The Table Podcast - Issues of God and Culture
Religion & Spirituality:Christianity
Kasey Olander:
Well, welcome to The Table Podcast, where we discuss issues of God and culture. My name is Kasey Olander. I'm the web content specialist here at the Hendricks Center at Dallas Theological Seminary. Today, we're going to be discussing cultivating love for God's Word. What is Bible literacy? What does it look like, and how can we help develop people in this? So I'm really excited because today's guest is author and Bible teacher Jen Wilkin. Jen, thank you so much for being here today.
Jen Wilkin:
Thanks so much for having me on, Kasey.
Kasey Olander:
I'm excited for this conversation. We're hoping that people listening will come away with a deeper love for God's word, a deeper affection for scripture, and also, you might share that love with other people. So I say we, I don't make a habit of speaking for Jen Wilkin, but I'm assuming that that is also your hope as well, Jen.
Jen Wilkin:
I verify those comments.
Kasey Olander:
Okay. Thanks. Well, Jen, why don't we start off by talking about what is Bible literacy and how did you get to be so passionate about it?
Jen Wilkin:
Bible literacy, simply defined, just means that you have access to the Bible in a language that you understand and you're moving toward understanding of it. So if you are an English speaker and you own or have access to a copy of the Bible in English, then you are someone who is capable of growing in your understanding of that book.
So I got interested in Bible literacy I would say gradually. My family is filled with educators and not just any kind of educators. There are a lot of English teachers in my family. I also got an English degree in college, but I didn't want to go into a career of teaching for various reasons. I think I was like, "That's hard work and you don't get a lot of recognition." So let's just say upfront that 21-year-old me was super charming, but what I couldn't shake was what I had grown up with, which was a love of reading, a love of books, and also a fair amount of exposure to the Bible.
That exposure to the Bible ended up playing out in a bunch of different denominational settings because my parents divorced when I was eight, and my mom was a single mom in the church, which is a tricky role to be in. It was hard to find places where she fit in the local church, which is another thing I care a lot about is single women in the church because I know how clunky it can be for them.
So she would move around from church to church looking for a place that felt comfortable, which meant that I had a lot of exposure to someone standing behind a pulpit holding the same book, but saying very different things. I grew more and more convinced that a firsthand knowledge of the Bible was going to be critical to being able to discern between false teaching and true teaching, but also just between bad teaching and good teaching. We have a tendency to just consign things to the outer edges, either it's false or it's true, but a lot of times it might just be that someone isn't as skilled as someone else in handling the scriptures. So we need to have discernment for both of those kinds of things.
So I grew more and more committed to this as I saw the effects of false teaching play out in my own family. My mom got super involved in the word faith movement and had a chronic illness. So any listener who has ever had that happen in their own setting will know that that's a tough place to be in, where your illness is attributed to a lack of faith on your part. Then you're going to respond to the medical community differently when you believe that all you need is enough faith to heal yourself.
So I always say that false teaching for me is not a hypothetical. I understand that it's dangerous spiritually, but I also understand that it can be dangerous in other very tangible ways as well. I do think that Bible literacy is the first best step toward each Christian, first of all, owning their faith, but also secondly, being able to discern between truth and error.
Kasey Olander:
That's really helpful. Thanks for sharing some of your story with us. I feel like you've highlighted a couple different things that this passion comes from lived experience that you really care, it's not theoretical. How is it that you … You said you already love reading, you already are like, "Okay. I've had this exposure to the Bible. I'm hearing people say different things about it." How did you set up on this journey to really know what the Bible said?
Jen Wilkin:
Well, I think what I began to realize is I gained more exposure specifically to all female spaces that the Bible was not treated as a book in many cases. It was seen more like it was magical. It was something that if you opened it and pointed to a verse, it would tell you what you should do or it was therapeutic, it was supposed to make you feel a particular way. Sometimes on a daily basis, it was supposed to make you have positive feelings so that you could start your day, that whole quiet time culture that has been so prevalent. I want to be clear, I'm not dogging on a daily practice of being in the scriptures. I'm talking about a daily devotional approach to scriptures that is exclusive, that does not include also other approaches that are literacy building. Devotional reading is a wonderful thing. It is not necessarily a literacy builder when we talk about learning the Bible from start to finish.
So the prevalence of those kinds of resources, specifically geared toward women, not only that, but resources that were approaching women only at the feelings level and not at the thought level, I could see that that was missing, and I didn't love that because the Bible is a book. It is much more than a book, but it is at least a book. We didn't handle it in the way that we would handle even a common textbook.
You wouldn't take your algebra textbook and flip to chapter five and read three sentences or a paragraph and ask how it should change your life that day. Then you certainly wouldn't come back and do that over a period of a semester flipping to chapter three and doing that flipping to chapter eight and doing that and expect that at the end of the semester when the final exam is given that you would be able to pass it.
So I'm an author. I've now written, I guess, five books, and what I've never done is thought, "I'm just going to throw some words on a page and people can use them however they want," and biblical authors are no different. They wrote with a purpose and they started somewhere and they built to somewhere and they ended somewhere, and not only that, but the story of the Bible as a whole is a story that is cohesive.
I had not been, though I had been given the Bible, I had not been given the Bible according to those terms. I think that's the starting point. Then you can place these other approaches to scripture on top of that foundational approach, but if you're missing the foundational approach, we're opening up ourselves to all kinds of interpretive issues, application issues, and so that's what I'm hoping to mitigate.
Kasey Olander:
Can you tease out a little bit, I guess if you would call them categories or I guess ways to read the Bible? You talked about devotional reading. It's not, obviously, that the Bible shouldn't change your hearts or even impact us at an emotional level, but can you, I guess, help describe some of those different ways of reading?
Jen Wilkin:
Yeah. So if you think about the way devotional reading is typically structured, you're given a grouping of verses or maybe a little bit of a passage, and then there's some reflection that the author makes over it to help draw you into what is being said, and that, depending on the quality of the devotional content that you're using, it may or may not give you the context for what that passage was originally doing or what it has meant to the church of all ages.
What typically is the focus of devotional content is what it means for me and for now. I would say that that is the typical approach of the majority of what I would call the flawed approaches to reading the scriptures is that there is an overemphasis on getting to what does it mean for me and for now or a sense of urgency to that that we just don't get to impose on the scriptures. They do have something to say to me and for now, but we also need to be aware of how individualism and instant gratification are shaping the way that we think about the scriptures.
I want it to have a word for me more than I care about the fact that it had a word for the original audience. I want it to have a word for me more than I care about what it has said to the church of all ages. So many of us had been trained into these methods and need to be brought back to, "Wait, wait, wait. Before I can talk about what it means for me and for now, I need to have a grasp of what it meant for them and for them, for the original audience, and I need to have a grasp of how it has been applied throughout church history in light of its whole context."
So devotional reading doesn't deliver that, it delivers an immediate hit, and it doesn't make me work for it either. Your namesake for the Hendricks Center had a formative effect on the way that I thought about approaching people as students. Howard Hendricks has famously said, "Never do for your student what your student can do for themselves," but so many of our approaches to scripture required nothing of us. They only required that we hear what someone else had said and then figure out what to do with it.
So because we view the Bible as something we can just pop into and then do whatever we want with it, we have become a generation of Christians who are essentially curators of other people's opinions about a book that we don't actually read ourselves in a way that is responsible to book reading in general, but certainly to this most important of all books.
Kasey Olander:
You're never going to go wrong with a Howard Hendricks' quote around here.
Jen Wilkin:
I feel like my end of the crowd a little bit.
Kasey Olander:
I appreciate that.
Jen Wilkin:
I figured I should use those words on it.
Kasey Olander:
That's really insightful, not to do for your student what he or she can do for him or herself. Where would you say that we are nowadays? You said that this is of the climate. Is that still where we are? Is that historical? How would you gauge what is it that I can expect a student to be able to do for themselves?
Jen Wilkin:
Well, it's not a very well-concealed secret that we're not just dealing with a Bible literacy problem. We have a literacy problem that people are not learning typically in their schooling how to read any book, much less a book of the Bible. So it's a compounded effect. So in many cases, when I start introducing people to the concepts to build Bible literacy, it's news to them, and it shouldn't be. I should be able to say, "Remember what you learned in high school English," or, "Remember what you learned …" There are some pockets where it's still happening, but I do find that, typically, people, if they did learn things like annotating or paying attention to context, that they would never think to apply those things to reading the Bible because the Bible is special, and those are just regular books.
So I think that restoring Bible literacy is a function of restoring just literacy. We're not good at thinking critically, particularly when it comes to what we're reading in the Bible. We think that there are questions that might pop into our heads that we shouldn't be asking or that we should already know the answer to. Then when we fail in our initial attempts to understand, we question whether the Holy Spirit is actually in us the way that He is and other people who seem to be better at this.
So that's why I believe so firmly that if we give people tools, then they will grow in their confidence to read not just the Bible, but I would argue other books as well and to be able to think more critically about what they're reading and to own the learning process rather than to outsource it.
Kasey Olander:
So what are some of those tools then that you give people, whoever you're teaching?
Jen Wilkin:
The most basic one, and I think also the most overlooked one is repetitive reading. So it feels like it's too easy, too good to be true, but also, it can feel like, "Well, why would I do that? I read it once, so why would I read it again?" When you think about the fact that we're 2,000 years removed, if not more, from the world and words that we're seeing in the scriptures, we should expect that it will take us more than one reading to start to have the meaning sink in.
If you think about even just reading the plays of Shakespeare, if your English teacher subjected you to that. I had this distinct memory of reading Shakespeare in an English lit class and thinking, "I'm having a really hard time following this language. Not only that, I don't understand a lot of the references that are being made." Then I remember going to a Shakespeare in the Park production, where you heard the tone and the emphasis for the words, and all of a sudden it started to open up more understanding for me. I could hear more the flow of the way that the language was being used.
The Bible is similar. We have to read it more than once before it starts to sink in. I think it also helps if you listen to it because if you think about in most of human history, that's the way that the Bible would have been consumed by people. They would not have owned their own copy, someone would've read it to them.
So repetitive reading is the first step toward comprehension. Now, comprehension, I would say is the least valued in our current climate of the steps in gaining Bible literacy. We think, "Oh, I can read it once and I will comprehend it," and we want to move on to the sweet sauce, which is, "What does it mean and how does it change me?" but comprehension needs way more time than we give it. So once we've read repetitively a book from start to finish, then we can start marking what we're seeing, "What am I seeing is going on here? What themes am I seeing? What repeated words? What repeated ideas." Writing things in our own words, paraphrasing things is another way to get closer to whether you actually do understand what is being communicated.
Everybody hates paraphrasing. Honestly, I hate it because you feel like you're failing the whole time that you're doing it. It's like, "How could I possibly write the words of God in my own words and not be a heretic?" but what you're doing is exercising a skill that's growing you and understanding you're allowed to write bad paraphrases. The goal is to get better at it in the same way that if you were practicing a musical instrument, you're allowed to have clunky practices. The goal is to get better at playing the instrument. So paraphrasing, marking the text, repetitive reading is the foundational point, reading in different translations. It's a wealth that we get to enjoy as modern day Christians. We have access to multiple translations. We can see how different translators made choices of what words to use in the translation. So those are all skills that can help. Just looking at words in the English dictionary can be a help. So those are a few.
Kasey Olander:
That's so comforting because I feel like those things are so accessible to people. It's not that you have to go to this special place and get this special knowledge, but rather, those are things, assuming I have the text of the Bible, I can read it repeatedly. I can read it over and over again. So how did you get from this to realizing, "Hey, we need to comprehend what the Bible says"? All of us need to have some understanding of how it affected, like you said, the original audience, but then also before we say, "How does it apply to me today?" How did you then start teaching this to other people, having enough of a grasp of it to then convey the truths of God to people in front of you?
Jen Wilkin:
I was absolutely terrified because I don't have formal theological training. I am a reader though, so it was not intimidating to me to pick up books that I know would be intimidating to a lot of people for very good reason, but I was like, "Oh, sure, I'll give it a shot. Let's see." So I was willing to pick, I knew that I needed to understand theology and I knew that I needed to get access to good sources. So I read the footnotes of people like R. C. Sproul to see who they were pulling from, and then I just went there because I didn't know who else to ask. Thankfully, I was pointed in good directions.
So I started first by trying to make sure that I myself was ready to stand up and do this. The method did not feel intimidating to introduce because the method was just how to read a book, but it was convincing people that that method mattered for the Bible. Also, a lot of the work that I have had to do is to pull the fire alarm. It's to make people aware even that they need this because they don't even realize that the approaches that they're taking to scripture are anemic or are keeping them in a state of immaturity from an understanding standpoint.
So helping them understand, "Hey, you don't know the Bible, and also that's okay. The reason you don't know it isn't because you failed. It's because someone like me hasn't given you what you need. So let's all just admit that none of us knows it the way that we should and let's start learning ways to be active learners instead of passive consumers of someone else's thoughts about this book or devotional readers or people who want to have a verse for the day. Let's start changing some of these patterns that we have actually been told are the right way to study the Bible. Let's start evaluating them. Let's assess how do you spend the time that you interact with the scriptures. What percentage of it would you say is devotional or topical? What percentage of it would you say is reading, trying to understand an entire book of the Bible from start to finish?"
So a lot of it has been not just the courage or the tools for me to stand up and teach it, but convincing the learner that this is something they really need and that there is a way forward that's accessible to them that will yield fruit over time because that's the other challenge. Everybody wants an immediate fix. They want the diet that's easy. They want the workout plan that's easy. This is a discipline, and so it's a long-term gain.
Kasey Olander:
I want to just read something in five minutes and then be forever transformed and have that be it.
Jen Wilkin:
Yeah, that'd be fantastic.
Kasey Olander:
No, but you're saying that it's worth it. Over the long haul, getting to know scripture and reading it over and over and over and time and time again even if you've read it before to try to understand and to understand it even better the next time is worthwhile. How do you then cultivate these environments where, like you said, for some people you're saying, "Hey, heads up, you don't know the Bible, but you can," combining with people who are maybe more mature believers who have been in scripture for a while? I guess how do you cultivate these environments, let's say, in a church where all these people are here at the same time?
Jen Wilkin:
This is what I love about the Bible study space, and you probably know this, Kasey, because we go to the same church, but it is a place where everyone has room to move forward. So even if you're further along in your understanding of the scriptures than the other people in your small group, you have an opportunity then to help someone else grow in their understanding, but you are not going to only function as the wiser person or the more seasoned person because anytime we come to the scriptures, we're going to see something that we didn't see before.
So that's why I love the Bible study space. I regard it as an evergreen environment. So you might take a course on the story of the Bible as a whole, but you probably wouldn't take that course 15 times. That's something you can gain mastery over and then it becomes a tool that you're using in a Bible study space or in a theology space.
So the Bible study space is the great equalizer in my view because we all are going to hit bumps in the road. No matter how long we've been doing this, there will still be a new challenge, a new treasure to unearth, even if it is just the expansion of something that we have been thinking about over 10 years. I think there's also a lot of joy when you're the person who knows more than the next person in recognizing, "Oh, my goodness, that used to be me and now I have actually grown over a longer period of time than I may have wanted, but I have actually grown in my understanding." So that's what I love about that space. I feel like it doesn't cross anyone off the list as being too slow or too advanced.
Kasey Olander:
That's awesome. I love that you called it a treasure too, that it's something that you can continue to mind for and to dig. It's living and active, and so it's not like anybody has 100% mastered it and it's not like anybody … It's too high of a bar for somebody who's brand new to this space. How are some ways that you're like, "Okay. These are some important principles or practices to keep in mind," when you're organizing this Bible study space that you love?
Jen Wilkin:
So you're asking a really good question because I think we can think that if I just have good content, then that's going to make this the space that functions exactly the way that it should, but I know, and I would imagine most people who have worked in a local church would tell you you can have really good content and nobody will come. So what we want is to have all of the mechanics in place that make it easy for people to opt in. So in other words, we want to lower the bar on barriers to entry that might keep people from saying yes that are reasonable.
So things like, "Is there childcare provided? Does it happen at a time that is accessible for people?" but then we want to raise the bar on what we're asking of them when they commit to being there. So that might sound a little counterintuitive, but if you think about the way that the church has thought about discipleship for at least the last 40 years, it's been, "Well, if we ask too much of people, then they won't come," and that's profoundly not true. People want to do hard things. They do hard things all the time. They do whole 30, they run marathons, they go to crossfit gym. Discipline is not dead. It just follows the most compelling message.
So what we have sometimes not done is, given a compelling message, we've actually been apologetic about asking people to come and join us in these spaces, "Oh, I'm sorry. Just give it as little time as possible," or, "Just come. You don't have to prepare anything before you come." We inadvertently communicate a low value of what we're doing when we say that. If instead we said, "You know what? We're going to build this according to recognized good principles of ministry. In other words, it's going to be highly predictable. You're going to know exactly what you're opting into. It will be structured. We will have mutual accountability between what we expect of you and what you can expect of us as the leaders. We are going to make sure that things are done with excellence," if you build it out according to just good basic practices of ministry and then you drop that good content and the higher bar in there, people come alive. They can't get enough of that.
If you think about it, that's exactly what the coach of your kids' travel team is doing. They're giving you predictable schedules. They're giving you structure. They're asking you to pay $1 million for your child to be a part of this, and you are throwing money at them because you trust the process and you know that it's not just the good coaching, it's that you know exactly when things are going to happen, what the rhythms are and exactly what will be required of you and what you will get in return.
So I've sometimes reflected on … This is not to dog on John Piper, but he preached a sermon. I'm pretty sure he wrote a book by the title Brothers, We Are Not Professionals. I have often wanted to say, "Well, no, but we could do things with excellence. We should do things …" Don't hear that and think. It means just show up and say whatever, and that is certainly not what John Piper meant, but I think that sometimes we get in our heads, "Well, we're well intentioned. God loves us. We're just going to throw some stuff at the wall and see what sticks."
When you do that, people don't feel like they can trust you with their time. Their time is precious, and so they're going to take that time and they're going to entrust it to the person who does give them structure, predictability, accountability, accessibility, excellence in a place to form community.
Kasey Olander:
It's funny, we think that we as humans don't need all of these things. These things sound really basic, but they're so helpful to us. There's some comfort, I think, in having that structured routine and knowing what to expect when you come to something like Bible study, knowing that your kids are going to be cared for and knowing that you're going to be held to a high standard, you're going to be expected to have done the homework before you show up, even though we know that you're … Everybody's busy. Everybody says their lives are busy, but everybody has this-
Jen Wilkin:
We have time for the things we care about.
Kasey Olander:
Exactly. We all have the same amount of time.
Jen Wilkin:
We allocate that time according to what feels like it can bear our trust, and that's what I'm saying. I think in a lot of cases, discipleship in the local church is running at a trust deficit because we've kept moving the ball so much. We've moved what we're asking of people around so many times. So just to give us a contrast, if you are familiar with the way that Parachurch Bible studies function, I know many women and men who would give their time to a Parachurch study before they'd give it to anything in their local church because what Parachurch does is the same thing over and over again all the time. We're over here trying to get all creative with it.
So if we would observe, and this is also not a statement against Parachurch Bible studies, but if you're a church leader wondering, "Why do they always go to that and they never come to what we plan here?" I would not look first at your content, although your content may be part of the problem. I would look first at how faithful you've been to create rhythms that are sustainable and recognizable and trustworthy where you actually deliver on what you said you were going to do.
Kasey Olander:
That is so helpful. How would you then characterize the relationship between discipleship, evangelism, and bible literacy?
Jen Wilkin:
Well, you're not going to be an evangelist for something that you don't feel deeply about and you're not going to feel deeply about something that you haven't thought deeply about. So if you think about the Great Commission, the words of the Great Commission, the Great Commission says, "Go and make disciples." It doesn't say, "Go and make converts." Obviously, it assumes that there will be converts so I don't want to overplay that thought, but it does say to make disciples, teaching people to observe all that he has commanded. I do think that we think of the Great Commission primarily in terms of evangelism.
Perhaps that's backwards to borrow an idea from Dallas Willard. Dallas Willard says, "We have evangelized and let …" Sorry. Now I can't even say the quote. "We have focused on making converts and let disciples happen, but maybe our job is to focus on discipleship and let converts happen." Now, he's making a big point. I don't think anyone would say converts don't matter and we should only focus on discipleship. He's correcting an emphasis problem. So when we think about what we're doing in the local church, if you want to have people who are eager to evangelize, then they need to know the beautiful story and they need to know it deep in their bones.
That's not something that we learn overnight. We learn it initially. I always jokingly say, although it's true, that much in the same way that we come into marriage on very little information, we get married on very little information, but then we have a lifetime to learn that the love that we felt in those initial stages could bear the weight of years. The same is true of getting saved. We come to faith on relatively little information, but then we have a lifetime for that love to bear the weight of the relationship. So that's discipleship. So the more people are taught the beauty of the beautiful story, the more likely it is that it will be on their lips at the opportunity that's presented to them to evangelize.
Kasey Olander:
That's so interesting that you come back around to people are going to evangelize, people are going to talk about what they feel deeply about, and you didn't start with feelings. The feelings are an outflow of this love for God's word, not love emotional, but love as in commitment and understanding of God's word. So people are disciples as in they are walking in the long haul, making the long-term investment that you're talking about. Then this like, "I feel really strongly about this, of course I'm going to tell people about Jesus, of course I need to share the gospel with this person I met at the grocery store," or what have you.
Jen Wilkin:
It's frustrating to me that in the recent iterations of church discipleship, feelings have been pitted against thinking. I find that to be patently false. In fact, if you think about the people who are most passionate about a subject or a pursuit, they are not ignorant of it. They actually know it very well. Cognitive science would even say that our love for something grows as we learn more about it. We know this to be true in human experience. I think we just don't always focus on that. My friend and colleague, Mason King, will often say, "Your feelings are real, but they're not reliable." I think that's a good watch word for us because if we are counting on feelings that are not grounded in a deep understanding to give us words for evangelism and to empower us to walk the Christian life, then when we hit a circumstance that is overwhelming and our feelings start to go all over the map, then are we no good for evangelism? Are we no good navigate these difficult seasons?
We have to rely on the knowledge that we have faithfully deposited into what I've referred to as a savings account in the day of crisis to carry us through because we are not in a position in the day of crisis to say, "You know what? I'm going to sit down and learn the book of Romans right now." You need that to already be in there to some degree when that day comes. So feelings and thinking are not antagonistic. Right thinking fuels right feeling, but I would also say deep thinking fuels deep feeling. So when we feel like we don't feel enough, we can't simply feel to feel. We have to think to feel.
Kasey Olander:
That is really good. I love that explanation of that relationship. They're not completely separate. They're not the same thing, thinking and feeling, but they're not completely unrelated. Deep thinking leads to deep feeling.
Jen Wilkin:
Deep feeling spurs us on to want to think even more deeply. I would say it's a virtuous circle.
Kasey Olander:
A virtuous circle, yay, not vicious. So then you alluded to these times of crisis then. Sometimes that can be a personal life, but then also sometimes I think it's spiritual. So how does then having this Bible literacy address things like doubt? I feel like doubt is one of those things that people don't like to talk about, it's embarrassing like, "We just have faith in Jesus. We're not going to talk about these questions we have," but how does the Bible literacy address them?
Jen Wilkin:
Well, first of all, Bible literacy is an invitation into shared conversation about the Bible. I think that one of the things people can miss is they're like, "Oh, so I need to have good tools so I can understand the Bible," but we're not created to operate in a vacuum. So again, where we see this message of individualism has been overcommunicated in the church. Your personal relationship with Jesus Christ is not enough to sustain your doubts.
Now, that probably didn't come across right. Your personal relationship with Jesus Christ will see you through to the kingdom, but here what I'm saying, you're not just saved into a personal relationship, you're saved into relationship with the church as well. Your doubts are meant to be exercised in community, not just you with your Bible trying to figure it out.
So when you layer doubt, which is just a normal part of the Christian life, when you layer doubt on top of biblical ignorance or miscommunication, then you've got a real fix. I think what you see in a lot of the deconstruction that we're seeing is that the way that we thought we were supposed to construct our faith was heavily individualized. When we understand that our faith is constructed in community and not just in community with our local church, but in community with the church universal, so the church across cultures and the church across time, then when you encounter a doubt, you're far less likely to think, "Am I the only person who sees this or am I the first person who sees this?" and to think, "There are not answers to the questions that I'm asking," you begin to realize, "Oh, I am of yesterday and no nothing, and I bet that there are other people who have wrestled with these questions."
You may hear how other people have wrestled with those questions and answered them, and you may still say, "I reject that," but I think that nine times out of 10, it will cause you to think differently or harder about that doubt, and if nothing else, you'll feel the assurance of, "Oh, doubt is something that we all go through."
Then again, the aspect of community is, "I've gone through long seasons of doubt during my lifetime and I've come to the other side of them, and I know that I needed to hear other people tell me that that was their experience as well, and I make it a point to tell other believers that as well," because in the moment of doubt you think, "Is this it? Is this the end?" and we can't see to the other side of it. So many factors can play into why the doubt arose in the first place and we're not always aware of what all of them are. We don't know ourselves as well as we think we do. So we need that shared identity of the church to help us along.
Kasey Olander:
Yeah, to have the humility to express that to somebody else. Like you said, we're a part of the body of Christ right now, the people that are around me, but also through all of history, I'm not the very first person to ever wonder, "Oh, well, if God is good, then why is there evil and suffering in the world?"
Jen Wilkin:
Also, that that's the right question to ask. It's the right question to ask, and that's one of many that are the right questions to ask, and we feel like we're unspiritual or failing if we even think it much less say it out loud and we don't realize that it's been thought and said out loud for thousands of years.
Kasey Olander:
So someone could hear this and be like, "Okay. If Jen Wilkin can actually verbalize, 'Hey, I've struggled with doubt,' okay, then maybe I can say that too. Maybe I can say that to somebody around me, and that can be part of not pushing me away from reading scripture, but something that draws me towards it to be like, 'Okay. I think this is sufficient. Maybe I don't understand everything, but I can read it for myself and I can read it in a community of believers around me who can help me and encourage me in it.'"
Jen Wilkin:
I never want in the Bible literacy conversation, because I am trying to restore an emphasis on learning, I never want to underemphasize or leave out talking about the role of the Holy Spirit and understanding the scriptures. That is real. The reason that the word of God is living and active is because the Spirit is pleased to work through the words of scripture to form us into the image of Christ. So don't hear what I'm not saying because I definitely believe that the Spirit is the way that we move forward in our understanding, but I believe that it's Spirit-empowered work that we partner in to show ourselves as workers unashamed.
Kasey Olander:
Yeah, absolutely. One of my favorite things in ministry has been reading the Bible with non-Christians. I feel like that has been such a rewarding experience. They help me. The questions that people ask are like, "Wow, I've never thought about that before. I need to go look that up." I feel like they help me with the observation that people or me are inclined to skip, but they are actually reading the text almost like, like you're talking about, like it's literature, like they're arriving at a book in a way that sometimes we forget to do if we're reading devotional or trying to cherry-pick it. So anyway, I love that part of Bible reading because I think it's so helpful. I would encourage people to do that, find a non-Christian to read the Bible with. Go ahead.
Jen Wilkin:
They are so much more honest about the gaps that they're seeing. So also, I find it a lot of times with Catholics who are first exposed to the Bible firsthand because they've heard a lot about it. In many cases, I hear Catholics say, "I was told I shouldn't read the Bible," and then they start reading it and they're like, "I have questions." I love that because you're going to get a lot more honesty and it's going to press the teacher on how to give the instruction, but it also is so refreshing because they're asking the right questions to get to a more literate reading.
So things like, I didn't mention these earlier when we were talking about tools, but obviously, having some historical context matters so much. Understanding genres is huge. So many people who are not Christians have heard so many Christians take a literal reading of passages that weren't meant to be taken literally, which is not to say that no passages are to be taken literally, but if we would train Christians into a literate reading of the Bible versus a literal reading, which means that you take literally what's meant to be taken literally, and you take literately things according to genre rules. So I wouldn't assume that when Jesus says if your right eye offends you to gouge it out, that He actually means I should do that, simple things like that or that a proverb is not a promise, it's a principle, ideas like that that are important.
I think a lot of times when we get into conversations with non-Christians about the Bible, they are like, "Well, the Bible said …" They want to have a very literal wooden reading of the Bible because, again, literacy is an issue across the spectrum. It doesn't just live inside the church. So I think when you start to go, "Well, wait a minute, wait a minute. What if we read this according to the genre rule?" Well, someone who has never been told the Bible is a book, Christian or non-Christian, that's a compelling proposition for them.
Kasey Olander:
Right, because nobody would look at poetry the same way they would read a novel. We know that's not the same genre.
Jen Wilkin:
That's right. So when you go, "Yeah, the Bible's like that too," that's a new idea for a lot of unbelievers because they've heard only the Bible presented as, "Well, if you'll just read it, the Spirit's going to speak to you and it's going to …" In my view, it might happen that way. I would love it. You hear those stories about the Gideon Bible in the bedside table at the hotel and I don't mean to say that those are not true or unimportant, I think those are beautiful, but are they normative? I don't know. I think it depends a lot.
Kasey Olander:
If I have the chance to walk alongside somebody, then I can share these things about like, "Hey, did you know that the Bible is actually 66 books and these are the different genres?" and having that kind of context. So I love that I can share that with a non-Christian and they also can spur me on to read the Bible better and to ask questions that I'm like, "Why did I never wonder that before?" So how would you encourage somebody who's new to the Bible … Let's say they're a new believer. Where would you have them start?
Jen Wilkin:
First of all, you're not meant to do it alone, particularly a new believer. You need to find someone who can help you so that … Hopefully, that's through your local church. So start asking, "Who can help me learn the Bible?" and then sit down with someone and start going through a book from start to finish. My suggestion is often to start … I know a lot of people say start with the Gospel of John. You could do that, but I would say a shorter book might be good for your first venture into trying to learn how to handle the Bible as a book, and I often recommend the book of James because it's wisdom literature.
You never have to reach the end of a phrase that James has spoken and think, "I wonder what I'm supposed to do with this." So it removes the barrier of trying to figure out application. Application's pretty straightforward in wisdom literature by definition, and it's five chapters, and so it's a good way to get a snapshot idea of how to read the Bible, to read an entire book of the Bible from start to finish and to grasp what it's saying as a whole and to grasp how the parts support the whole. So I would recommend that.
Then I would say, as quickly as you can, get yourself to the Old Testament and start learning Genesis and Exodus in particular because when we know those two books, then so many of the themes that are in those books are on repeat through the rest of the Bible, and it helps us be better readers of the Bible as a whole.
Kasey Olander:
I love that.
Jen Wilkin:
Get a buddy.
Kasey Olander:
Yes. I love that you bring that up because my husband, Daniel, whom you know, actually came to faith in Jesus reading through the book of James with a couple of friends in college.
Jen Wilkin:
This is the best.
Kasey Olander:
That's perfect. So I'm like, "Oh, she's right. That actually works."
Jen Wilkin:
I'll get him to make a little endorsement video for the idea.
Kasey Olander:
Yeah, that's perfect. Well, gosh, I wish we had more time to talk, but I want to give people some final thoughts and/or resources. The resource that I want to recommend is Jen Wilkins' book, Women of the Word. That's a really excellent book to talk about how to read the Bible, and you can even go through that with people as you look at the text. Jen, what are some other resources that you would recommend for people who are desiring to cultivate love for God's word?
Jen Wilkin:
Well, I think one of the ideas that I introduced in Women of the Word and, first of all, you can read it if you're not a woman, I promise it won't do any damage to you, but one of the key ideas that I introduced in the book is reading the Bible as a book about God. So in other words, reading, asking first what's true about God before I try to find out any self-knowledge from the scripture, and that's borrowing an idea from John Calvin, but what I know to be true is that we have underdeveloped or atrophied vocabularies about what is true about God.
So simply to say to you, "Hey, you should read the Bible as a book about God," I know that you don't necessarily immediately have the ability to do so. So I would say if you read books like The Knowledge of the Holy by A. W. Tozer, which will introduce the doctrine of God, which basically just his attributes, what's true about him, not only will you develop a better vocabulary for what is true about God, but you'll very quickly begin to connect worship to study, and that's important. We don't want to just learn. We want our theology to lead to doxology, to worship.
So I would say start with books that can help shape your understanding of who God is, knowledge of the Holy … Arthur Pink has an online free resource called The Attributes of God. It's pretty short, and the chapters … I would urge you just read a chapter and think about it and then read another chapter and think about it, really make meditation on what's true about God.
Then in terms of building Bible literacy skills, I would say look for … Don't assume that just because you have read Women of the Word that tells you some of the tools you can use to build literacy, that you'll intuitively know how to use those tools. Go and find curricula that have been written that help you to employ those tools in meaningful ways. So this is not a plug for my studies, but all of my studies are written to help implement what I talk about in Women of the Word. Actually, do have a free James study just in case you're worried I'm trying to sell books here. I'm not.
Also, we have resources available through our church too that would follow the same pattern of showing you how to ask better questions, not just assuming that you will because we told you that you should and told you what kinds of questions to ask, but in addition to that, I love the LifeChange series by NavPress. They have studies, I believe, over every book of the Bible. What you should be looking for in studies that are going to help you to grow in Bible literacy is look for studies that create dissonance in the questions that they're asking. In other words, they ask a question that you're going to have a hard time answering.
So a lot of resources will ask a hard question, and then we know that if we just keep reading a little further down, they will answer it for us. That is not growing you, that is infantilizing you. So don't go for that kind of stuff, although it can have its place, but if you're really committed to, "I want to be able to learn these skills on my own," start looking for curricula that are not heavily laced with commentary, that they only give you what commentary is necessary to help you begin to draw your own conclusions based on what you're reading, and then the commentary piece comes after you have done work yourself.
So going back to Howard Hendricks's idea, we so often only answer questions after we've heard teaching. If you do that, then you've actually already been given the answer key. Those questions are less helpful in drawing us forward in our understanding. We have to feel dissonance in order to grow. So as you're looking for curriculum, I would say the LifeChange series is great. For the women looking for women's studies, I know a lot more of those than I do for men, although I would argue that these studies are actually beneficial for both men and women, but Melissa Kruger writes her studies this way. Courtney Doctor writes her studies this way. I'm trying to think. I don't want to leave anybody out. Jackie Hill Perry's studies are written this way. Be looking for studies that are making you do work.
Kasey Olander:
That's really helpful. I was going to bring up your studies if you didn't. So I'm glad that you gave us some helpful examples because we just talked about like, "Okay. We're not looking for this kind of content, but this is helpful," because it's what kind of curriculum are we looking for when we're trying to sit down and develop these skills.
Jen Wilkin:
DTS graduate and my dear friend Elizabeth Woodson is publishing studies that follow this pattern. So that'd be another one.
Kasey Olander:
Perfect. That's great. Well, Jen, you've … Oh, I also was going to say, you mentioned attributes of God. Jen has written a couple of books about the attributes of God, None Like Him and In His Image. So I think those would also be helpful, but how can people find you online if they want to hear more of your content, more of what you have to say in addition to your books?
Jen Wilkin:
Probably the easiest place to find me is at Knowing Faith Podcast. That's our place where we are talking about all things theology and bible literacy. Then I have a website, jenwilkin.net, where I sometimes update things, but that's where you can find typically where I'm going to be speaking, if there's somewhere in the area, and it's a good one-stop place to come for … Actually, that's where that free curriculum can be found and then links to some of the other things that I've done.
Kasey Olander:
That's awesome. Well, Jen, thank you so much for being here today. This conversation has been so fun and really helpful.
Jen Wilkin:
Thanks, Kasey. I really appreciate the time.
Kasey Olander:
Yeah, we enjoyed it. We also want to say thanks to you, our listener, for being with us today. We appreciate you being here for the conversation, and hope that you join us next time when we discuss issues of God and culture.
The Image of God
Mental Health and Generation Z
Can All Religions Be True?
Preaching Biblical Characters
Cultural Engagement, Politics, and The Gospel – Classic
What Happens When We Die?
A Glimpse of the African-American Church
The Bedrock of Christianity
Facing Death for Following Christ
Dealing with Grief and Anxiety
Intelligent Cultural Engagement
Business Leadership Under Stress
What Happened to the Trinity on the Cross?
Living out Faith in Business and Government
Equipping Generation Z for a Challenging World
Pastoral Practice and Whole-Life Discipleship
Global Theological Education
Christians in the Media
Ministry in Restricted Contexts
The World of the New Testament
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
DTS Chapel - Teach Truth. Love Well.