Let's Start With the Text

Season 5, Episode 11 – Be Careful What You Read!

Guest Host – show favorite, Rev. Darin R. Collins of Berean Baptist Church in Burrillville, RI

In the first installment/movement of his “Bible Suite” Jonathan is joined by Darin to discuss… the Bible. Let’s start with the simple question, how do you read this thing? Darin throws a wrench in just that question by looking at the story of Noah and the Flood (Genesis 5:32-10:1). He brings up the tricky aspect of God planning on destroying the majority of humanity, offers some hermeneutical acrobatics to get around such a reading, and yet is still unsettled. Part of the difficulty is not just the horrific aspects of scripture (rape, murder, betrayal, hatred, oppression, etc.), but the many times that scripture contradicts itself (such as when Jesus corrects a certain interpretations of scripture… “you have heard it said, but I say unto you” Matthew 5:17-48 as an example). It is a tricky thing to read the Bible.

What Jonathan and Darin do is engage the difficulties and complexities of scripture with some honesty and some confusion. If nothing else they stress the importance of reading scripture in a community. It is very important to read the Bible with a group… maybe a book group. You can have a glass of wine while you read which is Biblical because wine is Biblical.

Jonathan did write a whole blog post about this Bible reading thing - read it here

Anyway, read your Bible, but do it with others because it is not an easy thing to figure out.

Rialage –

Spiritual Obesity! Churches grow quickly (like Joel Osteen’s or Mark Dricsoll’s) on a foundation of weak, thin theology, certainty without questioning, feel-good answers, and basic processed crap. This is leading to a spiritual obesity epidemic in our country where people are not getting the whole-grain, home-grown, organic, and crunchy goodness of the gospel. It isn’t healthy.

Scripture-

2 Timothy 3:14-17

All scripture is “inspired” by God and will make you a better person if you let it.

Watcha’ Into

Darin is smarter than he thinks, reading another John Caputo book: The Insistence of God: A Theologyof Perhaps – good for you, Darin!

Jonathan needs to dumb it down – he is reading The Confessions by Augustine of Hippo

Again, thanks for listening. Send your comments and questions to 12ecast@gmail.com and don’t forget to rate the show on iTunes.