How Did We Get the Bible? with Karen Keen
⭐ This interview with Karen Keen, author of the Word of a Humble God (Eerdmans, 2022), explores topics around biblical interpretation, how to engage challenging parts of Scripture, stories about war and violence in the Bible, biblical interpretation methods. Karen's book has been described as a top resource for an introduction to the Bible (Scripture) and introduction to scriptural interpretation. How can we read the Bible in light of God's humility and hear God's voice anew?
Divine humility, Keen claims, teaches us both how to read Scripture and to love our neighbors in challenging but often fruitful ways.
Check out Karen’s book, The Word of a Humble God
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Description
⭐ This interview with Karen Keen, author of the Word of a Humble God (Eerdmans, 2022), explores topics around biblical interpretation, how to engage challenging parts of Scripture, stories about war and violence in the Bible, biblical interpretation methods. Karen's book has been described as a top resource for an introduction to the Bible (Scripture) and introduction to scriptural interpretation. How can we read the Bible in light of God's humility and hear God's voice anew?
Divine humility, Keen claims, teaches us both how to read Scripture and to love our neighbors in challenging but often fruitful ways.
Resources
📚 The Word of a Humble God, by Karen Keen
Generated Transcript
speaker-0 (00:01.28)
Okay, we are joined for tonight's theology lab, our scripture and tradition series with Karen Keane. Karen, thank you so much for joining us.
speaker-1 (00:10.808)
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
speaker-0 (00:13.582)
Karen, you have written this book, The Word of a Humble God. That's going to be kind of the basis for our conversation here. Can you just give us like a sense about why did you write this book? Why was it important for you to write a book about the Bible?
speaker-1 (00:31.672)
Yeah, good question. I, as a writer, I think through writing. so pretty much anything I write is coming out of some of my own questions and my own journey. And this book is very much representative of my own journey of trying to make sense of scripture, particularly coming from a conservative evangelical background and then encountering.
historical criticism and different types of methodology for the study of scripture that was very disorienting and trying to then figure out what is the nature of scripture? What is, how do we think about inspiration and what do we do with the difficult troubling passages? And as somebody who comes from a Baptist tradition that holds scripture in high regard, I've always had a deep love.
of the Bible that has persisted even through these questions. And so part of this is my own journey and processing things, but I also realized that there were people on different sides of the spectrum wrestling with some of the same things. So on the one hand, I felt like there was a maybe
Like in my tradition, a conservative evangelical impulse to protect the Bible and defend the Bible and that's apologetic that would sometimes see some of the human traits in scripture as a liability. And in some way didn't always feel completely honest to me. And then on the other side, you know, sort of the influence of Richard Dawkins or something like that, where it's like, what is this? There's all this.
barbaric stuff going on in the Bible. What is this all this weird primitive stuff? This thing is not worth reading or listening to. And so there's a sense in which some people are disillusioned with the Bible and wondering whether it has any value anymore. And I hope that the book will speak to people on both ends of that spectrum as well as
speaker-1 (02:49.614)
those somewhere in between there. So ultimately at my root reason for writing this is that I love scripture. I do believe that it is life-giving and I'm hoping to instill that same love of scripture, that same reclaiming scripture, while at the same time not
avoiding some of the hard questions about it, really wrestling with those honestly. So that's how I kind of got there to writing this book.
speaker-0 (03:25.134)
Hey, Scott here. If you're enjoying this video, you can like and subscribe to Theology Lab's channel below and you'll see our latest releases and what's happening at Theology Lab right now. Hey, so you wrote a book called The Word of a Humble God. If you write a book about scripture, it makes sense. Okay, so I guess it's gonna be called The Word of God. And yet you add this kind of funny word, humility, humble.
Why is the book titled The Word of a Humble God? What does divine humility have to do with it?
speaker-1 (03:55.822)
I did not go into writing this book thinking about humility or the humility of God. thought, I'm going to go and look at the material origins of the Bible, the archaeological evidence, the textual remains, how manuscripts come together. What can we glean from concrete evidence about how scripture came together and what do we find?
The presupposition that I had and going in was, I believe that God is active in history. And I believe that it seems plausible that God would have something to do not just with the content of scripture, but with how scripture came to us, the process of coming together. So inspiration is often talked about with regard to content, but there's not much out there.
thinking about inspiration in terms of the particularities of how the texts came together, all these manuscript traditions and all of that. And so it was about halfway through the manuscript when I was pondering and reflecting on what I was seeing and how we might think about that in terms of inspiration that I was.
struck by, wow, what kind of God put the Bible together this way, contextually, communally, in this dynamic way, in this varied way.
And what was impressed upon me was the humility of God. you know, for example, there are, it's not really a new thing per se to think about inspiration in terms of God's humility, because in Christian tradition, there's the accommodation view, this idea that God has stooped down to our level and that the human language in the Bible is there.
speaker-1 (05:59.278)
you know, as some of the early church fathers would say, you know, why is this crude language in the Bible? Oh, it's because God is like a parent talking to the child and the vocabulary that the child understands. And, and, and so there's a humility in that. What I was noticing that was a little bit different was seeing God's humility from the very beginning and the creation of human beings. So we often
At least in my tradition, we tended to think about humility in relation to Jesus and particularly Jesus's humanity. And sometimes it would make people uncomfortable to think of humility as an attribute of the triune God, because God is sovereign and powerful. And somehow that seemed like a conflict with humility. But when I looked at the creation story,
Right away, you see that God in creating human beings and, you know, to reflect the divine image and giving human beings responsibility and stewardship that God is sharing power right away from the very beginning. We see God sharing power to rule, to govern the earth.
And that whole idea of God sharing power is carried all the way through into the New Testament, where we see language like we have been seated with him in the heavenly realm, which is meaning we have been enthroned with him in the heavenly realm. And Jesus saying to whoever, whoever conquers, I will, you know, have you sit on my throne with me, just as I sit on my father's throne.
That is mind blowing to think about.
speaker-1 (08:00.322)
God sharing a throne with human beings.
And so I began to see, okay, there's something going on here in terms of God's desire for collaboration, in terms of working with human beings. And certainly within Christian tradition, we think of inspiration as a partnership and collaboration between God and human beings. But in my tradition, the articulation of that really
very closely resembled mechanical dictation. was sort of, yes, the human beings are involved, but God wrote the Bible. God wrote the Bible and the effect of that was essentially a Bible that dropped from heaven and was uncomfortable with some of the cultural elements of scripture. And so I didn't
feel like some of what my tradition gave me was enough of that engagement with how human agency is involved in this. But at the same time, wasn't persuaded, for example, by maybe the adoption analogy of inspiration where
This is just a human book. There's all these errors in it. It's sinful and God just kind of, you know, redeem this human work to, you know, tell us about salvation. That didn't really resonate with me either at being an accurate reflection of the Bible.
speaker-0 (09:45.962)
in the book you address that we come to the text with certain ideas that are already there and these ideas shape how we engage with the text. We call these presuppositions. Could we just talk about this a little bit? kind of what are possibly to help kind of shed light on this? Some of these common presuppositions, maybe particularly in at least evangelical influenced church spaces.
Let's talk about that a little bit and then we'll try to get into why that's so important to understand.
speaker-1 (10:17.71)
Yeah, I think one common assumption is that the text is easy to understand and that really comes out of the Reformation. think, you know, we have to say that scripture is easy to understand in some sense if we're going to allow scripture to interpret scripture and we're not going to have this institution interpreting the text for us. And of course, early in the Reformation, they realized there was a problem with that and that scripture
does need teachers and without getting too much in the weeds of all of that. I think that that assumption that the text is easy to understand and that we can just open it up can sometimes lead to isagesis that is reading into the text. So my tradition was very concerned about that we not read into the text, but at the same time was not attentive to the very thing
that would help to prevent that isogesis, which was the sociocultural context. We lived within the world of the narrative of the text, which is good, and we want to do that, but there was too much of a dismissal of the sociohistorical context and how valuable that is, that for making sense of what is actually in the text.
Because I think a lot of misunderstandings across the board, evangelical or not, is a lack of cross-cultural engagement with the Bible. I think to be good Bible readers is to approach scripture cross-culturally. you know, even on something like how we understand language of annihilation in scripture.
understanding some of the cultural background and the way hyperbole is used in the ancient Nerees is very helpful for nuancing how we understand some of that language. So the idea that scripture is just really easy to understand, we don't have to have really any awareness of the socio-cultural context, I think is problematic. so context and appreciating that God works in context and understanding context is important.
speaker-1 (12:34.51)
The idea that scripture speaks with one voice.
We see a variety of traditions in scripture. We see a beautiful conversation and dialogue across generations. But that idea comes from, well, God wrote the Bible and God is the sole author. And so there's one voice, which again is a minimizing.
what scripture is, which is a collaboration and really a conversation between God and human beings across time. It loses that conversational dynamic of, you know, of what's being wrestled with across time. And I get to the problem of proof texting too, because so much of the richness of scripture and seeing that conversation and dialogue is when we look at the whole.
rather than plucking something here or there. We could say proof texting and cherry picking are two sides of the same coin, more conservative side, proof texting sides that want to say that the Bible is full of errors, maybe cherry picking certain parts that they like better, both of those tendencies being problematic in my view, and that the whole reading scripture is holistically is essential.
speaker-0 (14:03.214)
So let me ask a question that if it's okay, if, okay, if we think the text is going to have one kind of unified voice to it, uh, that can possibly get in the way of seeing kind of the distinctions, the distinctiveness of, different books and even the diversity within the books themselves. But what about the kind of the flip side of that? Then if it still remains important to understand unified themes within the text, if there's still some kind of value to that.
How do you get there? How do you handle that question?
speaker-1 (14:38.154)
Mm-hmm. You know, we can take the example of what's happening with regard to tragedy. How do we make sense of tragedy or bad things happening? So within scripture, you see a theme of wrestling with that issue and continuously coming down on the side of
I just believe that God is good. Somehow God is good. God is good. God is good. God is still here. God has not abandoned. Somehow I'm going to hold on to that truth, even though I'm... But the way that gets articulated is different at different times. So initially, maybe it's in order to preserve God's goodness in the midst of this horrible war or tragedy that's happened.
I'll blame myself. I'm simple. God's punishing me for my sin. And so God remains good, which was helpful maybe in an ancient Near Eastern context where the gods were unpredictable. Who knows why things happened the way they did? The gods would just do things at a whim. And so there's just belief. No, I don't think God is capricious like that. I don't think God is just
doing things on a whim, I think God is consistent and stable and that God is good. So how do I understand that? Maybe there's something that I'm doing that's not quite right. But then you see like in the writing, whether it's Ecclesiastes or Job, this, well, maybe it's not always that I've done something bad that causes something to happen. Maybe good people suffer too and that there's a mystery to this.
And of course, in the New Testament, why was the man born blind? Why did this building tower collapse on people? They must have done something sinful. So I think the consistent thread in there is I've got this conviction despite everything that God is good and I'm going to I'm wrestling with how that can be. And you see different theories that they're sort of wrestling with and proposing.
speaker-1 (17:07.874)
But there is that consistency around God is good, God is good, even in the midst of bad things happening.
speaker-0 (17:16.407)
But I think that's like, what, these are really good examples because in some ways I feel like, you know, we're not saying, Hey, anyone possibly could come to the text without presuppositions. In fact, a good way to look at this text is to look at like, is to look at it. Saying there's a central storyline here in which God is good. And that's something I'm going to at least use and wrestle with this text to figure it out. what's going on there? I, I think, you you've said something here as well, which is like,
you know, if you look at like the examples of some of the wars that the religious wars that take place within the Old Testament, how important it is to like enter into the fullness of that context there to understand the fullness of that context. And that might give you different perspectives on like, you know, the how God is portrayed in a culture that understands God mostly in terms of a kind of warrior ideas and imagery.
You understand that you realize how why things are set a certain way and then why there might be another different way of talking about God, but still following this line that you might this lens of looking at the text in light of God's goodness through that. I mean, I want to ask you to put on kind of your divine humility hat here or lens for interpreting scripture. So sometimes like what we think about the text or kind of presuppositions about it can be can be challenged. Right. And like even like, you know,
by the, say, by the Bible itself. And here's, we're talking about the challenging passages, maybe particularly around like war. Some of these presuppositions get challenged and we're not entirely sure what to do with them. What's your take on how the divine view and understanding of divine humility can be helpful when that takes place?
speaker-1 (19:01.208)
Well, I mean, think Augustine gives a basic good principle, which is any interpretation that does not result in love of God and neighbor is not the correct interpretation. And so you go back and you reread. And for some, for a lot of Christian tradition, allegorical interpretation was a legitimate way of interpreting scripture and was used to help make sense of
difficult passages. So, Origen is reading Joshua and he sees the conquest story and the slaughter and he goes, well, God, this is not about God commanding violence because we know what God is like. So, obviously, this is not about God wanting violence. The real meaning of the text is that we are called to
to fight against and to mortify our simple impulses. So in case you didn't know that that was the meaning of Joshua, that's what Origen would say is the meaning of the correct meaning. that, there was medieval text study Bibles very commonly did something similar with the text of dashing babies heads against the rock, the Babylonian heads against. You want to
mortify those sins and their infancy before they grow up to be big Babylonian sins that take over and conquer your life. And so there was there was ways of wrestling with those texts. So I'm not saying that I'm not trying to give an opinion about allegorical interpretation as much as that principle that Augustine brings out, which is we know what God is like.
And so we're going to interpret the text and draw meaning from it, knowing what we know about God. And Jesus says as much when he says, search the scripture, you study it, you search it and you don't see me in it. And why does he say that? Because you do not have the love of God within your hearts. So there's something about
speaker-1 (21:28.554)
are the disposition that we have, having the love of God in us, but that's very much connected to knowing something about the heart of God, knowing something about the love of God. the, you know, so it comes to, in some respect, our image of God on whether we will see God in the text. If we have an erroneous image of God,
And then we go to the text, how will we see what is truthful if we're going in with an erroneous lens of who God is in the first place? And I think that idea and that principle for interpretation is what we see in many of the interpreters throughout Christian tradition, that attitude.
speaker-0 (22:19.928)
So, okay, so help me. So I think this is getting at, you you've mentioned creation as an example where we see a humble God who makes us partners and we enter into collaboration with God. That's part of your saying like the formation of scripture itself. What about taking the person of Jesus as an example here? Is there a similar way that you could say, actually, like it's by the very words of Jesus in the Bible that I'm able to read the rest of
Scripture and have a really open, honest engagement with the Bible, but still one in which you're constantly learning and open to it. Do think you can do that same thing with the person of Christ?
speaker-1 (23:06.808)
So, I mean, I think it's important to see that God is the same yesterday, today and forever. And that Jesus says, what do you mean? Show me the Father. You've seen me. And I think that is important for that because I think what happens a lot of times is just bifurcation of the Old Testament being the mean warrior God and the New Testament is the nice.
God or whatever, which is totally false and we need to throw that out. There's a consistency there and Jesus is saying, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father. so, but what I think Jesus does is not give us something new by way of humility or that humility is only confined to the humanity of Christ, but that it's an additional bigger window.
So we already see the humility of God, not only in creation, but in prophetic texts that where God said, I hold out my hands all day long to an obstinate people and that incredible vulnerability and humility of someone holding out their hands all day long while being spit upon, so to speak. So the humility of God is there all along. But in Jesus, we have that window opened even wider.
And it's often framed within the terms of obviously the incarnation, God taking on human flesh, but also the crucifixion. But the particular example of humility that I like to touch on in my book and use as a focal image is Jesus washing feet.
The reason for that is because in my own tradition, fixation on the crucifixion as the moment of humility tended to ignore how Jesus lived life and exemplified humility throughout and would be almost used as a way of getting out of humility. So being self-sacrificial meant particularly for men
speaker-1 (25:27.862)
I'll get the robber if he comes in and I'll self-sacrifice myself if a robber breaks into the house. But, doing the dishes, that's woman's work. And so, so I think it's helpful to center around this image of Jesus washing feet, because it also tells us what humility means. There's a lot of misunderstandings about how we even define humility. And, you know, as I would see humility,
in all of this, I realized somebody was gonna come along and say, what's your systematic theology about humility being an attribute of the triune God? And I'm like, I'm not a systematic theologian, I'm a biblical scholar. But I did come across Matthew Wilcoxon's book, Divine Humility, God's Morally Perfect Being, which is an excellent book that I recommend. And he draws out.
similar idea that I was seeing with God sharing power and that is, you know, in some of the early church fathers, humility is a characteristic of greatness because there's something grand and glorious when power is used to
lift up and build up the community. so what I see in that story of Jesus washing feet then is that recognition of his own power. The text starts out saying he knew where he came from and where he was going and all this authority has been given.
And it's in the knowing of who he is and his agency and the fact that he is teacher that he kneels down in front. So the God of the universe kneeling down in front of you.
speaker-1 (27:40.3)
which freaks Peter out and would freak any of us out because there's something incredibly unnerving and alarming about the God of the universe kneeling down in front of you. That's not where God should be. God shouldn't be there. What's going on? Because one, we feel too unworthy and
you know, God shouldn't be serving me because we don't have enough sense of how much we are beloved that God wants to serve us because we're beloved, which is incredibly astonishing. And but also because what it demands of Peter, if this is how God treats me.
And Jesus said, go and do likewise. That can be really a well, maybe I don't want to kneel down and serve in this way because I kind of like having my way. kind of like living my life for myself. So there's something incredibly beautiful in how much it shows God loves us. And it's also unnerving in what it calls us to.
So that's why I used that particular focal image.
speaker-0 (29:03.946)
this image of God that you have depicted that is basically saying, listen, God is humble, like all the way down. This goes into the very depths of God's heart. And it's something that we see woven throughout the scriptural text. how does, like, what does he think maybe like the simplest way you can say that helps us make sense of why scripture looks the way it does either in all of its just
diversity or maybe even particularly in some of the passages that can be very troubling.
speaker-1 (29:39.662)
Again, I would say part of that is cross-cultural. We want to understand some of the difficult texts in a cross-cultural sense. So for example, language of annihilation is very common in the ancient Near East and it's hyperbolic. Even in scripture, we see that that doesn't explain everything away, but there's also the sense in which scripture is written within a collectivistic culture.
And, but you see within scripture itself, a wrestling with the idea of collective punishment. So often war was understood to be collective punishment. But then again, you see within the scriptures, a wrestling with, maybe bad things don't always happen because we're sinful. So that's the beauty of reading scripture across the whole story and reading it holistically.
is if you don't do that, we miss out on the dialogue, we miss out on the wrestling, we miss out on what is being learned. And I don't think that the language of error or inerrancy is helpful at all. When thinking about scripture, I wouldn't use those terms. I think we, I would use the term truthful. Is scripture truthful in what it's conveying?
as just salvation history that points us to Christ as one form of revelation, a particular type of revelation, which is to point us to Christ. And within that, you see diversity of tradition being put together, two different creation stories, or maybe the two, the different endings of the.
the story of King Manasseh, you know, here he's terrible and awful and here he's repenting and the beauty of reading the traditions together. It's not, it's not like the biblical authors said, no, there's two different versions of the story here and I hope nobody notices that this mistake has got put in here. There's just a really appreciation for
speaker-1 (32:01.71)
how different traditions add to the richness of it and are part of the conversation.
speaker-0 (32:12.75)
I think that's a great observation that gets us thinking about the text in a number of different ways. Let me help move us over to the Q &A a little bit. We've got a few questions here. So the first, here's a question here. A few times here, I've talked about difficult or challenging passages, but maybe, I know without explaining a little bit about what that means. So here's a question kind of to you, Karen. What would make a passage difficult or challenging?
speaker-1 (32:39.756)
text could be difficult or challenging for as simple as a lexical reason. mean, you know, a word that has never appeared anywhere else and we're trying to figure out what that word maybe means. I mean, that's a kind of textual difficult maybe, but I think that the kind of difficulties or challenges that often come up for people is
Why is there violence in the Bible or things that when we come across them in the Bible, they trouble us? you know, there's a rabbinic way of thinking about difficult passages that I really love, which is, you know, the apostate city is where
Everybody is supposed to be destroyed. Everybody in the city is supposed to be killed off in the apostate city if they succumb to idolatry. And the rabbinic text says, the apostate city, there never was, there never will be such a situation like that. What's the reason to study and get the reward of studying? In other words, it's a...
It's in there and the text to make us wrestle with the moral and ethical question and difficulty of violence or of unfaithfulness. And so in that sense, scripture is the challenging text of scripture are challenging us to wrestle with what they evoke in us.
speaker-0 (34:29.474)
Yeah, actually agree. think your first example is one that resonates with me. A difficult or challenging passage is one like Deuteronomy seven or Deuteronomy 20, where you have at least someone who's speaking on God's behalf saying, go and kill all the people from this certain area, including women and children. And how do I square that with a God who tells me to love my enemies? How do I wrestle with scripture and see this?
as God speaking to me through it. So I think your, and I think your book offers a really interesting proposal of thinking about a God who is humble enough to just bring in all of who we are, even as authors, and to make that part of the way that God can still speak to us, particularly in these, the humility of God, the vulnerability of God and the person of Jesus. Let me go into this question here. If love of God and people,
is our hermeneutical key, we've used that word a few times, just kind of means like how we interpret hermeneutic there. If love of God and people is our hermeneutical key, how can we know what is love? And here there's this example of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, who would say their actions are loving actions.
speaker-1 (35:36.588)
Yes, that's an excellent question. my assertion would be that humility is the foundation of love, that love is what springs, that you cannot have love without humility, that humility is what, it's the well out of which love springs. And so, and that is essential then to the...
focal images that we see in scripture as using, for example, Jesus washing feet, Jesus kneeling, you know, the God of the universe kneeling down in front of us as this is what love looks like. And so am I kneeling down not just before my friend, but even before those that are difficult to love?
Is the Westboro Baptist Church folks, are they washing the feet of LGBTQ people, for example?
speaker-0 (36:43.726)
There's a question that we really need to hear. And I think what I hear in your response there is like, can take words off of a page and apply them and say you're applying love. But there is also like, Jesus is the word of God in his actions, like in his character and his posture speaks to us just as powerfully. Okay, so this question here says, I really love your book, love the thesis of the book. I'm a youth pastor. Do you have any tips on how to teach a contextual view of scripture?
while thinking about minds of youth, about overwhelming them with heavy exegesis and historical criticism, how can we hold a person's hand and walk them through reading scripture through a loving yet critical way while emphasizing the power of humility? I think it's a really good question. think a lot of us are thinking about ways we've been taught scripture in the past. And one of the most moving things is to figure out like, how do we introduce our children to this text?
speaker-1 (37:41.814)
Yeah, that's a great question too. And I would approach it with wonder because that really is.
It is a pretty amazing thing how scripture came together. And if we teach those things early on as a means of wonder and not, no, there's all the differences and apparent contradictions and all, and then we try to force this apologetic onto the text to make it.
And then they leave and they go off to college and they realize it's not so clean. And then they lose their faith. So when we just start with when, when people in Sunday school, when they're young, is what I wish I had gotten, but wow, look at this, look at how God is working with us within our context. And look at the context of the biblical authors and the time that they lived in and how God was working with them in this time period.
and that the Bible written in a context and these, there's cultural dynamics and look, we can see some of these cultural dynamics right here. And how neat is that, that God comes so near that God works with us in our culture or look at how God collaborates with human beings, even little old human beings and imperfect human beings.
is collaborating and how the biblical authors are collaborating with each other and how they're collaborating even across hundreds of years intergenerationally working together as a community. Look how scripture is written across time and this dynamism because God is with us across history and look at how God is working not with just the biblical authors but how God is working with the editors and all the people that are
speaker-1 (39:41.688)
taking part in this over a period of time. So we're instilling a sense of wonder that these things are not problems to be solved, but are pretty amazing. part of that is getting out of this post-Enlightenment modernist
expectation for how a text should work, how scripture should work, and begin to have that more ancient understanding of storytelling.
speaker-0 (40:19.854)
so let me go back to your next question here. The concept in your book that's made an impression upon me is that God is at work across history. So every generation has something to offer when it comes to interpreting the Bible. Can you say a little bit more about that idea?
speaker-1 (40:35.522)
Yeah. Yeah. So I was sort of raised with this idea that there's one method of interpretation and we've got to have the right method. Otherwise, we're not going to get what we're supposed to get from the text. But if you look at history, we see that any methodology can be used in very abusive ways.
And simultaneously, we see that many different methodologies have sustained the church over time and that it's not the method as much as it is the disposition of the reader and the north star of what scripture is, the purpose of scripture and what it's pointing us to, which is Christ and equipping us for
Christ-like embodiment. so the beauty is breaking out of our little myopic small world. And I know everything because I was born in the 21st century. breaking out of that myopic mentality and looking at, look at the wisdom within Christian tradition.
over time and how I stand on the shoulders of those who come before me and I'm going to become part of that and the future generations are going to be standing on my shoulders too as I become part of this community across generations for growing together and understanding God. So tradition
and new insights go hand in hand and we see that in scripture itself where tradition is often left there in the text rather than erased but it's built upon even as it may be built upon in fresh ways for a new context.
speaker-0 (42:43.15)
We talked earlier about allegorical interpretation of scripture. That's kind of like just getting a spiritual and moral meaning out of a text. This question is, especially in light of allegorical interpretations in Christian tradition for troubling texts, texts that have violence in them, can point to violence. Does it make sense to ask if scripture is historical fact? How do you go about doing this? Like to what extent?
speaker-1 (43:12.29)
that again, we have to look at what the purpose of scripture is, which is to point us to Christ and to equip us for every good work. And so is the Bible a science book that teaching us how to do heart surgery? Is the Bible a post-enlightenment Harvard historian?
methodological way of writing history with footnotes. So I would say all of scripture is truthful. And I would say that it tells a truthful history, a truthful salvation history, and that part of understanding what that means again, involves a cross-cultural dynamic of understanding what did this culture and people
how did they understand history telling? So I don't think that because we in the 21st century in the West have a particular way of relaying history that we should consider that to be superior to how other cultures tell and relay and pass on history. And there's certainly plenty of problems with the way that we do history now. If you look at any
history textbook in a high school today in the United States, you probably find some things in it that are like, hmm, I'm not sure that that's the most unbiased way to tell history or the best way to tell history. So I think there's some kind of a superiority complex when we kind of look at, well, it's not telling history the way I would do it in my place and time and my Western culture.
Instead, we need to look at how this particular people and culture tell history, how they tell their where they've come from. And when we look at it that way, I think it is absolutely a truthful story of history.
speaker-0 (45:26.807)
Okay, and then if folks are interested in finding what you're doing right now, seeing more about your work, where can they find that?
speaker-1 (45:36.846)
I would just refer people to my website, which is redwoodspiritualcare.com. And I usually have stuff there. You can find me on Twitter from there or what I'm writing about.
speaker-0 (45:52.898)
Karen, I have really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. And folks, I hope that this conversation will entice a number of you to jump in to the word of a humble God and maybe to form communities where you can talk about that book. Karen, thank you so much for joining us.
speaker-1 (46:07.842)
Thank you so much for having me.
