it.
Collin Hansen:Now, again, I wanna come back and say, I don't construct the issue in that kind of false dichotomous way, but but I take your point. Now, I I thought you were gonna ask a different question, and I wanna answer the question I thought you were gonna ask. And that's that's called, I tell my children, don't be a competitive listener. Let, you know, when when someone when someone's talking, listen to what they're saying and then respond to that. But I I just did competitive listening.
Collin Hansen:I'm sorry. I thought you were gonna ask, is it belief or unbelief all or nothing when it comes to the reading of the bible when it comes to being a Christian?
Speaker 8:It's got a lot of men.
Collin Hansen:Okay. Well, maybe I wasn't. And I and this this has been I've got a middle son. Alright? So this is a tender issue for me.
Collin Hansen:My wife and I, you know, we we know either he's this guy is either gonna be an atheistic writer of the great American novel, or he's gonna be a Christian theologian in the life of church who's gonna be fascinating to read someday. He's just an interesting guy. Now he's unlike any of my other kids. I work hard to know how to relate to him, but he wrestles with his faith. I mean, he does.
Collin Hansen:I mean, this is an 8 year old who, a 9 year old now, but who a couple years ago, if we prayed as a family at night, and by the way, I just wanna be real clear, we don't do that every night. I wish we did, but I mean, we're not, you know, we we struggle with all that. But when we do, he would pray, God, help me with my doubts. That was his prayer as a 7 year old. I'm like, good Lord, help us, right?
Collin Hansen:Because I'm not really good at apologetics. This is not I'm not good at that. And we've been able to talk with him in in my own sort of interactions in the life of the church and my own interactions with my family, my my wife. You know, doubt is not antipodal to faith. It's not the opposite of faith.
Collin Hansen:To doubt, to struggle to believe I mean think about the figures in scripture who modeled this for us. John the Baptist, can you believe this? I mean, this is John the Baptist, the apex of the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament. The bony finger pointing to Jesus. The night before he's decapitated, sends a few of his Now remember, he's baptized them, the dove, the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
Collin Hansen:All that's happened, I guess, according to the narrative. The night before he's decapitated, he sends his disciples and says, I want you to ask Jesus, are you really the one? That's John the Baptist the night before he's dying. So the struggle with faith, the struggle to believe, the struggle to come to terms with what we really say we believe on Sunday mornings, especially when that comes into conflict with what we're experiencing, the Bible is ready made for that kind of existence. Welcome to the Psalms.
Collin Hansen:Right? I mean, what do we do when we live in that kind of tension? Well, guess what? The Bible anticipates Christians to be like that. Here's one of the things I found surprising about the Westminster Confession of Faith.
Collin Hansen:You know what it said to people who were doubting in their faith? You run to the communion rail. Run. In other words, and I was surprised because I kinda thought with my instincts about Presbyterian and Reformed life that the answer would be, if you're doubting, if you're struggling with belief, then, you know, get that sorted out before you no. No.
Collin Hansen:No. You bring it to the table. You come. You feast on Jesus. You trust in him and come and bring all your doubts because that's not antipodal to faith.
Collin Hansen:That's part of the dynamic of Lord, I believe help my help my unbelief. Now I will say this. You know, I do think we're in a time where unbelief in the life of the church is kinda kitchen cool. I don't think that's true. But when you're talking about the deep angst of human existence, the struggle to believe, the fact that we say in church, I believe in God the father almighty.
Collin Hansen:He's sovereign and I'm looking what's happening to children in interior Syria and I've got to square that together. I mean there there are dragons down every lane of Christian faith. And I think Jesus says in the Bible, bring all that to me. You know, come come to me with that. Talk to me about it.
Collin Hansen:Even get angry at me. Swear a little bit. But don't leave me. Why? Because and this is a big marital principle, right, and big life principle, the opposite of love is not hate, right?
Collin Hansen:I mean, my wife and I can get into it. Sometimes we do it just for fun now. We're married 16 years, so it's just kinda fun to have a good row every once in a while. But, you know, the opposite of love is not hate. I mean, we can turn on our spouses like that in anger and betrayal.
Collin Hansen:The opposite of love is indifference. It's the silent treatment. It's the I really don't care right now whether you are. That's the opposite of love. That's the scary part.
Collin Hansen:That part. And I think that's what the Psalms are doing for us. The Psalms are saying, you can be angry at me. You can say very risky things to me. You can live in disorientation before me but talk to me about all of it.
Collin Hansen:But don't be indifferent to me. I think that's the kind of tension that we're called into into this circle question about the relationship with belief and and and unbelief. It's a very good question and maybe a good way to end. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Join me in thanking Mark for being with us tonight.