BibleProject - How (Not) To Read the Bible – Feat. Dan Kimball

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

What do we do with the passages in the Bible that are really difficult? Violence, slavery, the treatment of women—what the Bible has to say about these topics has, at times, been misinterpreted and misused. Join Tim, Jon, Carissa, and special guest Dan Kimball as they discuss his book, How (Not) to Read the Bible, and explore how any topic in the Bible looks different when we see it as part of a unified story.View full show notes from this episode →Timestamps Part one (00:00-15:20)Part two (15:20-26:40)Part three (26:40-44:00)Part four (44:00-57:14)Referenced ResourcesHow (Not) to Read the Bible: Making Sense of the Anti-Women, Anti-Science, Pro-Violence, Pro-Slavery, and Other Crazy-Sounding Parts of Scripture, Dan KimballGregory KouklJohn H. WaltonMere Christianity, C. S. LewisA History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Karen ArmstrongInterested in more? Check out Tim’s library here.Show Music “Defender (Instrumental)” by TENTS“Cycles” by SwuMShow produced by Cooper Peltz. Edited by Dan Gummel and Zach McKinley. Show notes by Lindsey Ponder. Powered and distributed by Simplecast.

Hey, this is Cooper at Bible Project. I produce the podcast in Classroom. We've been exploring a theme called the City, and it's a pretty big theme. So we decided to do two separate Q and R episodes about it. We're currently taking questions for the second Q and R and we'd love to hear from you. Just record your question by July 21st

and send it to us at infoatbiboproject.com. Let us know your name and where you're from, try to keep your question to about 20 seconds and please transcribe your question when you email it. That's a huge help to our team. We're excited to hear from you. Here's the episode. Hey everybody, welcome to the Bible Project Podcast.

In today's episode, we are near the end of a series we've been in for a while called the Paradigm series. We have been exploring what we mean when we say our Bible project mission statement, which is we want to help people experience the Bible as a unified story that leads to Jesus. So we've been unpacking that, what we ended up calling seven pillars of this paradigm. We've been trying to recover an ancient paradigm that is faithful to the design and intention of the scriptures themselves and trying to reshape what we think they are and what we should do with them in light of that. And so what we're doing today is often we interview scholars or authors who are writing on similar topics that we've been learning from.

And so that's what today is. We're going to interview a pastor and a professor, Dan Kimble. He is a pastor of a church vintage faith that he planted almost 20 years ago now, down in Santa Cruz, but he's also an agent professor at Western Seminary. And he has written quite a few books but he has a really neat story. He has a passion and dedication to Jesus, to the scriptures, and to really helping people discover who Jesus is by learning about the scriptures. And so we're going to interview him today because he is putting out a new book that's right along the topic of what we've

been talking about in the series. Yeah, so Dan's book is called How Not To Read the Bible, and it just came out in 2020. And in it, he addresses all of these disturbing and important and common questions that a lot of Christians and people who are exploring the Christian faith have. So he starts off with questions like, why is it okay for God to kill children and not hair it? Things like that. Is God endorsing humans as property? Is God commanding gender inequality? So these are really

tough questions and he provides some tools that resonate a lot with this paradigm that we've been talking about in the series. So he provides some tools for how to read these difficult passages. Yeah, so Chris, you and I and also John, we're able to sit down with Dan with this interview. So let's get to it. All right. Here we go. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful.

I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. So yeah, Dan, you're here. We're going to talk about your book.

First of all, thank you for writing this book, Dan. Yeah, thank you for your inspiration over the years too. And this very kind of discussion. Chris, you're here too. Hey, and John, you're also on the scene. Yeah, hello. So Dan, this fits into a bigger conversation in a podcast series that we're in right now about the paradigm with which people approach the Bible, kind of the unspoken assumptions that we all approach the Bible with or different traditions approach the Bible with. And so in this series, we're trying to expose those unspoken assumptions and kind of tinker with them and ask what are the most ancient assumptions that we should come to the Bible with

that will help us really hear it on its own terms, hear scripture on its own terms. So we've been friends for a number of years, and we've been having these conversations for a lot of years, and so what's cool is that what you've done in this book is translate a lot of your learnings and convictions personally in pastoral ministry into a really accessible and actually like funny,

like a fun and funny book. But that's talking about some really serious and important things. Yeah, reading it feels like there is a lot of resonance between what we're talking about right now in this paradigm discussion and what you're writing. So I'm super excited that we get to offer this to our audience as a really engaging and practical resource.

Maybe, before we jump into the book, and these topics, though, first tell us a bit of your story, Dan. How does a guy end up in pastoral ministry, adjunct faculty, member at a seminary, and having a deep interest in how people understand or misunderstand the Bible? How does that happen to a person? Yeah. I grew up in Paramus, New Jersey, which is right by New York City. And it was a great upbringing there.

I didn't have faith of any type. Really, I wasn't against God. I just thought there was some sort of God, but growing up there. But there's actually, I went to college at Colorado State University. And while I was there, you know, like they have these little pamphlets that they kind of give out at, you know, first week of school type of thing and the different campus groups. I walked by and I was a little kind of pamphlet about Christianity and it had a focus on is Jesus being the only way or something like that. And I don't know a high

but that statement that Jesus is the only way and then I opened up this little pamphlet and was looking at it and it had some of the Bible, which I assume were the ones that we were all familiar with now, about one way to God and all of that. That haunted me so much. Mike, the Christians really believe this. And I had no parents telling me to go to church or anything. So it was kind of like, is this true? Is this what Christians really believe?

I hadn't thought about it ever before. I only can say, like, it got me on like, if this is true, I certainly should want to know about this then. And I went into a deep dive for no reason. Again, I just think it was God drawing me to Him when I started questioning and started like reading books on the origin of the Bible. And I bought a Bible for the first time out in Colorado.

And a big defining moment is that my friends who weren't Christians started seeing me by Bible stuff. And I came home one time, and they were gathered like in the living room, and I walked in, and I could tell they were talking about me. Like, what? And then it wasn't a plan intervention, but it was kind of like an intervention. Because they said, we're kind of worried, like you're buying all of this Christian stuff. And I don't know what I'm gonna like,

what? And then they just started describing. They said, well, you know, Christians, at that time, the end times, like the rapture, and I was kind of big in Christian subculture. And they started saying, you're gonna think like, you know, you're waiting for the end times to come in and you and one girl that I was actually dating at the time, she said, like, you got to lose all your creativity and he started telling this stuff. And then I'm like, is this true? Like,

they were asking it out of concern. Like, how do I know it's not a cult? Like, people get into cults and they don't realize they're getting into cults, right? So it caused me to actually say, is this true and really started diving into a lot of apologetic stuff and looked at different world religions? So that's my entry into faith was that way. And then I was into music and went out to England, London for a year,

playing in a punk and rock-a-bally band. I would say that's why I first said, I'm a believer in Jesus now. And then I went to Israel for five months and lived on a caboot, because I had the time in Postgraduate and in college. And the bass player in the band got a job in the Bay Area, I moved out here.

And what compelled me to say how to get in pesteral ministry and ministry was that if what the scripture say is true, right? And it's not a cult. And Jesus is who he is. I'm like, I want other people to know that. And that has been my compelling absolute motive for everything since like, people got to hear about this then, hear about him. And what are the barriers that people have against faith to try to clear up? And that's how I got into everything,

volunteer in the church, plan drums, and then Phil Comer, dad of John Mark Comer, is the guy that brought me on staff at Santa Cruz Bible Church way back and in ministry sense. Somewhere along there, you ended up with a conviction that starting a church, not just being a pastor, starting a church, would be a good idea. What I remember of our conversations over the years is that much of what you're doing in the book is processing years of conversations, which is lots and lots of people

in your community about their struggles to read the Bible. Yeah, and because being in ministry, you know, then we planted vintage faith church, uh, I think there's 17 years ago now, in Santa Cruz, and being pretty immersed in listening to people's opinions in lives, especially younger people, university students. And these are the difficulties and barriers, types of questions that keep surfacing up and over and over and over again, that are causing people to think, you know, what was the good book in the scriptures is now seen almost as an evil book. Christians who are raised in churches their whole lives end up giving up faith because ironically of reading scripture and what they thought about it or what they're looking at it now as adults versus just kids when they come to that point. And so

it's very strange that the Bible is being used to discredit Christianity and leave even leave faith. And that's why I wrote this because there are responses and it's that same motive like people have to know. Like the Bible is actually a good book, not a evil book. So that's why I wrote this to address the primary things that we hear. Yeah, you have a prelude in your book titled Becoming Atheist by Reading the Bible, which describes an experience that's really common both to Christians and non-Christians. Is this exactly what you're talking about now or tell us more about that? Yeah, I think that for Christians, depending on the church, but there's so many like great, wonderful churches that taught Bible, but didn't teach what is the Bible. And as like, you know, teenagers, and we all get to a

point of questioning things, which is really good, but all of a sudden, you know, teenagers, and we all get to a point of questioning things, which is really good. But all of a sudden, you're looking at the Bible with fresh eyes and seeing these topics of slavery and the extreme amount of violence and all of these things, you know, Bible verses that seem to really demean women. And all of a sudden, now as young adults, they're like, oh my goodness, like, I didn't know this was in there. And it's causing Christians, then, to be challenged was in there. And it's causing Christians then to be challenged about their faith. And that's kind of the, you know, a lot of the mantra out there. I go to the prayer room. It's one particular time and there was a young woman

in there and she was crying. And I thought it might have been like a boyfriend break up or something. And I'm like, how can I pray for you about? And she's like, I just need to ask you. She's like, I'm not a Christian. And you've been telling us to read the Bible. And then she started reading it. And then I started getting really scared because you talked about Jesus a lot. And I like that. But then I'm reading about a talking snake,

the slavery in the early chapters. And she said this very thing. I'm worried I'm joining a cult. And I'm getting very scared. And she was upset. And this was a non-Christian coming in a student at the university that was really intelligently trying to process what was taught in the Bible. So it's very real. And atheists have it. When I say atheists,

I'm talking about the militant atheists. Most atheists are kind, loving, wonderful people. And then there's the militant ones. And you'll see tons of memes and things that are saying reading the Bible causes you to be an atheist. Many of them say that. I just found this, I'll read this to you. It was by the Winnie the Pooh author. I've never read this quote before, AA Melney, author Winnie the Pooh. And he says this about the Bible. He says the Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, and disbelief. Call it what you will than any book ever written. It has emptied more churches than all of the counter attractions of cinema, motorbicycle, and golf courses.

So I never heard that from when you the two author. Yeah, well, when you start into your book and you're raising these questions about slavery, misogyny, the violence of God, whether Jesus is the only way, it's like, yeah, these are really hard questions and the encouragement to the invitation to really dive in and wrestle with them

both for those friendly to the Christian faith and those who wouldn't call themselves Christian is a really good invitation, but not an easy one. It's an important one though. Yeah, I mean, it's just the older I am in the more, I just think, I say this with great respect to Christians, it just feels like it's insane that Christians don't want to read their Bible more desperately to know,

because I say this, like how do you, that's who's where all our beliefs come from, it shouldn't just be about church culture, it should be where it's the origin of where we're learning about Jesus and faith and beliefs from. And yet now that some people are reading the scriptures more, these things are what's popping up and being pointed out more to say like you shouldn't believe.

John, I'm curious, you know, you had your own journey that you've shared about on the podcast, about struggles with the Bible. Yeah. As far as I remember, have you telling that story over the years that didn't lead you necessarily question everything you believe out everything, but it made you frustrated with the Bible. So it's interesting to think about these different experiences that people have just about the oddities in challenging stories in the Bible. Yeah, when I hear something like you just said, Dan, which is, Christians ought to really

want to read their Bibles. I always think of how difficult it actually is to read the Bible. And the one example that's just been standing out to me the most because Tim sent me this chapter just randomly for a completely separate thing. It's in the first book of the Bible. Let's say you're trying to read the Bible in a year and you're cruising, you're getting through some hard stuff and then you get to Genesis chapter 38. I think it is and it's about Judah and his daughter-in-law and it's like sexually explicit, gnarly and you're just like, who's the good guy? What's happening?

It's just like, if you didn't want to give up back with the talking snake, like, I don't know how you're gonna get through this chapter. So, this whole series of us talking about what kind of literature it is, I was never given a framework for how to think about the literature. It was just, this is God's word, jump in,

and God's gonna talk to you through it. And then you read something like that, and I God's Word, jump in, and God's going to talk to you through it. And then you read something like that. And I'm just like, whoa, like maybe I should just not read it and say I did. Well, you said something actually, it's probably even a pastorally, which I should have added on to right there, because I think that has been a problem, where you'd feel like read your Bible, read your Bible, read your Bible, and then you just open it up and read it without understanding what it is and how to read it. That can lead to actually a lot of confusion versus understanding what the Bible is and being taught more of how to approach it and to read it and what to expect in it. So I think that you said

something really important. I think every Christian probably knows you should read the Bible, but we don't do teaching what is the Bible and how do we approach it and read it. 1,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5, So your audience is people who are faith friendly, Bible friendly, and who are still open to and trying to read the Bible, and you're trying to give handles on some of these really difficult issues when you are learning how to read the Bible and then actually reading it. The book's structured into kind of six main parts. And the first one is great.

You're really great at making clever chapter titles. But the first main part is called Never Read a Bible Verse, or you'll have to believe in unicorns. So unpack what you mean by that and the thing about the unicorns. But also, you're trying to communicate something, I think, pretty foundational about what the Bible is, what kind of book it is and how you should approach it and not. Yeah, I mean, that's the first section of the book. You mentioned six parts.

The one is kind of the foundational part, and then we address the difficult issues of violence and slavery and women and those type of things. But when it says never read a Bible verse, there's an apologist named Greg Cokal, and he would use that phrase, and so I got the phrase from him, and he is basically saying the church in general has been really great at pulling Bible verses out, memorizing them, putting them on coffee cups, and different things like that. And so often, then using just Bible verses can lead to a lot of confusion about where it's from, where it is in the storyline.

And we have misused the Bible not intentionally, but what's happening now is a lot of the anti-Bible folks are guilty of the same thing. They're pulling out Bible verses out of the grand-bible folks are guilty of the same thing. They're pulling out Bible verses out of the grand story and then pointing them back at Christians and if Christians aren't ready to respond, they're getting very confused. So what's up with the unicorns? Well, the unicorns came, I didn't know about the unicorns until my barber. I never get my haircut by a Christian barber. And the reason not that Christians can't cut here, it allows me the opportunity to have conversations with barbers.

And this is another one that I was going to. And he knows I'm a person of faith and believe in Jesus. And then one time I came in, and he's like, I didn't know you believe there's unicorns. And I didn't know what he's talking about. And then he's like, there's unicorns in the Bible. And he then told me, like, where'd you see this?

And he saw it online, and there's like, it was on Pinterest, I think. There's memes and stuff that talk about Bible verses that like from numbers, I think in different places that will use the word unicorn. So I looked them up and sure enough, you can type in unicorn and Bible and there'll be memes with graphics and Bible verses that talk about unicorns. And at first glance, if you don't know anything different, you'll say, look at this crazy stuff in the Bible. But then this is a really easy one, because then all it takes, though, if you do look at it, the words unicorn was used in the 1611 King James translation. So it's now put up on memes and graphics, which certainly is clever,

and it makes you feel awkward seeing them. But when you look into it, in that case, it was simply a translation error if they didn't know what other word to use. And today you'll see the word wild oxen because it was most likely a wild ox with a prominent horn that they were talking about that we know of today that back then they didn't know what words, so they just use unicorn. We made a video on Psalm 148, which has one of these wild oxen as the main character. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The unicorn oxen unicorn ox is brought up there. Yeah.

I wish there were unicorns in the Bible. My daughter would be really excited about that. Why would they choose unicorn? Well, I think the word in the Septuagint is the one-horned animal. Yeah. And so then they translated it into English as unicorn, which I guess that makes sense, but our understanding of what a unicorn is, it's just different than what they meant by a one-horned animal or prominent horned animal. Well, and then there's funny things like on, I think it was on Etsy. People have taken a diagram of unicorns standing on the shoreline where the arc is floating away and they'll say like, we thought it was four o'clock.

And that's why there's no more unicorns because they're just getting on the arc. So the takeaway there is really kind of overlapping with what we've been talking in the paradigm conversations about the unified, the Bible is a unified story, which means it's inappropriate to just take a line or a bit out of a story as if it's its own standalone idea or content or statement. And you're using a funny example with the unicorn. The stakes are actually fairly high here because if you're audience or if you're not informed about what that unified story of the Bible is, but you see people using the Bible to promote or prohibit this or that by quoting sentences, it can just get really unfortunate real quick. So this is the funny example, but of course we could go on with lots of examples

that are not funny at all. And that's an easy, solvable one because that was more of a translation error or other Bible verses that it's not a translation error. It actually does say something that can lend itself to confusion and distrust of scripture in general. But it's just like, you know, in all these many things,

like what's gone on in my observations is that this conversation has moved from even academic world into pop culture, and you'll see celebrities, there's a celebrity that 68,000 likes on this tweet, and the tweet was talking about like shrimp, and it was saying like, look, you're, you're cherry-pick versus, and look how crazy the Bible is prohibiting shrimp and tattoos and those type of things from Leviticus. And then it got 68,000 like likes. And again, it's mocking Bible,

looking how silly Christians are for believing that you shouldn't eat shrimp or touch the skin of a dead pig or these certain things that are being pulled out and then mocked. And it's not my young Christian, I'm then going to start saying like, man, I don't want to be silly or I don't want to feel like I believe in something nutty and even though there is a reaction, you believe in the resurrection. So you believe in a man rose again and dead. So, but talking about that, that's why this is getting confusing. But like you just said, you can't extract the Bible verse without understanding where in the storyline it is.

Yeah, your part two of your book has shrimp in the title. It's Stranger Things, Shrimp Slavery, and the Skin of a Dead Pig. And there you're focusing on some of these really strange laws in the Torah. What do you think some of those deep underlying problems with the typical way Christians read these laws is, and how can we do that better? Well, say you're looking at these, and these are in the scripture, it's not a translation error, where it does say, you know, things when it mentions, you know, markings on the

body and tattoos and haircuts and dietary laws, which turn out to not eat shrimp and don't touch the skin of a dead pig. These things are real, not a translation error. But, you know, it's the same thing where we're saying, you're reading, who was it written to? Like, never read a Bible, Hirst, then you want to, as John Walton, the professor from Wheaton will say, like the Bible was not written, it was written for us, but not to us. So you always have to go, who was this written to originally? And when you look at the, as you're looking at the liturgical laws, you'll find it was written to the people of Israel while they were being moved into a land where there's all types of strange

worship rights and practices by the surrounding people groups. And God was, and his presence was moving into this geographic area and moving along. And he was setting some commands of being distinct from other people groups, but we don't live back then. So they sound bizarro to us and they are kind of bizarre, but they had meaning

to the people of that time. I mentioned the story of, I think it was 1924 and like in Arizona, there's a law that says, do not keep a donkey in a bathtub. Right. And that sounds bizarre to us. However, if you were to go back into 1924 to that town in Phoenix, you would find out that there was a farmer who kept a donkey in a bath tub and it washed into a mud basin through a flood that a really difficult time getting it out and they had to set a law in place. Like, you know, a farmer Joe, no more donkey in the bathtub, right? So if you live back then, you understood it. Today, it sounds bizarre. And that's why knowing the storyline is really important when you see strange Bible verses. Yeah, you have four interpretive keys or you call them four facts for how not to read the Bible or how to read the Bible. Would you recap those for us? I think

that'd be really helpful for our audience. Yeah, the first is the Bible is a library, not a book. And I have, I'm going to have my bio next to me here, like I've just over the years, when I hold the Bible, whenever I open it, I picture them walking into like an ancient library. And over to the left, or some over generalizing, you know, about say some like law books and scrolls over there. And over to the right, there's some poetry books.

They're in several hundred years later. And then over there, there's some letters to these churches that were in the first century. And so it's like when I walk into the right, there's some poetry books that are in several hundred years later. And then over there, there's some letters to these churches that were in the first century. And so it's like, when I walk into the library, I want to go to what section. And then if I pull a, you know, a book that was written to a specific church, I'm going to read it differently than wisdom literature that was written to the ancient Israelites. And so you have to look at the Bible as a library, not a book, and you don't just pull shelf books off the shelf and read them

all the same. So that's the first one. The second is the Bible was written for us, not to us, and I kind of just walked through there, the importance of that. A third one is never read a Bible verse, the same thing. You always have to look at where in the storyline it is because, you know, in the early chapters of Genesis, we're vegetarian in chapter nine, we're then allowed to eat meat. If you just read the Bible verse in the early chapters of Genesis,

anyone's in sin and breaking the commands of that God is laid out for us if you've eaten meat. Later on, it changes. You have to look at where in the storylines. So never read a Bible verse. And the last one is all the Bible points to Jesus, a unified story that ends up pointing to Jesus. And that's major in understanding what the Bible is. Yeah, thanks. Dan, it says, if we've been friends and talking about these ideas and learning together over the years. Yeah, it's a great summary of like the things we've been talking about.

Yeah, but a lot faster than how we have. Yeah, you're really good. Yeah, more memorable. Stickier. Let's shift to one of the stickier topics that you address in the book. You have a whole section cleverly titled, Boys Club Christianity. So you're addressing ways that the Bible portrayed as or perceived as or used as anti-women as misogynist. And so all these issues we talked about thus far come into play about individual Bible passages that can be lifted out of context. Yeah, what are the dynamics that play here? This is something that strikes almost all modern readers if they read any part of the Bible at length.

Yeah, talk about your experience with this, why you felt like this was, you really needed to go at this in the book. When I first was reading through the Bible, and I'd see verses like that, you know, just like certain verses about women being saved through childbirth, or women be silent, you know, don't speak up in church,

or these stories, you know, of concubines and polygamy, and just certain things that I'm just being honest that I read them and I'm like, ah, somebody's got it figured out. Even when I became youth director at a church, I'd read those passages and I go like, somebody's got to figure it out and I just kind of keep going. And the moment that it changed for me

when I was working, serving with young adults, the church materials that were going through had a couple references, and it was like first Corinthians. And then someone was like, what's that? And a young woman read the passage out loud, and remember, and I'm paraphrasing it, but it was at a first Corinthians where it says, you know, women should be silent in the church. They are not allowed to speak. It is a disgrace for a woman to speak in church. They must go home and ask their husbands the questions. And I remember sitting in that room seeing that verse, I mean hearing it, and they're all looking at me. And I wanted a run-in-hide behind the couch because I'm like, I don't know how to answer it. It's always been in there, but I've ignored

it, but I can't ignore it anymore. And again, you're looking at these verses and there's so many of them. But in today's world, what's happening is that you're seeing there's a guy that put it on his truck, you know, women be submit and be silent, don't speak up in church, puts it on his truck, it makes national news. And his whole thing is Christians read your Bible, do you even know that it's in there? And so the emphasis has been women are demeaned, concubines, slavery, you know, the patriarchal culture. And that is the impression

that the scriptures definitely give. And it took me to then personally like, is that true? And then have to look in the scriptures through the principles. And you find out, no, that's not true. We're not just, we're not reading the Bible in the way it was meant to be read by the original readers. So yeah, maybe talk about some of the ways forward that you discovered when it comes to that issue. And I think the reason to highlight it is because you do this with a number of issues, whether it's slavery in the Bible, science in the Bible, violent in the Bible, and you're trying to take the same tack in all these chapters. So when it comes to this issue of the role of women in the Bible, what were your guiding

lights in your path forward? All right. Well, it's because, again, after, don't just read the Bible, but reading it for years now, I see it as the full story. And all of a sudden, if there's a line or two in a story, but then if you know the full story, you start going, like, well, how does that make sense in the full storyline of the whole Bible?

And I always go back to the beginning, and then you see man and woman, created equally equal value equal worth co-serving together that certainly doesn't seem to match up with women be silent and submit to your husband. So then you look through the storyline and then you see what happened when humans rebelled against God in that way and then things changed but what you don't see we could talk for an hour just on this topic. Just on this, sure.

Yeah, so, but just the quick line is when you see the storyline, you'll see that God was raising up women throughout the Old Testament. God worked with what human beings did also. So God didn't create slavery. That was something that was instituted by human beings in different ways. And he was actually coming in and helping correct in a trajectory towards no slavery. But same thing with women, you'll see that there is women like Miriam, Debra, God was using Hilda a prophet. So it couldn't have just been a blanket statement,

all women be silent. He gets the new testament and you put in some basic principles. Three chapters earlier, in the first Corinthians passage I'm talking about in chapter 11, Paul is telling women to prophesy and pray. So he can't be saying women be silent in all situations. So it's a specific situation, a specific thing that was going on. Again, we could talk about this in hour, but it's wrong to then use those Bible verses against women that's not was their intent or their purpose. And it's wrong when people do. Yeah, this point seems really important, and it's also just really hard to onboard, because you think if there's a book that is God's Word,

a book that is the holy book, however you want to think about it, and then to say, but it wasn't written to you. These letters, like the one we're talking about with Paul, it's like we're reading someone else's mail. Those two things feel so opposite. Like, why wouldn't God write a book? That's too everyone. And then it just begs question, how am I supposed to engage with a book that wasn't written to me, was written to other people that have to kind of parse out.

That seems like a really hard thing to click over. I guess Dan, when you do ministry in your church, how do you see that idea landing for people? And then how do you then help them read a book? That's for them, but not to them. Yeah, well, our instinct always is like to jump immediately to application, like almost every part of the Bible.

You know, again, for all of these years, I didn't look at it like we're talking about now. And so, especially in my early years as a Christian and even on a church staff, you know, the Bible was God's love letter to us. And I mean, it is. It's his love letter of telling the whole story. But I immediately would jump to what does this letter of telling the whole story, but I immediately would jump to, what does this have to do with my life?

Right? So I think we were using the Bible and teaching the Bible to always jump to personal application immediately. And that is not good Bible study methods to do that. So in order to change that, church leaders, I think, I say, if we talk about first Corinthians, when we're teaching it, we usually have a full Sunday just talking about where was Corinth, what was going on, who are the players that are going, that you might see rising up in the scriptures.

It's telling the story of setting up where all this came from. I mean, this isn't just saying this because I'm talking to you guys, but we often will play the Bible Project video to the church when we start a teaching series on something because the information is out there for people. So I think church leaders must pay attention to this. So we're not ending up hurting people in the way we're trying to help them understand scripture. I think there's a there's a dynamic here when this issue that you're raising, John, comes up. And as the years go by, because I feel like this has been an underlying theme for years.

In the conversations we're having, and for me, I keep seeing how there's a close connection between this question and the very premise of the biblical story, which is that this portrait of God is of a God who chooses to interact with the world and be present in the world, in and through image-bearing humans, which means in the story humans are the main way that God is going to embody His will and purpose and communicate in the world. And so what God has to say is developing along with the human story, and that itself is a key part of the story, which means that there can't be a moment where it's too everybody. Because of God's the living God, he's interacting with each generation on its own terms. And so what he would have to say now will be based on the wisdom of what he said before, but it also, it's what God is saying now, and it's still to be discovered, because that's just the nature, I guess, of existence within the story.

For me personally, where that takes me is that when I'm looking for God to give me the like the list of rules or the list of answers that would answer every question that I might have, in a way, it's like taking away the responsibility I have as a human to live by wisdom and to learn to discern God's will here and now, based on the story. That's as if I want the Bible to do the hard work that the Spirit is asking us to do by cultivating wisdom to understand how to live out the vision of the biblical story here. Now, what if that makes any sense?

Tim, let me ask you something that I hear. So say what you're just saying, but, all right, so it's such a mystery and God still revealing things. So does that mean that everything's a mystery, ethics and morals, that I can then just sort of, uh, right, right, right. Because that's kind of a criticism that, or a taking advantage of things that way. So is everything up for grabs then? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, obviously Jesus didn't think so, you know, when Jesus read all these laws of the Torah, he could sum them up as love God and love your neighbor, right? When you choose about sex or justice in the community or treatment of the poor would come

up, you would appeal to these law- ancient laws, but then derive wisdom from them that over kind of like transcended time and place. But one thing Jesus didn't do was just like pull versus out of context. He would quote like a law, but then derive this wisdom principle that would transcend. And at least that's my response, but I'm sure you get that question too, Dan, like, oh, if God said this here, but then he says this here, so how do we know God won't change his mind and tell us something? No. I'm hearing that more and more, so that's why I was raising it up, totally. It's just to say that, you know, there are things that are mysteries and things that we

wish God would have been clearer about. But then, there are things that are mysteries and things that we wish God would have been clearer about. But then there are many things that he was very clear about in the New Testament, you know, writing again through the author's New Testament. Then we can cling on to those and have more confidence in what the truths are that we can know. And then less stranglehold on other things that maybe like, we're not quite as clear. Yeah. So what you're saying is there's these elements of the biblical story like core claims about the nature of human beings, which has moral ethical implications about how we should treat each other and shouldn't. And while those might be worked out in different ways at different moments in the

biblical story, you can point to every part and be like, yeah, don't murder. Like, it's very clear. Like, it's not very difficult. Sexual integrity is a super high value, how human beings treat each other sexually. It's like really important all throughout the biblical story. That's what you're saying.

There's these kind of themes that just don't, they don't shift, but then we have other ones like when it comes to slavery, for example, where you do watch God working with a culture where it's at, but pushing it in a direction. In a redemptive direction. No, and that's what I mean, because I do think this, the, what's the word? I don't know, the caution, which is happening, is making the Bible so mysterious that we can't have any truth that we can hold onto and that would not be accurate. You just summarize it up really well just then. But it is, what's that movie of the perfect storm?

Like several things hitting it once because I think what's going on, what's causing so much of the confusion is that there is a wave of the church overall didn't teach, we did what I did earlier, almost incorrectly, like read your Bible and then just put it out there and didn't talk about what is the Bible and how do we read it?

So there's that out there. Then you have generation or two now that are growing up even as Christians that don't know how to read the Bible or what's in it. And even there's a lesser degree of Bible knowledge from so many. And then you have the rise of the accessibility to clever memes and information out there that are pulling out Bible verses, usually out of context as well, and criticizing the Bible. And it's catching so many people off guard. And if you don't know the scriptures, then you don't know how to defend or think of it. And that's what's undermining so many people's faith and keeping people away from

faith because they wouldn't want to be part of such a crazy, crazy cult. You know, almost. See, as Lewis wrote a really amazing, I hear about something in Miraculous Janice, it's really been haunting to me because he talks about the amount of information that's out there and he talks about the importance of theology. And he said this, he said theology is practical. And this is how to theology to me is studying scripture to understand what God has left us. and discussion, perhaps it was possible to get on with a few simple ideas about God, but it is not so now. Everyone reads, and this was written in the 1940s, said from lectures, everybody reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen to theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones. Bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas.

For a great many of the ideas about God, which are trotted out as novelties today, are simply the ones that real theologians tried centuries ago and rejected. There's so much information out there today about Bible, God, beliefs, and that's why understanding the Bible is more important than ever before. I mean, I can feel my body actually reacting to this because it's so important because I think we have sold unintentionally created Christianity to be in contemporary times about church activity and music, and so many people they base their faith

more on the activities of churches and good things in the songs. But everything we do is coming from somewhere, ideas of who Jesus is coming from somewhere. And all of a sudden, slavery versus your pulled out and don't eat shrimp and don't play football. And women should be silent and submit. Also, these are being raised to the surface. Yeah, if you aren't familiar with Scripture, then you'll be really shocked when these things are brought up and it'll be harder to deal with them. I mean, you've seen the meme.

I mean, you've seen this a bunch of times. It's Psalm 137.9. And the verse, I'm just reading the Bible verse alone, it says, happy is the one who takes your babies and smashes them against the rocks. So you take that verse, and I'm looking at some right now, like, you know, you plop it up with a nice meme and a graphic and someone ironically took and I made like a little heart symbol out of their hands with the sunset.

And that Bible verse underneath it and saying, like, look at your God. So happy is the one who smashes babies against rocks. That's in your Bible. You're reading it, what do you do? You look at it, where was that written? And the Psalms, what are the Psalms? There's poetry and expression and emotion. And you have to look at who said that? That's not God's words.

That's the Psalmist writing those words, what was going on at that particular time. It's not a command that you're reading. It's someone who is a poetic expression of someone who's experiencing horror and grief because it was from the destruction of Jerusalem and the captivity. And they probably did the way people would kill horrifically, would they would throw babies against the ground to kill them when they're a captur of city. And therefore, someone is writing out like for justice and anguish and pain. And that's that little verse that's not God commanding something or saying that's what he

delights in. And that's what's unfortunately then convincing people, Christianity and if you believe in the Bible, you're crazy and even in a cult. Yeah, when we read that, we're supposed to grieve with the poet and we're supposed to feel like it's really dark and painful. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. To switch gears, you have three final parts of your book, and they relate to the conflict. Some people feel between science and the Bible when they read the Bible.

Christianity's relationship to other religions, so the idea that Jesus is the only way to God and then divine violence in the Old Testament. Those are three really difficult topics. And I'm curious to know in your experience which of these are coming up the most in your church or with people you talk to. And if you could just give us a snapshot of some of the main themes underlying these chapters. Yeah, well, with the science one, and you guys have done some excellent work on Genesis, of course. But I think what's to a non- someone outside of the church,

generally, what's portrayed about the Bible is that it's either a young earth talking snake like a ca version, you know, ca, ca, of the jungle book, understanding of the early chapters of Genesis, or it's nothing. And I think we've painted like it's only one way or the other. And if you doubt it, then you're doubting God's word for you to think it could be anything different. And so we've set up a horrible tension for many young people to even face as they start thinking more, compared to science, but then when you start looking into Genesis and you start

realizing the questions that God was communicating to the people of Israel were not the questions that that we have today. They weren't asking the people of Israel being coming out of Egypt after 400 years in slavery and a polytheistic culture and understanding the worldview of how they saw the land sky, they're asking, how do we worship this God? Should we worship this God like the Egyptian gods? How are we going to survive out here? Our questions are, how do you explain the transitional fossil records? And the earth start from primitive amino acids, all of these things, they're not the questions that they had. And then we try to read into the text, questions that was not meant to answer.

And unfortunately, then that causes fallout because there's people's lives that are confused about this. The science is obviously, there's so many of them. Now, can God defy science? Absolutely. We believe in a man that physically rose again from the dead. And I would, you know, we'd all die for that. And then that's, you can't explain that

other than God intervened. But let's not argue about things that shouldn't be argued about like that. Because it becomes a dividing line and really tough. So that's why I addressed the science issue. You know, they weren't asking your dinosaurs on the ark. It would be interesting if it wasn't there. Like, by the way weren't on the ark. That was a verse. That was so interesting. So bizarre for them to have read. They're like, what are dinosaurs?

But that's again, why you have to ununderstand it. The same thing with world religions, it's the storyline of God in the beginning, even Karen Armstrong who wrote the book, The History of God. When Jesus talks about salvation and we believe that through the atonement of what he did in the cross, we are saved and all of that, it's not saying that we're exclusive and we're better than other people. But you look at the whole storyline of humanity and the Bible tells of that, then Jesus makes total sense when you see the whole storyline. Then you see how other world faiths make total sense. You know, they were developing things that weren't

about the one true God as they spread across the planet and in different things. So like the world religion questions obviously really big, but you have to look at it in the storyline again. And the violence one is tough. I mean, bottom line, God did use violence. Violence happened. The cross was violent.

But God is not a random violent using monster who just killed people for no reason. And there's the criticism. Well, jealous and petty and just starts killing people. When God used violence, there were reasons for it. And that's why knowing the God of the whole Bible is so important. Because then we trust that God. And when he did use violence, there were reasons for it, and that's why knowing the God of the whole Bible is so important, because then we trust that God. And when he did use violence, then I trust.

But let me ask you guys this, because this is a danger. Well, when there's violence in there, God would never use violence. So that didn't really happen. The Israelites just made up those stories. And they record them in scripture. So don't worry, they really didn't happen.

How would you answer that? I haven't heard that take actually. Well, it's becoming more common, but you explain the violence in the Old Testament by saying that the Israelites wrote what they just thought would be good to write about their God. Or maybe even how they would portray events that happened in their time, they would attribute them to God and to God acting on their behalf or something, but that we don't have to take that seriously, that portrayal of God. Yeah, it doesn't seem like Jesus held that view.

He really believed that the God of Israel, who he was embody embodying was about to bring the hammer on Jerusalem, right? And that's why he has many warnings about Jerusalem. But at the same time, Jesus himself was claiming to represent and embody God's mercy, right, to the people that he's warning. That's the question I always have at that point is if we're going to attribute all portraits of God's violence just to human misunderstanding, you have to carry that onto Jesus' own view of his father bringing justice on Jerusalem. Yeah, to me, a lot of things start to unravel. If you go that direction.

And it seems like Jesus and the Hebrew Bible authors just had a deep sense that God is the author of life and so he can give it and he can take it away. And that when God does that, he does it as a last resort and as a form of justice. And that's hard for me. But I think based on Gio's own teachings derived from his reflection on the Hebrew scriptures,

it seems like that's something that he would want as followers to take on board. And the main point there is that it's God's prerogative, not human representatives of God, to be doing that on God's behalf, because that always goes poorly. Well, as Tim, sorry, John mentioned earlier, there's a lot of crazy, violent, morbid stuff in the Bible, but a lot of them are human beings doing it, not under God's command. And it records the horrible stories, but that doesn't mean God was for those things happening. Yeah. Yeah. If you've seen the Scary Mary video. Oh, yes, yes, totally. Someone took Mary Poppins, and for those that don't know Mary Poppins, it's the Walt Disney film about a good nanny, magical nanny that comes in

and helps a family. So she's all like loving and caring. But what they did was they took the movie and extracted a few points of the movie where he knows like her staring at a kid and then the boy gets like sucked up into the chimney or then locked into the closet or the and she might look mean for a second. They just capture that quick part and then they put it together in like a 60-second clip called Scary Mary and at the end it says, hide your children. But if I only saw that I would think it was a horror film and Scary Mary if I don't know the whole story and all the bits of that clip were true. They do come from the story.

I think that's kind of what's going on with the Bible in many ways that they're extracting little pieces, putting them together to create something, but you have to know the whole story. So you understand, wait a minute, that's not, you know, that's not Mary. This isn't God. You know, God is compassionate and loving and kind and patient, and that's the God of the Bible. Not just this one specific story or things that you might piece together to portray him in all of these ways. So it comes back to knowing the whole story.

So critical. Yeah, that's one of the underlying repeated themes throughout the entire book. And yeah, what I appreciate is you are articulating in a very, very easy to read book, that you're addressing dense topics, but it's written in such an accessible way. And you're addressing so many of the same key issues

that we're trying to address, helping reshape how people read and understand the Bible. So I, it's just great. There's so much alignment. And that's also because we've been learning a lot of the same things from a lot of the same people over the last few years. So I'm excited for the book to be out there and for it to see how people respond to it. I hope people find it really helpful because it's addressing things in a way that we really believe in too. You know, I would plead, plead, plead with youth leaders, especially, and even children leaders, to

teach about this stuff early, because when they then get to college or they start as you would, you're thinking, you know, or in high school as well. And also now they're looking at TikTok and seeing all of these teachings and these short little bits that sound so authoritative and confident. But again, they're doing the same fault of their, of how they're teaching it. Please teach about the stuff early on so that then when they do see things, they're like, Oh, that's not catching me off guard as much anymore. And once you understand the basic principles, like, you know, that you guys teach all the time, then when you see disturbing things, it doesn't shake you up as much, because

they're still disturbing, but you'll be like, okay, there must be more to it, or let's look at what's going on. And so I just beg, I beg parents and youth leaders and church leaders to please teach about this stuff earlier on to children and youth and young adults. I mean, everybody should, but especially them. Yeah, so you could send them to 12 hours of us jammering away or a quick and accessible and delightful book by Dan Kimble. So thanks Dan, so much for sharing your work and for all of your kind words.

Well, thank you. I said, I can't, it's just a cliche, just a word, but I'm so thankful to the Lord all the time for what you were doing. So I can't express that enough. I'm getting emotional taking you back right now because you remember way back when you and John, when you're writing on those clear glassboards

and then you and John's used together and had the idea it's so wonderful to see how God has been using you to the most important thing. It really is understanding the scriptures because all of our lives come out of that's what we learn. So, and we can respond to. So, thank all of your staff. You're amazing. We'll do that.

We'll do that. Dan, thank you for taking the time to sit down and talk with us today. Hey, thanks for listening to the Bible Project podcast. and thank you for taking the time to sit down and talk with us today. Hey, thanks for listening to the Bible Project Podcast. Today's episode was edited by Zach McKinley. It was produced by Cooper Peltz. Our lead editor is Dan Gummel and the show notes that go along with this episode were produced by Lindsay Ponder. The Bible project is a crowd-funded, nonprofit media company. We're making videos and resources and classes that are helping people experience the Bible as a unified

story that leads to Jesus. And one of the coolest things about this whole project is that we get to give this away for free, because it's all already been paid for by the generosity of so many of you who listen to the podcast by people all around the world. Thank you so much. Thank you for being part of this with us. Hey, this is Abby and I live in Sherwood, Arkansas. I first heard about Bible project from a friend and I've been listening and watching for years now. I use Bible project, definitely to go deeper in my personal study of the Bible, but also whenever I get the chance to teach the Bible, I jump over to the Bible project for sure.

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