Episode 293: Better Ways to Read the Bible feat. Zach Lambert

What do you do when you WANT to love the Bible, but you find yourself feeling defeated, hopeless, unseen? What if all the things you’ve experienced in church and in the wider Christian community have left you feeling adrift when you open Scripture? Zach Lambert’s new book Better Ways to Read the Bible shows us that everything we’ve been taught about the Bible may actually be new ways to read it—that miss the whole point! This encouraging conversation encourages us to get back to seeing the Bible through the lens of Jesus.

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LINKS MENTIONED:

• Zach Lambert’s book Better Ways to Read the Bible
• Zach's Substack: Public Theology 
• Social media: @ZackwLambert on all platforms
• The Whole Story course - Bare Marriage's puberty/sex education course for parents
• Free book studies for "The Great Sex Rescue" and "She Deserves Better"
• Restore Austin - Zach's church in Austin, Texas 

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction & Sheila's Reaction to the Book
• 2:40 Little Zach Gets Expelled from Youth Group
• 7:17 Learning A Better Way To Approach Scripture
• 13:10 Four Harmful Lenses Of Biblical Interpretation
• 20:57 The Three Big Questions To Ask Of Scripture
• 28:09 Questions & Doubts Need to be Acknowledged
• 31:00 How Churches Often Weaponize the Bible to Maintain Wealth & Power
• 38:00 How Terrible Interpretations Lead To Gatekeeping And Harm
• 58:50 Healthy Lenses To Read Scripture Through
• 1:16:56 The Real Story of the Widow's Mite & Tying Everything together

Transcript

Sheila

What if you love Jesus but you're not really sure that you love the Bible? In fact, you're not even sure what you think of Jesus anymore because the Bible's become such a slog for you because of what other people have said. Well, we have an amazing, life giving discussion with you today on the Bare Marriage Podcast. I'm Sheila Wray Gregoire. 

And we're from baremarriage.com, and we like to talk about healthy, evidence based biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage. And today I am so excited to be bringing a wonderful interview, to you by Zach Lambert, the author of a new book, Better Ways to Read the Bible. And this one. You know, when I read this book, I cried.

It really, really affected me because I just needed to hear this, you know, for a couple of years. Sometimes when I look at the Bible, I feel bogged down by it because of how so many people have distorted it. And I've had to fight through that. And I knew a lot of the stuff Zach is saying, but he just said it in such a beautiful way, and I know this book is going to help you.

So get ready for that interview. But before we turn to it, like and subscribe wherever you are listening to this, whether it is on Spotify, whether it's on YouTube, wherever you are listening to this, please like and subscribe to this podcast. Because when you do that, you tell the algorithm, hey, this is good stuff. And then other people see it.

It helps us immensely. And now, without further ado, here's my interview with Zach. I am so excited to talk about this book. I am being joined today by Zach Lambert, who I have followed for a long time on social media, and this is our first time meeting. Kind of.

Zach

That's true. Yes. And I have also followed you for a long time on social media and have benefited so much from your work, your writing, their marriage, all the things. So it's an honor to be with you, Sheila.

Sheila

Yeah, I like doing interviews and actually meeting people. You know, it makes me feel like, oh, maybe this social media thing isn't actually real in a way.

Zach

That's perfect and not all bad. Some bad, mostly bad, but not all.

Sheila

Bad. No, I've met some amazing people and it's honestly, it's it's opened my eyes to so many things and I've made some great friendships and that's wonderful. So Zach is the lead pastor and founder of Restore Austin, which is a church in urban Austin, Texas, and he's the author of the bestselling book The Better Ways to Read the Bible Transforming a Weapon of Harm into a Tool of Healing.

And I am so excited to talk about this book. I have just read this book. I read it through in one sitting yesterday, and I was in tears by the end of it. And it's like the church needs this book. It really does.

Zach

Thank you. That means a tremendous amount to me, especially coming from you. And so thank you.

Sheila

Okay, so you opened the book with the story of little Zach, who I think is the same as little Rebecca, my oldest daughter. Like she got in trouble for the same thing. So I just loved the story of little Zach. Can you tell me about little Zach getting expelled from everything?

Zach

Absolutely. Yeah. Little Zach, little Zach had kind of a parade of expulsions, in his formative years. Yeah. The story I open with in the book is middle school. Zach in youth group. I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, and, the specific church I grew up in was not really tolerant of a lot of questions, you know, and, and so I remember I'm sitting in this Bible study and the youth pastor is talking about how when Jesus was on the cross, that, he had all of our sins on him.

And so, God turned his back because he can't be around sin. And, you know, kind of left Jesus alone to die on the cross. And I shot my hand up, and I think probably without being called on, if I had to guess, I just blurted out something like, I thought you said God was a good father, but he's like abandoning his child and his greatest time of need.

Also, if he can't be around sin, then can he be around any of us? Because like we all sin and stuff and then it Jesus, come and hang out with sinners and I'm you know, I'm just like going into this long spiel about all the things I don't understand. And, I'll be honest, I mean, I was, I was earnest, I was probably abrasive, but I was also earnest and like, I wanted to understand because so many of the things that I've been told and the things that I was reading in Scripture and the things I was experiencing didn't line up.

And my youth pastor's response was, go sit in the hallway, Zach. And so, which was a pretty normal refrain from him. And I walked out and I sat in the hallway until a Bible study was over. But that night he came out and instead of saying, see you next week, he said, I want to talk to you and your parents.

Let me pick you up. And so they came and picked me up, and we sat down in this little Sunday school room and he said, your son is disrupting my Bible studies, and he's causing other kids problems about their faith, and he's asking too many questions, and he can't be a part of the youth group anymore. He is kicked out.

He can do Sunday school on Sunday morning, but nothing on Wednesday nights. No youth group stuff, no youth trips, no youth taps, no youth missions, nothing. And part of me was ecstatic because I really did not like going, and it just felt like I said, really inconsistent and confusing and frustrating. But another part that I don't think I'd identify until much later, through a lot of help and therapy and stuff like that, was, I felt really like isolated, you know, my parents were in ministry.

Everybody we knew was a Christian. Our whole world was church. And the ministry that they ran, and I went to Christian schools growing up, which I was also kicked out of one of those. And, and so it was really difficult to think this thing that is most important to everybody in my life is now something that I've been explicitly told, like, you can't be a part of, or at least the version of you that you bring to these spaces is not okay.

And that was really hard to wrestle with. And I spent a lot of years wrestling with that, trying to figure that out. And it also, you know, to bring it full circle to the book really affected the way that I was able to engage with Scripture in fact, I became fairly traumatized by it. I, I didn't want to open the Bible.

I didn't want to have Bible studies anymore because I'd had such kind of painful experiences with it.

Sheila

Yeah. And I think a lot of people who are listening to this podcast can really relate to that, that you weren't allowed to have questions, you weren't allowed, you know, to think anything different from your pastor. And the Bible was often used against you. It was used to shame you. It was used to keep you silent. It was used to keep you in unsafe places.

It was just used to keep you down. And it didn't result in you feeling loved by Jesus. It often resulted in you feeling rejected. And that's not what the Bible is supposed to be.

Zach

Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. And I think, you know, the subtitle of the book is Transforming a Weapon of Harm into a Tool of Healing. And I know that you and so many of your listeners have experienced that weaponization of the Bible, but the way it's been used, to subjugate women, to silence, abuse, to try to control and scare people into doing exactly what, maybe a pastor or a leader wants them to do, no matter how harmful that might be.

And I think what the my kind of thesis is and the book and my work, my hope and prayer really is that, I believe that the problem is not with the scriptures themselves, but with how they're often used, and that there are better ways to engage with them in ways that lead to healing and wholeness and the fullness of life that Jesus said he came to bring to everyone.

But we have to kind of be intentional about how we read and engage with them. And that's my hope, is that it would help people, you know, kind of take that step.

Sheila

Yeah. And hence the title of your book, Better Ways to Read the Bible. Again, the link is in the podcast notes to anyone listening.

Rebecca

You know what doesn't sound fun to a lot of parents? What, telling their kids about sex. I mean, I know it wasn't fun for you when I was growing up.

Sheila

I did a terrible job. You did a terrible job.

Rebecca

But the good news for you all is that she did do a terrible job. And so that made us want to do a better job for the next generation. So together we have created, a course called The Whole Story, which is a course that walks you as the parents through having these talks with your kids, both boys and girls.

Rebecca

And we've created two different versions for each gender, a young and an older version. So like the younger version, is that that really awkward age, you know, the one where you're in puberty in the middle of junior high?

Sheila

Yeah. You're starting to get your period. You need a bra when you're.

Rebecca

Starting, your boys starting to have wet dreams, and then the older one we put in, because often what happens is we have these conversations once and then we don't have them again. So we also created a program for you when your kids are more in high school where you can have the nitty gritty conversations, get into those difficult topics and really connect.

So that's not just giving them a book and hoping that they understand, but you're having the ability to shepherd them in this stage of their life. The videos are recorded by me and my sister for the girls and by my husband, Connor, and, a man named Daniel Barrows, who is a Christian medical student for the boys.

Sheila

And you can find the link to the whole story in the podcast notes below. You don't need to be scared. We're here to help, but let's, let's get back to your story. So. So this happens to you, and you go through a lot of years of searching. But one thing that I really found interesting is that you didn't actually give up.

Sheila

Like, you didn't completely walk away. And I know a lot of people do either, and I completely understand that. But you, you yourself, you push through and at one point you decided you were just going to read the Gospels, you were just going to figure out Jesus. And I loved what you said. 

It was quite surprising because you knew a ton about the beginning and a ton about the end. But what surprised you about the middle?

Zach

Yes. It was like I knew Christmas and Easter, you know, the first and last chapters of the Book of Jesus's life. But I had no idea about who he was, what he taught. You know, maybe a miracle or, you know, two sprinkled in here and there, feeding the 5000. You know, I might have got a sermon on that, but the churches of my childhood primarily preached through kind of Old Testament judgment passages a lot in revelation.

It was a real hell, fire and brimstone kind of a place. And so, like I remember at 17 years old reading the sermon on the Mount for the first time and being like, how have I never heard, you know, like it had never been taught to me. I had never heard it in a sermon. And it was just wild.

I I've met this radical, kind of revolutionary Jesus, this one who was this guy who continually went to the margins, who lifted people up. I was particularly struck by how he engaged with women, in his circles and outside of his circles, how he was constantly breaking kind of social norms and barriers to uplift women in a society that was really like a totalitarian patriarchy.

And he was subverting those norms all the time. And inviting women in and, and in a number of other things, too, I mean, you know, touching The Untouchables, healing the hurting, and not even just the physical healing, but also the social healing, you know, inviting them back into society when they've been cast out. And I just came to this conclusion.

It sounds a little trite, but I really mean it. I was like, if this is what it means to be a Christian, to follow this guy, then I want to do that, you know? And that's what I attempted to start trying to do at 17.

Sheila

I love that, I really I love that and I love how, you know, and as I read your book, it was so clear that you really were earnest. You really wanted to love God, but the God that you were presented with was not very lovable.

Zach

It's exactly right.

Sheila

And and the scriptures that you were presented with were not necessarily very comforting, but it instead had been weaponized. And you said, you know, you said that that for years the church has been inflicting a lot of pain on people. And when that happens, people understandably leave.

Zach

Right?

Sheila

And, you know, over the last few decades, we've seen 40 million people leave the church in North America. And it's the greatest mass exodus in the history of the church. It's it's in Quebec. Our province in Quebec went through this, silent revolution, probably, I think in the 60s and 70s where so many people left the Catholic Church.

But now we're seeing so many people leave, the evangelical church, too. And we need to we need to figure out what's going on. We need to start listening to these voices. So, you you said that you. So you said you talked to numerous folks about the spiritual trauma that they've endured. And in almost every case of spiritual trauma, the primary weapon used against them was the Bible.

Yeah, these and these are your words. These experiences have led to some people being emotionally and spiritually triggered every time they try to read it, others trudging. Others trudging through Bible study only to be left frustrated or confused, and still others abandoning scripture altogether. Okay, none of us want that. So let's let's solve it. Zach. Okay. Let's solve it.

And I think your book does a great job. And you set it up at the beginning, and I and this is the framework that we're gonna use for this podcast. But you talk about how we have four harmful lenses that we often read the Bible through and for helpful lenses. So can you tell us what the four harmful ones are?

Zach

Absolutely. So, the four harmful lenses are. And again, I think to set it up a little bit, you know, my my thesis in the book is to say we are all, we're all interpreting the Bible every time we read it. We're doing biblical interpretation whether we kind of know it or not. Because, you know, there's a there's a gap between us as a modern audience and the original audience of Scripture.

It was. And also, I think sometimes we've been taught to read the Bible just like, like one big long book, when in reality it's a library of books, it's a collection of texts, and it's written by about 40 something different authors across a couple of thousand years and three continents and three languages. And so the first really harmful lens is this kind of flat wooden literalism, reading that we have been taught, which is basically reading every biblical passage as if it must be factually, historically, scientifically literal, and often missing any kind of nuance or especially genre.

And what I mean by that is there probably scholars think 10 to 12 different genres of literature represented in Scripture, and yet a lot of us have been taught to read it through just kind of this flat reading wooden lens. And we miss things like, okay, well, you know, we might read a science fiction novel today and we know, okay, this is not trying to give us a, a future prediction of the world.

This is a science fiction novel, right? Similar to, like, revelation. You know, a lot of us have been taught to read revelation in ways that lead us to violence and things like that. But what if we understood the genre a little bit better and what was actually happening? Or same thing with Genesis or anything like that? And so that's the first harmful one is this kind of flat wooden reading of the text.

And the truth is.

Sheila

I got interactive was like, have you ever seen the spoof movie Galaxy Quest?

Zach

Oh, yes, of course. Tim Allen. Yeah.

Sheila

Yes. Okay. So for those listeners who don't know it, it's it's roughly based on like Star Trek, you know, and it's this group of has been actors who were on this super popular show like Star Trek 20 years ago. And, they are kidnaped by an alien race who thought that the star that the Galaxy Quest show was a documentary.

Sheila

And so they.

Zach

Oh my gosh.

Sheila

They needed the Galaxy Quest crew to come and help them, fight against this terrible alien enemy that they had. And so they built their entire society based on this Galaxy Quest show, because they didn't understand what the story was.

Zach

Wow. I that should have been in the book. That is a great illustration of exactly what I'm talking about. So you left?

Sheila

Yeah. It's like, yeah. It's like, no, no, no, it was it it like, yeah, yeah.

Zach

Yeah, yeah. We do that all the time. We do that all the time. And so yeah. So that's, that's a harmful lens because it leads us to yeah. You know, solidifying things or, or canonizing things that really like, are not supposed to be read in that kind of way, you know, and and.

Sheila

Yeah, and I'm pretty sure everyone listening is having a heart attack now because they're wondering what I'm saying, like, wasn't wasn't true. But we'll get we'll get to some of that in a minute. The point is the Galaxy Quest, the show was a show for entertainment and people took it as literal. And in the Bible there are things that are poetry.

There are things that are wisdom literature. It's not all history books and even the things that look like history. Well, we think of history and what they thought of history of two different things.

Zach

That's exactly right. Very well said, very well said. And the truth is, we already do this and we already know it. Like this is not new. A radical, you know, proverb says, the lazy man gets eaten by the lion. None of us think lazy people get eaten by lions and reality, you know? Yeah. Paul instructs, all Christians, in the early church to greet each other with a holy kiss.

We have decided that that was contextual. You know, that was descriptive of a time none of us do that. We don't greet each other with a holy kiss.

Sheila

They probably do France. They probably. Yes.

Zach

But we have taken other things and that exact same thing and said, well, no, that is prescriptive for all time. And so, again, my thesis here is that we are all making these interpretive decisions based on background, belief, denominational affiliation, stuff like that. That's the first harmful. And the second one is apocalypse. And I already touched on this a little bit that's interpreting Scripture is kind of obsessed with the end times judgment, fear and violence rather than this renewal and restoration that God is like all about throughout the text.

You know, so I talk about, a lot of like, left behind theology, you know, and this idea that, well, it doesn't matter what we do here on earth, because it's all going to burn anyway. And Jesus is going to kind of come back and kill all of his enemies. And I talk about the dangers of, if you believe that Jesus is going to come back and kill everybody who, disagrees with him, then it makes a lot easier to justify the violence against people who disagree with us right now.

You know? And so there real world implications for a lot of these things. The third harmful end is moralism that's using the Bible really just as a rulebook to control behavior. Again, divorced from context and cultural considerations. And I want to pause with these first three and say, one of the reasons that they're so insidious is because they're there's truth in all of them.

You know, they're very literal things in the Bible. Right? You know, when when, they're moral imperatives in the Bible. Right? Jesus said, love your neighbor, love God, and love your neighbor. It's the most important thing. You know, there's 2000 plus verses about caring for the poor in the marginalized. Those are moral imperatives in Scripture. But reducing the entirety of it to just a rulebook is where it becomes really problematic.

And in the last harmful lens of hierarchy. And, again, I think this will resonate so much with you and your listeners is that this is the leveraging of Scripture to prop up usually cultural power structures, which elevate some and diminish others based on gender, race status, things like that. And again, we see this all the time, right?

We see it with the subjugation of women, but we also see it with something like, I don't know if you're familiar with, like The Curse of Ham from the story of Noah, which is this, this really wild story where Noah gets drunk and falls asleep naked, and his son Ham walks in and he's like, oh my gosh, dad is sleeping naked.

He goes and gets his brothers, his brothers, like back in so they don't see their naked father and put a blanket over him. Noah wakes up and he's so mad that Ham saw him naked, even though it was 100% Noah's fault for getting drunk and falling asleep naked. And he curses Ham and says, you are going to be basically subservient to your brothers for all time.

Now the like legend basically goes that Ham's people, Ham's descendants, settled in Africa and were darker skinned, and that ended up being a huge justification for chattel slavery and African enslavement for years and years and years. I mean, it's kind of fallen out of favor now, thank God. But if you go back and read some of the defenses of chattel slavery in the 19th century America, a lot of it was citing this curse of hand thing.

And so it's using the Bible to prop up these hierarchies that exist. So those are the four very harmful lenses that a lot of us have been given.

Sheila

Right, right. And I want to go into detail on them. And then and then of course, you have the helpful ones which we which will save for the end. But I love them. And we've actually talked a lot about them on this podcast too. So so let's get back. Okay. Before we go through the lenses, let let's just get back to this whole Galaxy Quest thing here and talk about, you know, what?

When you look at Scripture, you said there's three big questions that too often we don't ask of it, which is who wrote this, what point were they trying to make and what genre of literature were they using?

Zach

Yeah.

Sheila

And why are those questions important?

Zach

Well, I think because of the way that that first harmful lens, that kind of wouldn't literalism because of the way a lot of us have been taught to read the Bible or even like this idea that the Bible is, you know, kind of God's love letter to each of us, something like that. It really gives us a skewed understanding of what was what was actually happening here.

As the biblical affix. Now, to be clear, like, I very much believe in the inspiration of Scripture, God's involvement in Scripture, but they were still human authors attempting to do something, you know, like attempting to record history. Obviously, Paul attempting to write letters to the early church to encourage or exhort them, these are real people writing to real people with real problems.

You know, and they're addressing specific problems. And then again, also, the genre of literature thing, is so vitally important. Right. And you actually said this earlier, even the more historical books, especially in the Hebrew Scriptures of the Old Testament, the way that they talked about history, is really different from the way that we talk about history now.

We think of history as like video camera surveillance footage, you know, like what exactly happened? That's what we think of with history. It's dates, it's numbers, all of that kind of stuff. That's not how ancient people talked about history. They told historical stories, you know, sometimes changing details and things like that to make larger points. So a great example of this is found, actually in the gospel accounts where you have two different genealogies for Jesus and two different gospel accounts, and they're like really different, like the names are totally different.

And so for years people have tried to say like, well, is one Mary and one Joseph, but if you go back, that doesn't work. But what you see is actually the two biblical authors there are using genealogies to make two different points right? So like Matthew is trying to make the point that, you know, Jesus is kind of the this, this new king of Israel, this descendant of David.

Right? Because that's his primary audience. He's trying to convince Jewish folks that Jesus is actually the Messiah. And so when he lists the genealogy again, he's like less he cares a lot less about like a literal retelling of father, grandfather, grandmother, all that kind of stuff and more to say, look, he is the Messiah. And then you have Luke's.

That's really different than primarily a Gentile audience, where he includes all of these Gentiles in it to basically say, look, Jesus has all like the lineage of Jesus has always included people outside of the Jewish world. It's always been this broader tent for people. And so they're doing two different things. When we understand that, it's like, oh, this is really beautiful and cool.

And my thing is it's actually more meaningful. It's actually more helpful for us than trying to be like, well, I need to figure out exactly Jesus's true lineage so that I can maybe dismiss one and validate the other when they're both actually incredibly valid. And like I said, I think God's inspiration was involved in both of them.

Sheila

Right. And a lot of this came like our our way of reading the Bible is, is really a post-enlightenment, you know, very modern and postmodern, where, where we are assuming, you know, that that people are trying. Yeah. Trying to tell historical like this happened, then this happened and this happened because we don't live in an oral culture in the same way that they did.

And they often told really long, in-depth stories to make a point.

Zach

Exactly, exactly. And, and I think it's not an inferior way of, of telling truth. It's not an inferior way of communicating truth. I think that's that's really important for us to understand, because I think we will elevate the more post scientific method, question hypothesis analysis thing and say this is the highest form of truth, when in reality, storytelling actually is just as valid of a form of truth telling.

As more scientific method based think look no further than Jesus, whose primary teaching method was. Parables were literally made up stories to make larger points.

Sheila

Yeah, exactly. So tell me about your experiences reading Sodom and Gomorrah. So you're you're a young pastor. You have this amazing story and. Yeah. What happened to. Yeah.

Zach

Well, so after I kind of came back to faith, you know, like you mentioned, and, you know, I started reading the gospel accounts and really kind of was compelled by this revolutionary version of Jesus. I picked up a one year Bible. I don't know if you're familiar with the one year Bible, but, it was just really.

Sheila

It was great. Ours was great.

Zach

Oh, not ours was like this off white color. Yeah. We, So, yeah, it kind of had like an Old Testament reading, a New Testament reading, and a psalm or a proverb a little bit each day. And the idea was, if you read it every day for 365 days, then you would read the entire Bible, which was like a very cool thing, especially in the circles I was in.

Like you read the whole Bible in a year. And so I'm doing the reading program, and a few weeks in I read this story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and it's something that I had heard before. But if you remember, there's like this offer that Locke makes to basically hand over his two young daughters to this mob of sexually violent men.

And, and then there's these, like, it ends with this really wild text that I'll just read to you. So it says, so basically, both of lot's daughters become pregnant by their father. The older daughter had a son and she named him Moab. He is the father of the Moabites today. The younger daughter also had a son.

She named him Benjamin, and he is the father of the ammonites today. And then that was the end of the one year Bible reading. That was the last part of it for that day. And I remember I close my Bible and the one year Bible, and I'm just like, horrified by what I just read. And I look down and I realize I've got my first period, like biology class, in 15 minutes.

And I got to go, like, be inspired for the rest of the day from this text that I just read, that was anything but inspiring. And that's just one example of I continued to have a lot of trouble when I was reading through these lenses of actually, like, getting anything truly helpful out of it and not having some things to explain.

So that was a very like that was just one example of how a lot of times when we read scripture through these lenses, it ends up doing the opposite. I think of what God intended.

Sheila

When you think that okay. So this is, this is supposed to tell me about how God's working in the world and how he thinks. Yeah. And how this is supposed to be blessing me. And it's like, how is this how is this blessing me.

Zach

Yeah, exactly.

Sheila

I want to read to you something that you wrote in the book. You said I was taught that the Bible is God's word handed down to us from heaven, perfect truth, without any mixture of error and meant to be read literally in every instance if something doesn't make sense, causes confusion, or provokes outrage as is the case when many of us read the story of lot's daughters, it's our problem, not the Bibles.

If a passage in Scripture conflicts with modern science, science is wrong, not the Bible. If we have questions or doubts, those are indicative of sin in our own lives, not evidence that our biblical interpretation might be off. Yeah, no. I think most of us, like in the evangelical church, grew up like that for sure.

Zach

Yeah. And it's and I think it just does a lot more harm than good, you know, and especially when we feel like our questions are shoved down our doubts or dismissed or called sin or something like that. Like, the problem is that those questions and doubts don't go away, you know? Like when I got kicked out of my youth group, it's not like, well, I guess I'm just going to trust everything a pastor says to me from now on.

I mean, it hasn't had the opposite effect. Like, I became incredibly, distrustful of clergy and scripture, and I really struggled to reengage with it. And those wounds are, like, really serious. And I know you know this from the community that you helped Shepherd and laid, and I know it from our community here in Austin. I mean, sure, we've got people that walk in for the first time almost every week at restore who haven't been to church in years and years and have deep spiritual trauma and wounding.

And they look absolutely terrified the first time they walk into a church. And we come alongside and we try to be trauma informed. And, one thing that we've started doing over the last few years is that when people come to restore that have really serious spiritual trauma, we actually offer to help pay for their spiritual trauma therapy.

Because we really believe that if the church caused the trauma, then the church should also help alleviate the trauma. And even if it wasn't our church that caused it, we believe that like, that's the call of healthy churches to come alongside people on help and heal. And so we there are real world costs to these things. And it's actually driving people away, like you said, 40 million in the last 25 years, driving people away from the church and from faith communities and from Scripture itself.

Sheila

Yeah, yeah. I love that your church does that. That's really beautiful. I think that's one of the things that I reading the book. I was just like, man, I want to go to restore other. We have a we have a church very similar to that in this town that we go to that.

Zach

Oh, awesome.

Sheila

Yeah. I love related. Okay. This is a total aside. This is not anything to do with your main thesis, but you had this throwaway story in the book where, you know, you had been fired from a megachurch, because you just couldn't do it anymore, and you started meeting with this guy who, was helping you see the Bible in a different way, and that it didn't that was very healing to you.

But you said this as an aside, you said he also bought my lunch, which was great because my wife and I had absolutely no money at the time. I had spent the last two years working 60 hours a week for 15,000 a year, and the church, which took in 70 million, had automatically deducted 10% of my check as a tithe.

My wife, Amy, was in graduate school too, and we were taking out extra school loans just to buy groceries.

Zach

Yeah, that that was our life for two years.

Sheila

Like what is going on with megachurches where they're taking in millions of dollars and they're paying their staff nothing. And yeah, no wonder you were disenchanted.

Zach

Yeah, exactly. It was it was really difficult. I mean, those those two years, in some ways I'm thankful for them because while I'd had tastes of the Bible being weaponized, you know, like the story of me in the youth group or different things that had happened in my college years, seeing how Scripture was weaponized in a space like that, you know, even the tithing, right.

Like they automatically deducted tithes. They paid us. I remember working it out some day and sometime when we were there, like the hourly rate was like $1.63 or something an hour that we weren't. And being completely exploited. There were 30 interns on staff and I at the in my last 18 months, I was basically in charge of the intern program because I was the senior pastor's intern.

And so I would have meetings with interns all the time who, like, literally could not pay for food, you know, like they could not they didn't have money to eat. And so I actually ended up going to a wealthier guy in the church and saying, hey, we're having this really big problem. We're like, interns can't eat. And that's the church inside of this church.

It has a full restaurant like that, like an entire restaurant also had two Starbucks and three books, two words. And I mean, it was wild. And I said, could you by any chance, just, like, basically put a bunch of money on to the restaurant, like Tab and I can give the number to a few interns who, like, really can't eat.

And he was like, sure, no problem. So that's how some interns eight was like a wealthy donor in the church, giving them money to the church cafeteria. But anyway, like Scripture was used to justify that, right? Like I tell the story of the about the widow's might in the book, and I tell it, you know, related to something else.

But that was a story that was used all the time to, to our interns to say, look, this woman gave everything she had. You need to be giving everything that you have. I'll tell you, as a 22 year old, I was like, absolutely, I do need to give everything that I have. And there's something, you know, virtuous about making no money and working so much and neglecting my family and my school and all that.

I mean, that's what I thought that was, what was told to me by people in leadership that I trusted with the Bible as their backing. But then I realized, well, actually, like, this is not even this is leading to immense harm for me, from my wife, from my family, and for so many other people. And I just became convinced that that's not what God wanted.

I also became convinced that by, the hypocrisy that existed in those spaces because while we were making $15,000 a year, a lot of the leadership were making 6 or 7 figures every year. And that dichotomy, I realized you don't even believe the scriptures that you're teaching. You don't apply them to yourselves, but you'll apply them to other people.

Sheila

Yep. The other story that really stood out to me, is you talked you talked about explaining the gospel to a man named Joe from from Haiti. And that was really touching. Can you tell us that story?

Zach

Yeah. So part of this, this church we had, we were like 500 of us on staff, when I was there, and there were a handful of pastors that rotated through being like, quote unquote on call because people would just walk into the church in this massive campus. And so the pastor that I worked for, was on call one day, but he was like, busy on a lunch meeting.

And so he was like, Zach, I got an on call request. Somebody just walked in, go downstairs and I was very excited. Like I said, 22 years old, I'm taking evangelism classes at seminary, you know, and I'm like, I'm about to convert this guy, and he's going to be in the baptismal before that lunch hour is, you know, and I get down there and I meet junior, and he's telling me he's, he's a refugee from Haiti, who left after the earthquakes and, he lost everything.

And he's here with his wife and his kids, in America now, and settled in kind of suburban Dallas and walked into our church. And I just remember going right into the Romans Road, you know, you are a sinner. And, you.

Sheila

Know, the sin is death.

Zach

Wages of sin.

Sheila

Is God is eternal life.

Zach

Yeah, exactly. You know, I laid it on him, you know, and it was like, I remember coming back and we were pretty vividly his eyes kind of glazing over, even as I was doing The Romans Road, but thinking, you just got to push through, Zach, you know, you just got to push through it. So I finished the Romans Road.

I basically say, are you ready to accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior? And he is like, I have no idea what that means. Like, what are you talking about? You know, and I'm like, well, maybe I missed something like, I'm going to go back like you're a sinner and you need to go to heaven when you die.

And he's like, I can't feed my family. I lost everything in the earthquake. My dad is dying like all of these things. And he's like, how does this help any of those things? You know? And he was like based. I was like, well, you don't want to go to hell, do you? And he said something that stuck with me forever.

He was like, I'm in hell right now. I am in hell right now. My life is awful and I need help now. Not just eternal hell. I need tangible help today. And I was like, oh my gosh. It was one of those moments, you know, that you have where you realize, I think that I really misunderstood some things.

And it was, you know, again, from like somewhat of a place of privilege, I, I didn't know that that wasn't going to be good news for everyone. Right? This idea of like, kind of a get out of hell free card being salvation, but salvation is actually much more than that. You know, it's more it's it's now and forever, right.

Sheila

Well, yeah. It's like it's like the fact that Jesus went around preaching the gospel, preaching the good news before he died. So what exactly was he preaching like? We we missed that part of the, of the story, you know. Yeah. Okay. So so let's go into these lenses. I want to do a couple of a deep dive in a couple of them.

Sheila

So the first one is this inherent lens which we've talked about, which is that, you know, every word of the Bible is, is exactly right. And was and you can't question it. And it was all written exactly the way that we would write it today. You know, it was dictated by God. When that that actually, I don't think people understand that.

Sheila

That's a new belief.

Zach

Yeah. It's a it's a quite new belief. In fact, it really it kind of started being formulated in the 19th century, but it actually was not written down and codified until 1978. So we're talking about like, really new, like 45, 48 years, something like that. Right. And the even what that Chicago statement was, it was not an attempt to kind of distill 2000 years of Christian theology and biblical theology to try to put it into a statement.

It really was an attempt to kind of baptize a very specific understanding of reading the Bible, a very modern, Western specific understanding of reading the Bible and what they did, which was honestly like both terrible and brilliant, is that they basically said, if you disagree with this understanding of an agency, you have denied Christ and you are no longer a Christian.

Like the second paragraph in the statement says, the following statement affirms this inerrancy of Scripture, making clear our understanding of it and warning against its denial. We are persuaded that to deny it is to set aside the witness of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit, and to refuse that submission to the claims of God's own word, which marks true Christian faith.

So what they were saying is, if you don't believe this, you are not a Christian any longer. And so it was the kind of full packaging of the weaponization of Scripture. And again, even the way that they talked about the Bible as inerrant or that this flat wooden reading, was something that was relatively new, this kind of modernist, as you explained earlier, understanding of the Bible.

Sheila

Yeah. I don't think people realize that, like in the 1600s, like even Augustine, Augustine, who wrote in when, when was at like 350.

Zach

Roughly fourth century.

Sheila

Christian, like he did not believe that the earth was created in six literal days?

Zach

No. And he was like he thought it was. Not only did he not believe it, he thought it was like ridiculous. And he knew somebody who came to faith later in life. And he has this like, great quote that I'm going to butcher. But it basically is something like, if you think that the Earth was created in six literal days, then it's better for you to just not say anything so that people don't realize how dumb you are.

Like, that's basically the quote. And I'm like, that's too far. Like that's a little much. Because I don't honestly don't care if you believe the Earth is six literal days or if you believe in some kind of theistic evolution or whatever, because that's not what the biblical authors of Genesis are trying to get across. They're trying to get across that God is the creator, and that God is really different from these kind of other gods that were prominent at the time.

Those other gods made human supposedly to basically just do their labor. They were like slaves. But God said, I'm making you in my image and we are coal laborers. We are working alongside each other to create this kingdom of mutuality and flourishing. That's the whole point. It's not an attempt to be a scientific recounting of the creation of the earth, or the age of the earth, or the origin of dinosaurs, or anything like that.

All the questions that we've become obsessed with asking it, it's just not trying to answer, you know?

Sheila

Yeah, yeah, it wasn't written for that purpose. And, I, I know so many people who grew up in evangelical youth groups who then went to university and did turn away from Christianity, not because they didn't love Jesus, but because they were told, you cannot believe in an old earth and still be a Christian. And they were heartbroken, but they were like, well, it's the earth is obviously old.

And again, I don't really care whether you believe the earth is young or old. It makes absolutely no difference to me. But but if you are going to believe the earth is young, you need to realize that if you make that a marker of the faith, people will walk away from the faith.

Zach

Exactly right. They will. They'll self-select out of it. Because if you say a Christian believes that the Earth is young, that the Earth is 6000 years old, and somebody no longer believes that, that what you've told them is you're not a Christian anymore. And they will. I mean, I tell a story of a guy in our church who left the faith because of that.

And like you just said, you've met dozens of people and some of I who left the faith because of that specific thing. We've become obsessed with these. I wouldn't even call them secondary issues. They're like tertiary issues. They're so far out. But making them a litmus test for true Christian faith. And it's it's driving people away in mass from the church.

Yeah.

Sheila

So you say inerrancy got started around that same time, and it actually it was quite correlated with Darwin. Yeah, with the whole evolution debate. Because it really wasn't an issue before. In the same way, since this is a relatively new thing. And, and I don't think I really don't think people understand that, like, and, and that doesn't mean that every Christian since 1850 or 1870 or whatever, believed in inerrancy at all.

I mean, even C.S. Lewis did not believe that the Earth was was young or, you know, and most of us love C.S. Lewis, right? I mean, we read our kids the Narnia series. We wouldn't say C.S. Lewis isn't a Christian, right? But the belief that the Earth is young is a very American centric, very, recent belief. And yet the church has made it, like, foundational, you know?

Zach

Exactly.

Sheila

In your next lens, I won't go into it too much because when I get to some of the other ones. But I just another funny thing of the we're all going to burn lens is that the Left Behind series, which sold like I don't know how many like 70 million or so like it was insane. It was insane how much that thing sold.

That idea of the rapture has only been around since, like around the same time as inerrancy.

Zach

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It's very young. Yeah. And I tell this kind of crazy story because it was really invented by this one guy, John Nelson Darby. And if you read the book called The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, which is kind of about how this theology came about, not that long ago, 150 years ago. There's a there's pretty good evidence that John Nelson Darby stole it from a teenager who in a, in rural Scotland, in this prophecy like tent revival thing, basically had this prophetic word given to her, and she started talking about, about this very specific kind of left behind way of understanding, the culmination of the Earth

and the return of Christ. And he was like, that sounds interesting. Wrote it down. And then it became now the most prominent, basically understanding of the end of the world in evangelical spaces.

Sheila

But again, was not around in 1516 hundred, in 900. And there have been Christians for 2000 years.

Zach

I think that's the thing. Yeah. Like, like so you're saying that like if you're saying that is a litmus test for true Christianity, then basically no one before the 19th century can be a true Christian, if that's what you're saying. You know, and it's that's just a ridiculous like on its face. That's a ridiculous statement to make.

Sheila

Yeah, exactly. Okay, let's let's do the moralism lens a little bit. Because I think this is, this is one that a lot of our listeners will understand is, you know, you go to see your pastor, you're in a terrible marriage, you're being abused, your pastor knows you're being abused. Your pastor might even feel a little bit bad for you and might even want to help you a bit.

But we got to remember that God hates divorce.

Zach

Right?

Sheila

And so I'm really sorry, but the Bible says you can't divorce. And so that's all there is to it.

And this is what we get over and over again. Is the Bible being used to tell people, you know, you are in sin, you are doing something wrong because of this one verse, without looking at the totality of Scripture and what's really being said.

Zach

Yeah, I mean, that's exactly that's exactly right. And so I tell the story of a woman at our church who, stayed in a severely abusive marriage for years because her previous pastor had told her, God hates divorce. And no matter how painful your current situation might be, it's nothing compared to the wrath of God. If you pursue divorce.

And the horrors of that, like, I know, you know, it's because you counsel people constantly, you know, that you talk to and all that kind of stuff. But like sitting across at a coffee shop and this woman telling me this story and she's weeping and she's telling me about what this marriage was like, I'm like, I'm emotional now thinking about that moment.

And I just don't understand how somebody who is entrusted with shepherding and caring for people could ignore that in order to prop up this very specific understanding of Scripture that honestly is not even good. You know, like, it's not even a helpful way of understanding the text. So I make the point. I go very deep into this. I'm super deep into it now, but, basically every single instruction around divorce in the Bible is to men, right?

So it's men. Do not divorce your wives because men were the only ones that could initiate divorce. In ancient cultures, first century Near East, especially in the Roman world, women were like property. Women, children, slaves, physical property. Like they basically all belonged, quote unquote, to the land owning patriarch. And the family. And even the way that marriage was done, right, was a woman was essentially sold, for dowry from her father to her new husband when she was very young.

And they didn't like women. They really didn't have a lot of say in how marriage went, what marriage was like. And so what ended up happening? Husbands would divorce their wives really, for any and all reason. Like they would get bored with them. They wouldn't find them attractive. Like, we have all these first century, extra biblical sort of like reasons that people got divorced.

In fact, even in Matthew 19, Jesus gets asked by the disciples, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason? And Jesus basically says no. And his disciples say, gosh, why even get married at all? You know, and it's like, that is these are the Jesus's closest friends viewed marriage like this, you know, and so he's constantly trying to fix that.

The reason he's trying to fix this is because a lot of times, in fact, most of the time when women were divorced, they would consider damaged goods. At that point, a lot of times they couldn't get remarried, and many of them died. Many of them had to resort to, like street prostitution just.

Sheila

Because that was the only way. That was the only way to get money.

Zach

As the only way to get money as a woman. Right. And so when, when God, when Scripture says, the biblical authors say God hates divorce, what they're saying is God hates it when this already vulnerable, marginalized population is further pushed to the margins, is then out of their home with really no recourse, no way to make money in a way to sustain themselves.

God hates that. And so I think what we can extrapolate is like, God hates it when we hurt people, specifically women who are in these difficult relationship. Well, fast forward the actual teaching then, for this woman who is in this abusive marriage is not God hates divorce, but God hates that you have been put in this situation where you were being abused by your husband, and you actually need to get out of that.

That is the God hate you being abused. And in the Old Testament or in the first century, Mary's that what God hated was a lot of times this kind of divorce for no reason, where women were left defenseless. Well, God hates a woman being abused today too. And so the actual better interpretation of that is God does not want you to stay in this abusive relationship.

Sheila

I find that so amazing that when you look at the passages on divorce, especially the one in Malachi that is so often quoted that God hates divorce, you know, the passages know God hates men who act unfaithful towards their wives. Like that's what God that's what God's mad at. And we're now using that very passage to tell women that you have to stay with these men who are unfaithful and abusing you like it's it's really wild.

It's really wild. But that that so often is the lens that we use when we look at the Bible is we ask. And I find this even in talks about sex before marriage, for instance, we treat it like God has these arbitrary rules. Right? And so the Bible is all about trying to figure out what the arbitrary rules are.

Zach

Yes.

Sheila

So that we can decide what is right and wrong as opposed to saying, no, wait, the Bible is telling us what God is like. Yeah, and the Bible is telling us what health and flourishing are like. And the things that are sin are the things that are leading us away from health and flourishing. It's not it's not that like we need to avoid these arbitrary things, it's that we need to become the kind of person who will naturally gravitate towards what is healthy and flourishing for me and everyone around me.

Zach

Yeah, you're preaching to us. Exactly right. That is exactly right. And we see we see Jesus doing this right. He gets asked, what's the most important thing and the most important thing in the law. He's being asked there 613 commands in the Torah. He's being asked which is the most important and he says, like, he doesn't kind of equivocate and say, well, they're all important.

He says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Love your neighbor as yourself. And then he says, all the law and the prophets hang on these two commands. What he's saying is, this is actually what all of the 613 laws were trying to do in their context and culture. Help you to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as you love yourself.

That's the whole point. And so if because a law is contextualized, or a rule is contextualized to a specific time and place, and it's now to your point, having the opposite effect of helping love God, love your neighbor, and love yourself, then it's not that the, like our understanding of what it means to love God and love your neighbor and love yourself needs to change.

It's that we need to change how we understand that law, because the point of it, like Jesus even says about Sabbath, remember, he gets in trouble for quote unquote breaking the Sabbath. And he has this incredible statement, right? He says that, you know, the man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man. Like it's a gift to try to help you.

And so if it's not helping you anymore or if it's getting in the way, this legalistic understanding, reducing the Bible to a moral rulebook is getting in the way of you experiencing the flourishing that God wants for you. Then it's time to do something different.

Sheila

Yeah, yeah, because I do think that we see God is like just arbitrarily having all of these rules where we can get in trouble, as opposed to God being concerned about our well-being. And yeah, it's it's it's wild. Okay. The last unhealthy lens is the hierarchy lens, which is basically the slave holder lens. Right? That we're all about, you know, that that that the Bible is all about who gets to be in power.

Yeah. And we need to make sure that the right people get to stay in power.

Zach

Yeah. It's interesting that it's always the same people, you know, back in the, in power with these. And I want to kind of I think we need to just it's a really helpful question when biblical interpretation is happening to ask, who does this benefit, right. Who does this interpretation benefit? And if it's the same small, powerful group of people that benefits every time from every Bible interpretation, then it's probably a pretty skewed Bible interpretation.

Because Jesus is pretty clear. I mean, when the angel announces the birth of Christ, he says, this is good news of great joy for all people. Not for some people, for special people, you know, for all people. And he first announces it to, you know, a Hebrew girl of 16, 17 year old Hebrew girl, and then shepherds who were on the edge of society, you know, and he's saying it's good news for all people, including, people that we would find on the edges of kind of what is accepted or not accepted.

And so, yeah, I think the I make I make a pretty strong straight statement that I think God hates when we use the Bible to elevate some people over others, because we see not just in the life of Jesus, but even in the early church in acts, that God through the early church is constantly leveling the playing field, constantly bringing people into equal and mutually flourishing relationships.

And it culminates with Paul very directly saying, there is no slave or free, there's no Jew, a Gentile, there's no male or female. We are all equal. We are all one. We are all in a level playing field before Christ.

Sheila

Yeah. You know, I do the reading sometimes at our Anglican church and the reading for the first week of July had that verse in it. And I'm like, oh, sign me up for that week. I want to read that verse. So it was, it.

Zach

Was I love.

Sheila

It, I love it, I love it. You know, one thing that I often think about is missionaries who go to all these different places in the world to bring the good news, right? And so they, they walk into this, this places which are largely patriarchal in many cases, it's not all, but in many cases largely patriarchal. And the good news that they're bringing supposedly is okay, you know, here's how you get to know God.

Sheila

But that patriarchy that you women have been suffering under, that's actually of God, right? Yeah. So it's not setting anyone free. It's just, you know, it's.

Zach

Exactly.

Sheila

It. Yeah.

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Zach

And it's the same kind of question that my friend JR was asking, right? Like, how does this actually help me right now? And again, it's not like Jesus didn't actually help people, right? Ben? Like that was what he primarily did. He went and helped people meet them exactly where they were and then help them move into something better.

Zach

And so if we're the hands and feet of Christ, we should be doing exactly the same thing. And the Bible, our biblical interpretation, should be leading us to that, not away from that.

Sheila

You know, one of the things that my husband says all the time and we've harped on this, on this podcast a lot, is that people don't realize that they have a lens. And that's a big part of what and what you're saying. You know, when you look at all these harmful lenses, people don't realize they have lens. They're saying, I'm just reading what Scripture has to say, right?

I am just reading the plain reading of Scripture. But we all have a lens. Like when you look at it, we all are going to it with our own assumptions of what this is for the fact that we live in, you know, the 21st century Western world or wherever you're listening to this podcast from. We don't live in the Near East under the Roman occupation in the first century.

Either. We all have our lens. And Keith always says, like, you can look at the lens with the belief, or you can look at the Bible and you can start with the belief that that that people are equal. Or you can start with the belief that man is over woman, white is over all other races, whatever it might be.

Right? And when you read the Bible, you can find support for either of those, for both of those things.

Zach

Yeah, yeah.

Sheila

So the real question isn't, you know, can I find verses that support my argument? The real question is what is godlike?

Zach

Exactly, exactly. And I think that's the the distinction I try to make in the book is the difference between what is biblical and what is Christlike.

Sheila

Yeah.

Zach

Because there are a lot of things in the Bible, because the Bible is recording things that have happened, not necessarily endorsing every single thing.

Sheila

Sodom and Gomorrah was biblical.

Zach

Exactly, exactly right. Like the Canaanite genocide. What's biblical? Yes. Yeah. All that stuff. Biblical, quote unquote. So it doesn't really matter what's biblical. It's what's Christlike. And Keith is exactly right. Rachel Evans makes this point when I, I quote her in the book, she basically says, like, we find what we go looking for. She says, if you're looking for Bible verses with which to support slavery, you can find them.

If you're looking for verses with which to abolish slavery, you can find them. Versus to oppress women. You can find them versus to honor and celebrate women. You could find them versus to wage war. There are plenty. If you're looking for reasons to promote peace, there are plenty more. It is the social location that we're bringing, the lenses that we have on and my my best pushback against people who are like, I don't have lenses.

Like I'm if there's just a plain reading of. So I'm just reading it in black and white is to say, not only are we not the original audience, and we read over the shoulder of the original audience, but even the original audience debated proper interpretation of these texts like, we we have that in the in the scriptures. They are debating, right?

And they are trying to figure it out. And again, they're using different criteria to try to figure out what the proper interpretation is. What I'm hoping to offer in this book is a helpful kind of set of criteria to make those decisions in a healthier way.

Sheila

Yeah. And so the first lens that you talk about that's a healthy way is the Jesus lens. Yeah. You know, and I love this I have harped on this so much is the Jesus is the Word of God. Yes. We interpret Scripture through the lens of Jesus.

Zach

Exactly. Yes. If if we are going to be Christians, which means a little Christ, that's what the word literally means, then that Jesus should be the filter through which we understand everything. And especially when things don't feel like they add up. And again, this is not like some kind of radical way of engaging with Scripture. In fact, we see this inside of Scripture itself.

So you have this really long debate in the Old Testament Hebrew Scriptures about does God desire mercy or sacrifice most? What's most important to God? And these Hebrew prophetic voices are going back and forth kind of in conversation with one another, something God desires sacrifice most, some saying like what? God's actually saying, I don't care about your sacrifices like Malachi, you know, put away all your noisy gongs and your sacrifices like, I want you to pursue justice and I want you to have mercy.

And so there's this constant conversation when Jesus comes on the scene and they ask him about it and he says, go learn what it means. I desire mercy, not sacrifice. Like he settles it. He said, you've been debating this for a long time. Here's the answer. You know, so Jesus becomes the kind of like referee, the decision making factor for this long argument that existed in Jewish religious circles.

And so I'm just advocating for us to do that all the way around. We are supposed to be using Jesus. If Jesus if Paul is right and Jesus is the divine in the flesh, the fullest expression we have of who God is and what God is like, then and we're going to call ourselves followers of Jesus. And Jesus should be the lens to which we're interpreting all Scripture.

Sheila

Yeah, I find it so interesting. When I read the Toxic books that I've been analyzing how little they talk about Jesus and how much they talk about God. While and this is what I found over and over and over again, is when people are teaching harmful stuff, they always say that God did it or God said it. They don't say Jesus did because you can't.

Zach

Because you can't. That's exactly.

Sheila

Right. Like people would see right through it. As soon as you say, well, Jesus says you're supposed to do this, people would see right through there. Know Jesus never said that.

Zach

Yeah. And that's why almost every ex Christian, non-Christian, atheist, agnostic that I have relationships with, none of them don't like Jesus. Okay? No. Like they're all good. They're good with Jesus. They are frustrated with the ways that God and Scripture have been represented to them in the way that it's been weaponized. But when the life of Jesus, the teachings of Jesus, they're like, that guy is pretty cool, actually.

Sheila

Yeah, exactly. Okay, so let's get to the next lens, which is the context lens. And how we actually do need to look at the context in which a lot of these verses that are often clobber verses that I use to say, you can't divorce or say that women can't be in authority or whatever it might be, you know, what is the context?

So, tell me a little bit about how context plays a part in first Timothy two, because I really liked what you had to say about this.

Zach

Oh gosh, that's such a great question. So, yeah. You know, I spend a lot of this chapter, the chapter that you're referencing, talking about how we understand, a couple of verses in context, two verses that have been kind of taken out of context and used to oppress women, one kind of in the church and then the other one kind of in the home.

The first Timothy 212 is the one that's usually used in church or faith basis that says, I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man. She must be quiet. And here's the thing that people don't realize about this verse. It's actually the only verse in the entire Bible that seemingly places some kind of restriction on women preaching, teaching, or pastoring.

It's the only one. And meanwhile, both the Old and New Testaments are filled with examples of women doing those things preaching, teaching and pastoring. In fact, this is how I'm including.

Sheila

Paul, including Paul, raising women around him for doing those things, like Priscilla, who was his co laborer, who was teaching men.

Zach

Yeah, exactly, exactly. This is how I had my mind changed. I was a freshman in college and I went to a Christian school, actually to play football originally, and I was not super interested in the Christian part of the school. It was fine, but, I went there, I thought I was going to be a football coach, and but everybody had to take one New Testament class and one Old Testament class.

First day of class, New Testament. I'm 18 years old. Our professor says, how many of you have been told that in the Bible? And, you know, God has certain restrictions on what women can and can't do in the church, and probably 80% of us raised our hands, you know, was like, yeah, for sure. We've heard that. He said, okay, my goal is not to, like, debate you or change your mind.

What I want you to do in the two days until the next class is I'm going to give you a handful of women, biblical women to look at, and I want you to see if they match up with what you've been told. Women are allowed or not allowed to do. So he gave us people like Priscilla, like junior, like Phoebe, like Deborah in the Old Testament, like Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of Jesus.

And I was like, I've never even heard of half of these people. I don't even know if they're in the Bible, you know? Which I'm like, oh, there's a reason I never heard of these women, because they go against the narratives in the church that churches that I grew up in. And so I go back to my dorm room and I'm reading about these women, and I'm absolutely blown away.

Right. Like, Phoebe is someone that Paul and trust the letter of Romans to, not just to hand it over, but to teach it, to answer questions about it, to speak on Paul's behalf about the theology that's inside of it. He doesn't call Julia just an apostle. She's outstanding among the apostle. She's one of the best apostles. Deborah in the Old Testament is given responsibility for all of God's people as judge.

And she leads the military and all of these like and I we go back to class the next couple of days and like two days later, you know, it's like Tuesday, Thursday class. We get there Thursday morning. He's like, okay, I have same question. How many of you still think that there are restrictions and only like 10% of us raised our hands?

And I went from the 80 to the ten. I mean, I went from the 80 to I went from raising my hand to not raising my hand because I'd been convinced. Beth, Allison Barr says this so. Well, you know, that biblical women contradict, modern ideas of what quote unquote, biblical womanhood is. And that's, I think, has to be the context or which we understand a verse like first Timothy.

And so then we are like, well, then what? What else could it mean if we engage with it? And so, like the way that I think it's best engaged with is to understand it as a very specific thing that is happening in this letter, in this specific city. And that's why Paul actually says, I do not pe26rmit a woman he's talking about a specific woman to teach man.

And it's like a very specific reason. And the whole book of Timothy is actually written because false people are leading, false teachers or leading people away from Jesus in the Ephesian church. And so he is basically identifying this woman as one of these false teachers and saying, I do not do not permit her to teach in this context.

Right? That's a that's a much better interpretation, a much better understanding of that verse, because basically no other women, if the only one in Scripture that seemingly limits women and no women in the Bible, actually abide by it.

Sheila

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I think the other funny thing is, like people cling to that verse and say it's literal, but then they ignore. First Timothy 215, A woman shall be saved through childbirth, which is really a confusing verse. Right? And I don't want to get into what that could possibly mean, but like, that's confusing. You know that you get salvation through childbirth.

What is that about? And then they ignore the like they don't interpret. First Timothy two I forget what the verse numbers are, but the ones about gold jewelry and braided hair, how you can't wear gold jewelry, braided hair, you know. So Laura Ingles is with her little two braids. Is is violating God's covenant. Like no one takes that literally.

Zach

Right? Yeah. And that's that's the point that I make in the book, is that you're exactly right that the verse 12 is taken literally while verses eight, nine, ten, 11, 13, 14 and 15 are contextualized and said, yeah, well, they're actually describing something else. We don't take those literally. So why pick one verse in the middle of seven to take literally?

And it's really just because it the hierarchy like it props up sexism. It baptizes patriarchy in a way that gives divine credence to the subjugation of women. That's the only reason that you would literally as that verse and contextualize the rest of it.

Sheila

Yeah. I love your response. When people say to you, I can't believe you allow women to preach and pastor at your church. So what is your response?

Zach

Yeah, I tell a story that, I always say, I don't I don't allow women to preach a pastor at my church and they're like, oh, well, thank God. I had heard that women were preaching and leading and pastoring, and I was like, oh no, you heard right. They are preaching and leading and pastoring. It's just not me who, quote unquote, allows them to.

Jesus and the Holy Spirit empowers them and allows them to. I just try to get out of the way and cheer them on. And that's been true for the entirety of our our church is about a decade old, and we've had women in pastoral and elder positions since day one. And still to this day, the majority of my bosses and our elder board are women, and we continue to like, I think, what I want to get across to people, too.

Zach

It's like the benefit of having shared leadership between genders and sexes, between people of different backgrounds, actually, like makes the church so much richer than when we just say only one type of person can make all the decisions. That's how we get into so many problematic places, you know?

Sheila

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You also have a fruitfulness lens, which I very much appreciate, because that is something that we talk here about a lot, that Jesus said, you judge things by their fruits. And so we are supposed to look at where there's good fruit. But I want to talk about the flourishing lens as we end up, because, as you said, like Jesus is always on the side of the poor.

Sheila

Jesus wants all of us to flourish. He's not only concerned with us getting to heaven. You know, he wants. He wants. Like as we pray in the Lord's Prayer, your will be done on earth as it is in Aaron. Like we're supposed to pray that every day that God's will be done on earth, and we are the hands and feet of Jesus, which means we are supposed to be a part of accomplishing that.

Sheila

Right? And we know that Jesus doesn't want there to be people who are oppressed. Like so much of the Bible is about correcting injustice. Yes. And yet for some reason, in the last ten years, it's gotten crazy. Yeah. Where justice like like injustice is seen as good and empathy is seen as toxic and bad. And it's like, have these people even read about I love the quote by Stephen Colbert.

Sheila

And I'm going to butcher it because I just saw an image of it again. But where he says that, you know, people, people are following claim they're following the Bible and claim they want to follow Jesus. But they're not caring for the poor and needy at all. And so either you need to claim that you're not a Christian.

Sheila

You need to just claim you don't really care. Yeah, but like, you can't do both.

Zach

Like you can't claim both. No.

Sheila

Yeah.

Zach

Yeah, you're exactly right. Yeah. And, you know, you identified a huge piece of this with the Lord's Prayer. But it's, you know, Jesus's message is consistent throughout his public ministry. It starts with the first time he preaches in his hometown synagogue. And Luke four, you know, and he says, I have come to bring, you know, freedom to the captives.

Zach

I have come to, you know, good news to the oppressed and the poor, recovery of sight for the blind, the year of the Lord's favor for not just some people, but all people. Now, which is opening message. And then you have all these different things throughout, right? Like he's meeting people's needs. He's caring for them. The Lord's Prayer all the way to Matthew 25, where he says, the way you treat those on the margins is actually how you treat me.

Zach

But I really focus in on kind of Jesus's one sentence mission statement from John 1010, where he juxtaposes like why he came with kind of what the enemy or or evil embodied seeks to do. And so he says, you know, the thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy. But I have come that you may have life and have it to live.

Zach

For he in Jesus's one sentence mission statement, he says, I've come so that people can flourish. That is why I am here, is to help people flourish now and forevermore. And so that should be the lens. Not through. Not just through which we do Christian ministry, but also how we read Scripture. And so if there are biblical interpretations that are leading us away from flourishing, like somebody demonizing empathy or something like th13at, and we going to say, actually, no, that goes against everything that Jesus says.

Zach

And that's how we can know that it's a bad interpretation of the Bible. In fact, like that, that whole toxic empathy thing is so ridiculous, right? Like if if empathy is sinful, what you're saying is that Jesus is like the most sinful person that has ever lived. Because you've had this passage in Hebrews that says, we do not have a great high priest who is unable to empathize with us, but one who can empathize with us in every way.

Talking about Jesus right, Jesus, empathize with people, with all of humanity, in every way, like he was the great sympathizer. And so the idea that, like, now, we shouldn't empathize with people. Now it's sinful and toxic. It's so backwards that we should be able to call it out and say, this is an un Christlike vision of Christianity, and this is a bad Bible interpretation.

Sheila

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I, you know, you go into, in your book on how God doesn't want us to sin because it causes us not to flourish.

Zach

Right, exactly.

Sheila

But so it's not like you're not arguing that sin doesn't matter. That's not what anyone is saying. But Jesus does care about our flourishing and the way. And if you think about that, that that sermon that he gave at in Luke four. Right. That he came to set the captives free, that it's good news to the poor, that all of these wonderful things.

Sheila

What is it exactly that Jesus is now bringing? That is good news, and it's that God sees you and cares.

Zach

Do back there, right?

Sheila

That God sees you and cares. And now Jesus invites us as a community to see and to care and to start redeeming things and fixing things, and to bring the gospel of reconciliation to the world so that we can see and care and we can help people flourish, and we can stop all the hierarchy, but we can enter into this on a level playing field and help each other and not see us is just individuals.

Sheila

Whether or not I go to heaven or hell, which is the way that Christianity has been defined, but instead as a much more historical way of seeing. Christianity is that, you know, the community. We are part of a community where we are bringing God's love to others. Yes. Yeah.

Zach

Very true. Exactly.

Sheila

You know, Jesus shouldn't be that hard.

Zach

Yeah. No, you're spot on. And you know that that that thing, that community scripture calls the kingdom of God. And that's the subject. You know, Jesus talked about the kingdom of God more than any other subject that he talked about during his time on earth. And this place of mutuality of of a place where everybody can flourish, a place where people are liberated, set free from the things that get in the way of their flourishing, where they're able to put aside sin.

Zach

Like you said, it's it's not that like sin and all that has been so weaponized and it becomes even hard to like, talk about. But if we understand sin as anything that gets in the way of our flourishing, which is what God wants for us, things we do to ourselves, things other people do to us, things that exist, and systems and structures that were built by sinful people.

Zach

Then we're able to kind of be set free to say, oh yeah, God does hate sin because God loves God's children and God hates seeing God's children get hurt. And that's what God hates seeing God's children. Not flourish, because that's actually what God wants more than anything else.

Sheila

Yeah, that's what I meant when I was talking about how, like we think of God as a bunch of arbitrary rules, it is like, no, it's not about that. It's it's that he wants us to, you know, he tried to explain to us, hey, these things are going to hurt you. These things are going to hurt you. And I don't want you to be hurt.

01;16;47;02 - 01;17;04;27

Sheila

And when you do these things, you're going to cause the community to be hurt, you know? So I don't want that to happen. So that's what he's trying to accomplish. I want to end by and you already mentioned this, but I really liked your take on it. About the widow's mite. I really like the way you talked about that.

Sheila

So can you tell us about that story? Because it's a great way to encapsulate the whole thing.

Zach

Yeah. This is a kind of a great way of kind of putting all the lenses together, so to speak, and how we're making these biblical interpretation decisions. You have the story of the widow's might, where Jesus and his d;isciples are hanging out in the temple. It's like a couple of days before Jesus would be arrested and and die on the cross, his last week in Jerusalem.

Zach

And this widow comes up and she puts her last two coins in the offering box. And Jesus says, look, she gave, a lot of people just give the, you know, a little bit out of their wealth. But she gave everything she has to live on is the phrase that he says, the way we've traditionally interpreted that is, okay.

Zach

Well, she gave everything she had and we should give everything we have, you know, but that's actually like Jesus says, nothing positive about her doing that. He just points it out to his disciples. And that's kind of confusing because of the way that the Bible is structured. Specifically in Luke, you have the structure of that story. It happens at the very beginning of Luke 21.

Zach

So Luke 21 one says, While Jesus was in the temple, he watched the rich people, blah blah, blah. Then a poor widow came by and dropped into small coins. I tell you the truth, Jesus said she has given more than the rest of them. They gave the gifts out of their well, she has given out of there, but out of her poverty she has put in all she has to live on.

Zach

And then they go and start talking about other things like the temple will be destroyed. You start talking about some other stuff. It feels like this really strange story, but if we understand that's actually not the beginning of the story, it's the end of the story. And most of us know right? Chapters and verses. They didn't come original.

Zach

They were added much, much later on, but they actually interrupt a story here. So the end of Luke 20, right before that, it says, while all the people are listening, Jesus said to his disciples, beware of the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at the banquets, yet they shamelessly cheat widows out of their property.

Zach

Another translation says they devour widows houses and then pretend to be pious by making long prayers in public. Because of this, they will be severely punished. And then it just keeps going right into. While Jesus was in the temple, he watched the rich people and a poor widow came by. Jesus is actually saying like, there is no reason this poor widow should be donating her last two coins as a tithe.

Zach

In fact, the way tithe worked in the Jewish system was that a percentage of it was given to poor widows, people who could not afford things. Jesus was saying she shouldn't be giving anything she should be receiving, but she's not. Because these corrupt religious leaders who are in bed with the Roman Empire are exploiting everyone, especially widows. Another way to encapsulate this story is to say Jesus is basically in the temple saying, these guys who are, you know, like acting like they're so pious are actually devouring widows houses, exploiting widows.

Zach

And then look, there goes one. Right now there's a widow who is being exploited right here. Look, she's giving her last two coins. That's all she has to live on. Jesus is actually warning against the exploitation of people who should be cared for for the purposes of propping up religious power and political authority and all that stuff. Not saying this widow gave everything that she had, and that's awesome.

Zach

We should too. So it's a story again that we've not just gotten wrong, but gotten backwards, you know, and story I tell in the book is that it had real world implications. A woman in our church, our grandparents, had this preached to them and they gave their on a fixed income. They gave extra more than they could afford, ended up having their lights turned off, not enough food in the house, and the church was nowhere to be found to help them.

Zach

And that is the exact opposite of what Jesus wants.

Sheila

Yeah, and I think about that. You know, you go back to your church that was breaking in 70 million a year and your interns couldn't afford to eat. And how much, you know, churches are saying you need to give till i34t 10hurts.

Zach

Yeah.

Sheila

But many of these places are in our glorified country clubs. And I'm not saying that's every church. And I understand that city of pastors actually make less like there's a big discrepancy between what megachurch pastors are making and what your average church pastor makes. So I'm I'm not trying to comment on that. I know that there's so many faithfully serving pastors who are who are barely scraping by themselves.

Sheila

Yeah, but but when you see these churches that are insanely wealthy, pressuring people to give more and more and more instead of understanding, wait, the the whole purpose of giving was supposed to be to support the poor among us.

Zach

Exactly.

Sheila

That's what we were supposed to be doing, was supporting the poor among us. That's how we flourish. Yeah, and we've missed the boat. We've missed the boat.

Zach

With pretty severe consequences. Yeah.

Sheila

Yeah.

Zach

But so like I said, there are better ways. There are better ways of reading the Bible. There are better ways of being the church. There's a more Christlike vision for Christianity.

Sheila

And so I just want to say, like, if you're someone who you find it hard to read the Bible because of how it's been weaponized against you, maybe you grew up in purity culture as so many people did. Maybe you're in an abusive marriage. Maybe you've just been taught horrible things about gender relations, and every time you open the Bible, that's just what you see.

Sheila

And it's so hard to separate what other people have told you. The Bible says from anything else. This book is really refreshing and can help you see things in a different way that you know. If we get back to the heart of Jesus, the Jesus is the word as Bryan's. And yet a great quote from Brian's on that, Jesus is what God has to say to us.

Zach

That's right. Yeah.

Sheila

I love that. And, yeah, if we can get back to that. So if you need some, if you need some hope that that God actually does see you and cares about you and isn't just trying to yell at you over sin, but that he actually cares about you, please pick up the book Better Ways to Read the Bible by Zach Lambert.

Sheila

Zach, thank you for being here. I really appreciate your voice on social media. Where can people find you?

Zach

Well, thank you for having me. I feel the exact same way about you. And I'm grateful to learn from you for so many years and to be in this conversation if you want to connect on. I write long form on Substack, public theology, where you can just search Zach Lambert, but I'm on Zach, I'm at Zach Lambert on basically every social media if you want to connect.

Sheila

And and that's.

Zach

An.

Sheila

Open source, not a case.

Zach

That's right. The W Lambert my DMs are open. If there's anything I can ever do to help or support you, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Sheila

Yeah. Awesome. We'll we'll put links to your Substack in here. I know I see you on threads all the time. I've kind of abandoned some of the other platforms, but as you can thread, you put links to those things in the podcast notes. So thank you, Zach, and thank you for writing better ways to read the Bible I appreciate it.

Zach

Thank you, I appreciate you.

Sheila

I really appreciate Zach and and this wonderful book that he has written. So do check out better ways to read the Bible. And remember too, that we have free book studies, as I talked about last week. Now for the Great Sex Rescue. And she deserves better already so that you can work through our books with your friends and help them have some amazing conversations about what healthy, evidence based, and Jesus centered looks like when it comes to raising our kids.

Sheila

When it comes to recovering from purity culture, even when it comes to the sex life that we want in our marriages. So do check those out. Those links are in the podcast notes as well. And, you know, tomorrow's Friday and on Friday, Rebecca always sends out an amazing email. You may not get it, but 40 I have about 45,000 people get it every week.

Sheila

And she has an enormous open rate because it's always amazing. And you don't get anywhere else where you're going to see that. So if you look in the podcast notes, there's a link to where you can subscribe to the bare marriage email, and then you're sure that you're never going to miss anything. You'll get notified of all our podcasts, all our posts when we've got a sale going on, and there's one coming up for the whole story hour puberty course on how to talk to your kids about sex and puberty and growing up.

Sheila

So don't miss that. Subscribe to our emails link is in the podcast notes. Check out Better Ways to Read the Bible and we will see you again next week on the Bear Marriage Podcast. Bye bye.