The Expansionist Podcast

Questions you should ask before reading the Bible with Dr. Jennifer Garcia Bashaw

• Shelly Shepherd and Heather Drake • Season 2

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What if reading the Bible felt less like swallowing a prepackaged meal and more like cooking something nourishing with friends? We sit down with Dr. Jennifer Garcia Bashaw to reframe biblical interpretation through a simple, memorable kitchen metaphor that helps anyone move from fear and formulas to curiosity and depth. Instead of treating Scripture as a static rule book, we explore it as a living, multivocal library—divine and human—where honest questions don’t break faith, they build it.

We start with you the reader: how your social location, church background, and assumptions shape what you see. From there we unpack genre—poetry, wisdom, ancient history, gospels—and why recognizing these forms changes everything about how you read. Jennifer shares accessible tools like the Bible Project’s book overviews to anchor any passage in its literary and historical context, and she offers a healing on-ramp for those wounded by weaponized verses: return to Jesus. Using Jesus as the interpretive lens reframes violent depictions of God and invites a way of reading that matches the character of Christ.

Along the way, we revisit overlooked stories of women in Scripture, trace Israel’s long path toward monotheism, and practice a two-step that keeps us grounded: first ask what a passage meant to them, then consider what it can mean for us. The result is a richer, kinder approach to the Bible that welcomes complexity, values diverse voices, and makes space for growth. If you’re hungry for Scripture that feeds your mind and heals your heart, pull up a chair and join us.

Dr. Jennifer Garcia Bashaw's newest book can be preordered on the link below.

https://www.broadleafbooks.com/store/product/9798889835561/Serving-Up-Scripture

Enjoyed the conversation? Subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review to help more people find the show.


SPEAKER_03:

Welcome to the Expansionist Podcast with Shelly Shepherd and Heather Drake. In each episode, we dive deep into conversations that challenge conventional thinking, amplify diverse voices, and foster a community grounded in wisdom, spirit, and love. Hello, Shelly Shepard. I'm so grateful that you're here with us this afternoon. We have an incredible guest, and we are really excited about this topic today that we're going to dive into. And again, just honored to be with you and with our guest and excited to expand our ideas about love, about God, about our place in the world, and about our imagination allowing the holy to come to us and experimenting or paying attention to what it would look like to live in the kingdom that Jesus invited us into, a more holy, more beautiful world.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and I just happen to know that our guest uh is all about expansion herself. So um it is going to be uh such a treat to have um Dr. uh Jennifer Garcia Bashaw with us here on the Expansionist Podcast. And welcome, Jennifer. It's great to have you. Thank you. I'm gonna give just this uh brief bio about Jennifer. Um Dr. Bashaw teaches in the fields of New Testament studies and biblical interpretation. Her research interests include gospel studies, the work of Renee Girard, Biblical Hermeneutics, Homiletics, Spiritual Formation, and Religion and Pop Culture. Dr. Bashaw has a passion for teaching the Bible on a lay level and contributes social media content to outlets such as Baptist News Global and the Bible for normal people, where she is a nerd in resident. I love that, which is where I first met you, by the way. Um, Dr. Bashaw is an ordained American Baptist minister since 2011 who enjoys preaching as well as training and resourcing pastors. She is the author of Scapegoats, the Gospel Through the Eyes of Victims and John for Normal People, a guide through the drama and depth of the fourth gospel. And today with us, we are going to be looking at her latest book. It releases in January, is that right? Yes, January 27th. Congratulations. Yeah, January. January 27th of 2026, and it is called Serving Up Scripture. So here we are with uh Dr. Do you want us to call you Dr. Basal or Jennifer? Which do you prefer? Jennifer's fine. All right, great. So we're here with Jennifer to invite her to tell us about what prompted the serving up scripture book to come to life. Talk to us about that first.

SPEAKER_01:

So I have been teaching in um undergraduate settings for the last uh 13 or 14 years. And that whole time I've been teaching classes on biblical interpretation. Um, and I've noticed how, well, one, how students just love to learn how to read and understand the Bible better. Um, but I've also noticed how the things that I teach them are not necessarily things that people in the churches know, right? Even adults who've been in church for their whole lives don't know some of these, these principles, um, these ways of interpreting scripture that I teach to my students. So um at some point I got to the um place where I wanted to be able to teach people in the churches what I teach my students in the classroom. Um and so that's sort of what sparked me saying, I need I need to um do uh write a book on biblical interpretation where I take what we uh we scholars do um and translate it into how people in the pews can use that in their everyday reading of scripture. So that was like the the reason that I decided to write this book.

SPEAKER_02:

I'm just sitting here thinking about maybe we all need to read it, whether we're in the pew or in the pulpit, maybe everybody needs to uh have a copy of this. And I think Heather's probably gonna tap into this cooking metaphor here in a minute, but you use this um this approach as a chef and a kitchen and these cooking metaphors throughout the book. Was that your idea or was that the co-author's idea? How did how did that happen?

SPEAKER_01:

It was actually my co-author, Aaron Higashi, it was his idea. Um, but I I told him, I said, I want there to be something that we can um illustrate with that really you know hits home for people so that they can start thinking outside of the way they normally think when it comes to Bible and biblical interpretation. So he suggested this and we started working through it, and we realized that, yeah, biblical interpretation is a lot like cooking because we all have sort of the same ingredients, right? Which is the Bible passages, um the Bible itself, but we can prepare it so many different ways and for so many different settings. Um, and the different uh spices we use, all of that is like the different questions and methodologies that we can use. And so, you know, once we started digging into it, I thought this is this is actually a really great metaphor um for the way we should be using scripture. Like what happens in churches is that they tend to just um package it up right in like a like a pre-packaged meal and then hand it out to people. It doesn't matter who you are or what you're asking. Um, and and I think that we can do better than that. Um, the Bible is um it's a living thing that we can interact with um in different ways. And I think that's what we've been wanting to do as we um as we use this this cooking metaphor. Is the book available for pre-order? It is. Um, so we don't have to wait till January to get it. No, you don't. You can pre-order it on Amazon, on um Barnes and Noble. And I think if you go to Broadleaf, the actual publisher, they have it there on pre-order too. Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_03:

You described even just recently, uh I mean in moments before, about this text that is alive, that is, um, if we engage it correctly, can speak to us and can speak to other people as well. But um, I was gonna ask, in what unexpected way have you been engaging the text? Or in what way have a shimmer kind of drawn you to something bigger or more beautiful than you even imagined?

SPEAKER_01:

You know, I've been teaching um in the last several years, I've been teaching a class called Women in the Bible and the church. And um, when I really dig into the stories about women in the in the Bible, Old Testament and New Testament, um, and and view them in their context, um, there's so many more uh sort of beautiful truths that come out about the way that God has used women to do God's work throughout history, right? We we tend to look at the Bible and say, oh, there's not that many women, and it doesn't, it doesn't really talk much about them, and they're so limited. But if you can read it in its context, you see where the work of God um comes through, and you can see like a trajectory really as more and more women um become leaders in the church, um, and more and more women become important to God's story and the story of salvation. And that's really been the most um inspiring um part of reading the Bible closely in the last several years. And I think the students that I have really enjoy that too, because they've been kept um maybe away from the stories of the women, or maybe they they're oversimplified, right? Um but when you can you can really delve into them when they're in their context, you can see um how many women have played a huge part in the story of God and the story of salvation.

SPEAKER_03:

Um, many of us who have heard the Bible or who have read the Bible, Shelley and I come from a tradition where the Bible was like that's the ultimate rule book. Like if you can find it in the Bible, and then you can learn to kind of jam your narrative into it and twist it in such a way that you can find that. Now that's your right to live a certain way, to behave a certain way, to judge a certain way. And um, I think that people come to the scriptures with this understanding that they're only allowed to let things mean a certain thing. And tell us how you you walk through or what kind of permission you give people to say it is possible that this can mean something completely different, or uh it can be both. Can it hold? Is it powerful enough? Both can be true.

SPEAKER_01:

Right, right. Yeah, I think that um really the when you look at the history of a biblical interpretation, which we have a uh a section on that, when you look at that, you can see that throughout church history, um, people have limited the way that their congregations um read the Bible. And it and it and I wouldn't say that it's always a conscious matter of control, but it is a way to control people um to make sure that they're staying in line, believing the right things, that there's sort of more harmony um among congregations. But even if you just read through that history and see how different communities have interpreted passages differently, then you can start seeing how the Bible is this um this um living thing that the Holy Spirit uses to speak to us, but also it's um it's something that we the more we engage with it and the more questions we ask of it, um, the more that comes to light, right? It's not static, it's not something that just um was written down and it's stuck in the past, right? It's something that is is continually speaking um to us, but we have to ask it the right questions. If we're coming to it with um a fixed idea of what it says, then we're not engaging with it, right? We're just like swallowing whatever someone has given us. Um but we do much more justice to the Bible and to the people who wrote it and to God um when we when we engage with it, when we interact with it, when we ask questions of it. Um and I think that's the goal of our book is to try to get people to ask more questions of it, right? Because it it can stand up under questions, right? Just like God can. God can stand up under these questions, right? We just we just have to ask you.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, it seems we're afraid to ask the questions. Do you do you find that? Is is that in in the students too, or is it just in uh the adults who have have come up through great tribulation of asking these questions?

SPEAKER_01:

Right. It depends on where you come from, right? Some of my students are afraid to ask um the questions in the beginning, um, but it's because they've come from um environments that do not allow them to doubt or to have questions, right? Um, and I found that people are our age, um, I guess we've been in it longer. And so it's much harder to break out of that, that those um sort of boundaries that we've been put in. Um so so students actually do a better job, I would say, than adults who are older, um, because they're still learning and growing, um, and they're not a set in their ways. Um, but I think that um that we can still learn, like even however old you are, like we can still we you can still learn, um, you can still grow and you can still push the boundaries a little bit. Um, I mean, if you're still in an environment that is um dictating to you what the Bible means and what the Bible says, I would encourage to find another um environment, another church or another community that encourages questions. Because there are many more of those nowadays, right? Um, and so that's what I would say. Like if you're feeling like it's too hard to question, maybe maybe you need to try a new community, a new, a new environment.

SPEAKER_03:

I would like to ask you to give us some um ways that we could actually question the text. And I would also um like to ask our listeners if there's nothing in the text that troubles you, if there, if, if you see no reason to expand your view, then maybe include more people in your life and ask them how they how the text feels to them, how the text engages to them. And in your metaphor of cooking, I would ask people to invite more people to their table and say, who can we learn from? Again, I just ask everyone to say, if there's nothing that I feel like is troublesome, is harmful, is maybe needs a new interpretation, then am I actually paying attention? And then who are we to have the right? And I ask this question to you, uh, to interpret the Bible differently than people did 20 years ago or that other people are doing. What gives us the right to ask the question? Right.

SPEAKER_01:

That's a good one. Yeah, so I I want to get to um the different questions and the way that we can question the Bible, but I want to lay a little bit of a foundation first. Um, because sometimes I think we're if we're starting from different foundations, it's it's pretty hard to build something together. Um, and I think a lot of people don't actually know what the Bible is, like in its nature. We all will call this like the nature of scripture, right? Um, I think we have been taught in many contexts that the that the scripture is um is inerrant, like that every word is written, you know, straight from God, or God whispered into the ears of um the writers, and every word is um is exactly what God wants to say. But but but the fact is that's not what the Bible even says about itself, right? Um the Bible never never claims to be that. Um it is a collection um of all these writings written by different people at different time periods, um, even from slightly different cultures, um, and they are they are wrestling with the idea of who is God um and who is humanity, right? And so at different times they're gonna have different different answers, right? And so it's this collection of all these diff disparate um uh writings that are kind of messy when you fit them all together, right? Um, but they are um a record of the way that Israel um and then the early Christians wrestled with who God was and who they were, right? So there's a there's a there's a messiness to it. And I think if we come to the Bible and think it's just uh of something that's fixed, or maybe that it speaks with one voice, then then we're not gonna actually be able to understand what the Bible um how the Bible functions because the Bible is what we call multivocal. This is one of the earlier points that we make in the book. Um so scripture being multivocal means that people are speaking in different voices, and sometimes they um don't match. Like people don't like to say contradictions when it comes to the Bible, but sometimes they have different perspectives than one another on who God is, right? Um, on what is the right way to live. Um and so we have to accept that first. Before we even move forward and try to ask questions of the text, we have to know what it is itself. Um, and that's a big hump to get over if you've been raised in a tradition that just says, no, this is what the Bible is, and it it's it speaks with one voice, it gives, it's a rule book, you know, it you know, it doesn't um it's it's completely divine, right? If you if you start saying those things, can then you can understand how um people don't feel like there's any flexibility or they don't feel like there's any way they can ask questions. So um Christians do um affirm the Bible is divine and human. Um and the human part is the is the part that um that we we tend to not think about, right? But because it's written by humans, we have to ask who were they, where did they live, what was their culture, what were the ideas that they they had in their heads about humanity and God. Um and and if we don't do that, then we're not gonna even be able to get to the point where we can ask questions um of the text. Just that segment. Like I want everybody to hear that.

unknown:

Okay.

SPEAKER_03:

We can do a uh making sure we clip those for the buzz sprout. Yeah, exactly. You had mentioned earlier that there are some questions that a person who is interested in expanding their understanding or their interpretation can ask the text.

SPEAKER_01:

Can you give us some of those questions? Yes. Um, so the first one is actually not about the Bible, it's about yourself. Um, and so we have to always ask who am I as a reader of scripture? Um, what am I bringing to the text? Just when I open it up and start to read a story, what are the ideas that are already in my head that are gonna lead me towards particular interpretations, right? And this um we like to call this like social location, um, but everybody has a social location. Um, and it's made up of things like what church did you grow up in? Um, what was the uh your family life like? Um, what's your cultural heritage? Um, what part of the United States do you live in, right? There's like uh the way that people think about the Bible is different in the West or in the South, right, or in the Northeast. Um other things are like what um have you learned from various pastors and um Bible studies and sermons that you have? Everything that you um think or you have experienced about the Bible or the things that you experience culturally, they're all waiting inside of you um to influence the way that you read the Bible. And if you're not aware of that, then you're gonna just jump ahead into interpretations that may not be the best ones because you're not you're not um sitting with those things about you. And I I kind of need to give an example, I think um that would be helpful for people. Um, for example, if you were reading the story of um Jesus turning water to wine at the wedding of Cana um in John, even before you start uh asking questions of the text, um, you already have some assumptions um about culture, about weddings, about wine, right? So my husband, he comes from a uh a family that is we would call teetotalers. Like they didn't drink alcohol growing up, like there was not alcohol in their house at all. They think alcohol is evil, right? This is pretty common um belief among Christians, especially I would say in the South. Um but if you start reading that text, you already have in your idea wine is negative. So you're gonna start thinking, well, why would Jesus change water into wine? Like you already have an assumption in your in your mind before you even start to interpret it. But if you have a negative assumption about wine, then you're gonna miss some of the things that um John is trying to tell us when he talks about Jesus turning water into wine, right? You're not gonna understand that wine is a blessing in the Old Testament. Um, it's a way to say the messianic banquet is coming. There's gonna be your vats will overflow with wine. Like all this positive imagery about wine um is in the background of this passage. But if you come from a background or culture where wine is negative, then you're not gonna be able to have all those things. You're not gonna be able to understand those things about the passage. So um it's a matter of just recognizing these limitations. Sometimes they're limitations, sometimes they're good things, but recognizing these background um issues. And in the book, at the very end, um, we give a little social location inventory and just helps people like write down um these are the influences in my life, these are the places that I come from, and these are the ways that these can affect how I read scripture.

SPEAKER_03:

We want to pause and take a moment and let you know how glad we are that you've joined us. If you're enjoying this podcast, consider sharing it with a friend. And if you found the conversation intriguing and want to know more about what we're learning or how you can join our online community, visit our website at expansionisttheology.com.

SPEAKER_01:

So, really, then that first question um is who who am I as a reader? Um, and then you can get to the questions that you want to ask the Bible. Um, and I think the first one really is what am I reading? Like what kind of literature am I reading? Um, that is something that I think a lot of church people don't ask because they just assume they don't think about it as literature, right? Um they just assume, or I'm just gonna read it word for word and take it literally. But there are so many different kinds of literature in in the Bible, right? We call this genre, like the genres of literature. There's so many different genres, but you need to know what you're reading if you're gonna interpret it well, right? If you're in um the psalms, right? If you you know you you might in the back of your mind know it's poetry, um, but you might not know that ancient poetry, like the Psalms, um, was written. People wrote it about their feelings about God or their feelings about other people. So when you're reading it, you're not thinking, oh, this is God speaking to me, because that's not what it originally was. This is people talking to God, telling God what's going on in their lives, um, you know, pouring their hearts out, really. And sometimes um they're very joyful, sometimes they're lamenting, you know. But if you don't recognize that genre, then you're gonna think, oh, God is telling this message to me, but it's not, it's human message to God. Um, but there are other genres that are um important to know, and they may not be the ones that we're familiar with. You know, we probably know um, we know things like murder mystery and we know um autobiographies and genres like that. Um, but the ancient genres are different than ours, right? When the ancient um Israelites were writing their histories, um, they um they wrote them very differently than we did. Like we today like to have date like exact dates and we want exact places and we like chronology. You know, we have this sort of modern mindset. That's not the way that the ancient writers um wrote their histories. First of all, they didn't write them down at all at first. They passed them down orally, you know, they started, they took on their own lives, different people added details and took details away. And eventually, when they wrote them down, um, they were concerned with um how does this help us as a people? How how do how are we gonna tell our history in a way that we um are moving forward as the people of God in a positive way, right? So they're they're much more concerned with like learning from history, right, and saying things that are gonna be helpful. They're not as concerned with chronology, they don't date things, they don't put dates on them. Sometimes they're not even as concerned with getting the names correct. They want to use make symbolic names because they want there to be lay layers, um, deep level of writings. And so just understanding that is gonna change the way you read Genesis, or it's gonna change the way you you read um Joshua or judges, um, these ancient histories, right? We can't read them like modern histories. Um, we have to treat them for what they are. Um, and that's giving the Bible the respect that it deserves, right? We instead of imposing our own reading onto the text, um, we need to read it the way that it's meant to be read, um, like the ancient people wrote and like the ancient people read it. And so that's like one big question you can ask when you're reading something, what uh what is this genre? What is this kind of literature? Um and we're we we give you hints throughout the the book. Um here's a good way, here's good things to think about when you're reading um wisdom literature, or here's some good things to think about when you're reading the gospels, right? And so hopefully that'll be helpful to people who aren't familiar with the genres. Um, but I think that um is a good, you know, first question to ask. But the second question is I guess there's several questions, but um, what context is this written in? Like what is the historical context? Um, what is the literary context of this passage that I'm studying? Um it it makes it so that when you read scripture, it's not just a matter of reading a sentence and then saying, oh, this is what it means and moving on. It means you have to pause. It means you have to think, maybe read some commentaries or read some things or listen to some podcasts to understand um what is the background of this? What at what time in history is this being written? Um what are the overarching themes of this particular book? And how does my passage fit into it? So you can see how like things are getting a little bit more complex, right? When you start asking these questions of the text, it means you have to engage, you have to talk to other people, you have to go to sources.

SPEAKER_02:

You you you made a good point here just a couple of minutes ago that there has to be other tools. Like you can ask yourself these questions, but there has to be these other tools that you you begin to um to use or read or listen to. Um, it sounds like I want to just come to Campbell University and take your class, right? Like this is just so rich. Um, sitting here listening to you. And from that perspective, it is like wow, over the top right now. Like I can see that we need to have you on here more than one time. On the on the average person, you you're saying that this book is really is it's a guide. It becomes a guide for biblical interpretation. Um, and so in your bio, you clearly say that your work is for the average person that just wants to jump in and understand what they're reading better. Are you finding that this is really the case? That people are just like so, so hungry for it, or are you finding people like, oh, this person's like off her rocker. She's some kind of liberal feminist that I don't ever want to hear her again. Like, what are what are you what are you finding um in your audience or in your readership that people are saying, wow, you recommended these tools, and they just totally opened up this floodgate for me in understanding understanding the Bible better. Talk to us about that for a second.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, more often than not, um, people are really excited to start digging deeper, right? And and and for some of the people that I speak to in churches or um teach in different settings, um maybe listening to podcasts or looking at things online is is easier for them. Like maybe they're not used to reading commentaries or things like that. Um, there's one pretty quick, quick resource and easy to access that I like to tell people, and they said they've gotten a lot out of it. It helps them as they're studying scripture. Um, that is the Bible Project. I don't know if you've heard of the Bible Project. Absolutely. Yeah. So they have they have so many resources online and their videos. Um, and so some of their videos are broad in that they'll tell you what are the different genres in the Old Testament, you know, they'll talk about the literature of it. Sometimes it's theological. Like, what is it, what does God's holiness mean? You know, and then they'll they'll go through it. But the ones that I like the best are the ones that go through each book. Um, so each book in the Bible has at least one, sometimes two videos about it. And it lays out the whole story or the um the literary context of whatever book that is. And it is so good. They do such a great job. Um, and so say you're you're studying a passage in, well, I let's say in Joshua, because I was talking about that. Um, I do like the Joshua video actually for a Bible project. You can watch that video, it's like eight or nine minutes, right? And it gives you the whole overview of what's going on in Joshua, points out some really important theological and historical background issues, um, and then you get an idea of how your passage fits into this overarching literary context, right? So, so when I tell people that there are some easy, um, easier to access um sources and people use them, they they do say that you know the whole world opens up to them. Like this is changes the way that they read scripture. Um, but I have had people, you know, not like the the way that I'm opening up scripture, right? Um, and and it and usually people are not as unkind as you would think. Um sometimes they do challenge me and think that I'm, you know, some liberal that's you know trying to lead people away from the Bible. But, you know, I I try to make people understand this is the my life. I have devoted my life to reading and and understanding scripture, but not just that, but to help other people. Um, you know, if I if if I didn't love the Bible, I would not have been doing this for 20 years, you know. Um, and that usually helps people understand, okay, maybe she's not trying to, you know, m ruin the Bible for me. So hopefully um that's the way they take it. And then the things that I teach can can help them. Um, because that's really my calling in life, I think, is to help people understand the Bible better. It's beautiful.

SPEAKER_02:

Thank you for that little divergence. I don't know if you want to go back to the third point here, but um yeah, I I think a lot of people are looking for looking for ways to I think help them not just wrestle maybe with the God of their past, but in this climate, in this culture of of Christianity in particular, you know, people don't even want to like open the Bible because they've attached it to, you know, some kind of Christian nationalism that um, you know, they just can't get their head around how anybody could interpret. uh what is happening in the world with what is in scripture. And so some people are just like, yeah, I I don't, I don't have any, I don't have any need for this biblical, um, this biblical word right now. So I think it's I I think your book is timely, if I could say that, in in in our culture and in our time. But sometimes I I don't I don't want to point people to to the Bible or to scripture as a way to go to go deeper in their faith because it's they've been wounded by it. They've been wounded by the church. They've been um asked to leave churches or um you know they weren't American Baptists so they couldn't they couldn't lead uh as women in the church. So there's all these reasons uh I think Jennifer to um you know to think that people we we we need a better story and and Heather and I talk about that a lot on the podcast is what is the better story here? Well the better story is you know we're evolving and so why can't why can't scripture evolve as well in our minds? Why does it have to stay in that ancient in that ancient space?

SPEAKER_03:

Well sometimes fear makes people demand that a scripture mean a certain thing and sometimes regret makes them double down on it because if it doesn't mean that then I made choices I chose paths because that was my understanding and so I think it takes a lot of love to be able to change your mind about something or to even invite the spirit to expand the way that you see something. And I think it takes a lot of courage to go maybe I got this wrong but I see that Jesus continually offered that to people you've heard it said but I say unto you. And so that to me is such a beautiful call for all of us to say is it possible that Jesus would like us to hear something about the kingdom about God about our way of living in in love that surpasses or goes beyond what this what we actually originally heard an interpretation of the Bible to say.

SPEAKER_01:

And I'm glad you brought it back to Jesus because um I I when I think about people who have been hurt by the Bible um and if they're trying to figure out how do I get back into it um I I I would say go to Jesus. I would say go to the gospels, right? Even if you don't read any of the other things because it's mostly the other stuff that has been used against people to be honest with you. So if you can you can start with Matthew and just go through and like immerse yourself in Jesus's um way of life and way of being and his and his teachings. And then I think that it'll just be healing. I mean it will automatically be healing. And then then you can use Jesus in his life as a lens um through which to view the other parts that maybe are harder to understand or the parts that have been used against you know if you if if you look at it through the eyes of Jesus I think that's one um really sort of simple way to move to move forward in in biblical interpretation when you've been hurt. Can you share an example of something that you changed your mind on uh uh in the understanding of scripture or that you expanded maybe didn't change your mind but maybe saw a higher perspective yeah um I I when I used to always wrestle a little bit with the passages in the Bible that seemed to portray God as a as a violent God as a God that ordered you know the killing of all the people in Jericho or whatever. I used to I used to wrestle with that but I never had an answer for it. And so I kind of tried to just avoid it. You know we do that when we don't have an answer for something we we just I'm gonna avoid that those passages. But when I started using Jesus as a lens um for to to teach us the character of God like we know that Jesus came to show us what God would do amongst us right what is God's character um and and that's what Jesus showed us. So if you look at it if I started looking at it through that then I realized that the pictures of God um in the Old Testament were something else. They weren't necessarily accurate representations of what God was or what God wanted. A lot of times once I did more study on that um a lot of times it's the way the people saw God because all the other gods from the other nations um were these sort of warring gods the gods that were violent um and so that's the way they thought gods were and so when they were telling their story um and the story of them and God um they just assumed that that's what God would want like the other gods right and so they portrayed God in that way uh but when Jesus came and showed us what God's character was really like um now we can go back and say okay the people who wrote this were very much influenced by their context they were very much influenced by the the nations around them um and and and we can see like that's not the accurate representation of God's character. Jesus is right so so changing my view on that was was was huge.

SPEAKER_02:

But again it comes back to the Jesus lens right something else that you you talk about in the book is um how maybe we've been taught to see most of scripture as monotheistic rather than poly uh theism and was that a was that a like an aha for you I mean was that like a big jump um to begin thinking and teaching that actually in in the Bible that we can talk that that we can talk about this?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah this is something that we learn um you know if you took an Old Testament survey class in a university or maybe in a seminary this is one of the early things that we learn but but it it it changes the way you think about Israel and their story right if you realize that they um it took them a very long time to become monotheistic where they were only worshiping God you can really figure it out if you follow the story. Like how many times does God say you know it you you have to not have idols right you have to not worship other gods before me. Like the fact that that's what's over and over and over again in the scripture means that they were worshiping other gods right they believed that there were other gods um as they looked around at the nations um that surrounded them um and and they fell into worship of it but but then you a couple of things happened there you can understand that they're not perfect right like the Israelites took on their context the ideas of their context right but God was faithful uh and God kept coming back and pulling them and saying you know you belong to me I am your God and you're my people right and we we need to stop this idolatry and eventually they did get to the point where they were like one God we are worshiping one God. But most of the Old Testament was written where they were still worshiping other gods right and that's a perspective that we have to have if you're going to read the Old Testament um well and understand it well. But yeah it does give you a completely different view um on them uh on the the Israelites as they are trying to worship their God.

SPEAKER_03:

This is a great place for us to just put a pin in it and clearly like Shelley said this is not um going to be probably our last conversation with you or at least hopeful that it's not um and I'm again we'll put in the show notes uh some things about the book for people so if they're driving or listen to this they don't have to try to rewind we'll just put it in the notes for them. But um is there any one thing like to wrap up or encapsulate what you said today that you're like this is what I want everyone to hear or at least this is what I would like people to think about.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah I would say this I um if we want to give the Bible um the respect that it deserves and also be able to learn from it and grow um we we have to always ask the question um what did it mean to them and then what can can it mean to us? Because I think we jump right in and say okay what does this mean to us? I mean how can we use this? And then we're gonna jump past steps that are important. So we have to always like think first who are the people who were the first ones reading this and writing this what would have it meant to them and then we can go to the next step and ask what what could it mean for us today? Right even if we slow down just that much um it shows us that we we have to dig deeper into what's going on in scripture. So that's what I would say.

SPEAKER_03:

Thank you so much Jennifer for this been such a beautiful illuminating conversation and so hopeful in the fact that asking the questions matter asking ourselves the questions asking questions of the text and um just the permission that you gave us to um say yeah there's there's a real path to wholeness in questioning the text and in slowing down instead of just assuming that we know how it's to be read but slowing down and allowing ourselves to question. Thank you Jennifer and may your book uh give us all permission to expand. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much. It was our joy to have you listen to our conversation today. If you would like further information or for more content visit us at expansionisttheology.com