Rediscovering the Bible as Wisdom Literature — Tim Mackie of BibleProject

What if many of us have been taught to read the Bible in a way it was never meant to be read? In this special live event recorded by Upper House, BibleProject co-founder Tim Mackie returns to Madison — the city where he earned his PhD in Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies at UW–Madison and pastored at Blackhawk Church — to share the story behind one of the most widely used Bible-teaching resources in the world.

Tim traces the origins of BibleProject to a coffee-shop conversation with his old college friend Jon Collins, a successful maker of animated explainer videos who had quietly become a “post-Bible Christian.” Their shared question — how do you engage Scripture well? — became the heartbeat of the project. Tim contrasts the “reference book” Bible many of us inherited (turn to the right verse, find the answer) with a richer vision of Scripture as ancient Jewish literary art designed to form wise, mature human beings over a lifetime.

Along the way, he unpacks seven core convictions that have guided BibleProject from the beginning — three about where the Bible comes from, and four about what it is for — closing with the practice of meditation (the Hebrew hagah) and an invitation to try again with Scripture, whatever your history with it.

Whether you’ve loved the Bible, struggled with it, or aren’t sure what to make of it, this conversation offers a fresh invitation to see Scripture as a unified, beautiful, and transformative story that leads to Jesus.

The Seven Convictions (At a Glance)

Where the Bible is from:

• Collaborative literature — human authors and God’s Spirit meeting, not passive dictation.
• Unified literature — one interconnected story leading to Jesus.
• Ancient literature — written for us, but not to us; context matters.

What the Bible is for:

• Messianic literature — every theme sets up and finds fulfillment in Jesus.
• Communal literature — designed to be read aloud together over a lifetime.
• Wisdom literature — forming us to discern good from bad, not just memorize answers.
• Meditation literature — hagah: slow, repeated reading that rewards a lifetime of return.

About the Guest

Tim Mackie is co-founder and lead scholar of BibleProject. He holds a PhD in Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a degree in theology from Western Seminary in Portland. His research focused on the manuscript history of the Bible and the formation of the biblical canon — including his dissertation on the book of Ezekiel, with particular attention to the Septuagint and Dead Sea Scrolls. After years of ministry as a local-church pastor (including at Madison’s Blackhawk Church and later Door of Hope in Portland) and as a professor at Western Seminary, Tim now serves as lead scholar and creative director at BibleProject. He lives in Portland with his wife, Jessica, and their two sons.

https://bibleproject.com/ 

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This episode was created by the SLBF STUDIO at Upper House.

Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour

Edited by Dave Conour

Transcript

Welcome & introduction to the live event

Dave Conour 0:02

Welcome to the Upwards Podcast, where we explore the intersection of Christian faith in the academy, the church, and the marketplace. What if many of us have been taught to read the Bible in a way it was never intended to be read? In this special live event recording, hosted by Upper House, Bible Project co-founder Tim Mackey returns to Madison, a city that shaped both his academic and spiritual journey. He attempts to answer that question about the Bible. Drawing from his years as a pastor, scholar, and storyteller, Tim shares the personal story behind Bible Project and unpacks seven core convictions that have guided its work from the beginning. Whether you've loved the Bible, struggled with it, or aren't quite sure what to make of it, this conversation offers a fresh invitation to see Scripture as a unified, beautiful, and transformative story that leads to Jesus.

Dan Hummel 1:00

It's my pleasure to introduce Tim Mackey. Tim earned his bachelor's degree at Multnomah University, his master's at Western Seminary in Portland, and his PhD in Hebrew, Bible, and Jewish Studies right here at UW Madison, writing his dissertation on the manuscript history of Ezekiel in the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls. During and after those studies, he serves as a teaching pastor, including several years at Madison's own Blackhawk Church, and later at Dorf Hope Church in Portland. In 2014, he co-founded the Bible Project, the nonprofit animation studio

Introducing Dr. Tim Mackie — from Madison to BibleProject

Dan Hummel 1:30

Turned Media Empire, you might say. He serves today as Bible Project's lead scholar and creative director. What Tim and his collaborator John Collins began, with a whiteboard and a couple of animated videos, has grown into one of the most widely used Bible teaching resources in the world. Bible Project's videos, podcasts, classes, and reading guides are entirely free, funded by donors, and available in more than 50 languages. Its videos have been viewed well over half a billion times in some 200 countries. Its podcast has a large and devoted following, and just this past spring, it became the first ministry ever to reach a million followers on the UVersion Bible app. For many people in and outside the Christian fold, a Bible project video has become one of the first places to turn to to make sense of a difficult book or passage in Scripture. Join me in welcoming Dr. Tim Mackey.

Tim Mackie 2:31

I really don't have words. I could almost spend the entire talk just giving a preface as to why uh this is a really surreal and special moment that is a true gift. My sincere thanks to uh the team at Upper House Commons, the Steve and Laura Brown Foundation for this invitation. The whole thing I've been up to the last couple days, and tonight is just feels like a real

A surreal homecoming: nine formative years in Madison

Tim Mackie 2:55

gift. So cheers. I'm just really grateful for that. And it's very meaningful to be able to be here and to you know share what I want to share with you because our uh this season in Madison for Jessica and I, we were here nine years from 2003 to 2012, and it was such a formative season for both my wife and I. We had our first son here. Uh, the the grandparents and free babysitting were all back on the West Coast. And so we uh we found our way back uh to Portland, as Dan said, um, and also to join a one-year-old church plant right in the heart, Portland, uh, in the neighborhood I grew up in, and to uh be a part of that pastoral team, and also to serve uh as a professor uh part-time at Biblical Studies at Western Seminary, where I went to school. And that was an amazing season. And you guys, we were there six months

The coffee with Jon Collins and the idea that became BibleProject

Speaker 2 3:50

before an old college friend came and asked to go out for a cup of coffee. Uh, his name is John Collins, and he had this idea. And so the idea for what became has become the Bible project uh was really almost simultaneous, like just a six months after uh we moved back to Portland and we began working on this idea in 2012. So my whole journey with the Bible that led me to go to school for way more than is reasonable for any well-adjusted person. Uh, the Bible, I loved every minute of it. And, you know, I was in my uh late teens, I was 19 when I started following Jesus. And my parents are followers of Jesus. We had attended church when I was growing up. But in reaction to their really strict religious kind of upbringing, they just didn't want to force their faith on my sister or I. And so I really had my kind of life-changing encounter with Jesus in a community

Two very different journeys with the Bible

Speaker 2 4:50

of skateboarders, uh, an outreach ministry to skateboarders at a church in Northeast Portland. And it was just, it was life-changing, it was all positive. There had just happened to be a Christian college across the street from the skateboard park and ministry. I it was six months I've been following Jesus and I'm signing up for classes, and I'm learning about the Bible as ancient Jewish, like literary art and wisdom literature and ancient Near Eastern cultures and Greco-Roman context, and it was amazing. And I was learning so much, and it was like the Bible was my gateway that opened my mind to understanding history and culture and literature, human nature, and all positive. Simultaneously, my friend John was also signed up, and actually met him at the skate park, and he had moved down from Seattle, and he ended up at this Christian college for a very different set of reasons. John grew up in a very politically and religious, uh conservative, non-denominational kind of church, Protestant Bible church. And his experience of the Bible growing up was just fundamentally different. It was very much an emphasis, as he would describe it, as you are kind of given an answer sheet in terms of the doctrinal statement of his church, which was a really defining part of his church community. And essentially what it meant to become a skilled user of the Bible was to know what pages you turn to to be able to answer the questions about the doctrinal package, you know, that he was raised in. And that's maybe fine in and of itself, but what he found, he is the most curious human being I've ever encountered in my life. And he asked more questions more consistently than anybody I know. And I love, I love him for it. And he was that kind of person as a kid. And he has uh memories of regular experiences of being told to stop asking so many questions at Sunday school, being questioned about whether his face was legitimate as a teenager because he was so inquisitive and wanted to understand the reasons under the reasons under the reasons. And so he came to Bible

Jon’s questions and the “post-Bible Christian” season

Speaker 2 7:00

college as a way of finally kind of sorting out, like, okay, I'm gonna figure out this faith and Bible thing for myself. And he asked more questions than uh most people I remember. And he walked away from uh the same educational experience that I did. He'll tell you, more confused, more dismayed about how the Bible relates to following Jesus today and to the theological belief package. And so uh he entered a season of what he calls of just being a post-Bible Christian, where he was committed to Jesus, he was a committed Christian, but reading the Bible made it everything more difficult and everything more complicated. And so he just decided to kind of just not do it very much. And he found being a Christian in his way of existing in the world was a lot easier when he just didn't have to deal with the Bible. So I don't know if that doesn't make sense to you, that's okay. Uh it wouldn't make sense to him now anymore, but it did at the time. And so while I, you know, was away paying to go to school for so many years, John uh after college, uh, was developing employable skills. And uh he found his way into advertising and um making short animated explainer videos, uh, mostly for tech companies in the Silicon Valley. And so his call to me, can you go out to coffee? I have this idea. He had was five years into that business, was very successful. He had an animation studio up and running, and he was reaching a point in his life where he felt like he needed to face his questions. And our friendship had provided context for many, many years of what he experienced as a safe place. And I think just we just like each other and enjoy each other and enjoy talking because every question that he had, I either had never thought of before, or I would be like, exactly, and here's another question like that's like that that raises. And we just found we would just easily pass hours talking. So he had this idea. Hey, I have a company and make these videos. Uh, what if I were to like raise some money and we were to hire in the evening some of the artists on my team? And what if we made some videos in that style, but like about the stuff we're talking about and all the stuff that you've learned about the Bible over the years? And I was like, that sounds fun. I don't have enough going on. A professor and a pastor and a dad of young kids, but like, you know, it just seemed like a unique opportunity. And so we started, we worked for a year and a half on the first couple of videos. One was about uh the story of heaven and earth throughout the storyline of the Bible, and then the first one was about the book of Genesis. And we uh were just really unprepared. The Holy Spirit had a plan that we were not even dimly aware of of what the work was for and where it would

Naming the problem: the “reference book” Bible

Speaker 2 9:50

go. And it's just it's been so much fun. It's been the most fun thing I've ever done in my life. Most of my colleagues, you know, that I met and friends here in graduate school that went on to be professors and researchers and so on, publishing their research in biblical studies. And I still do all that nerd stuff too. It's just that instead of publishing books, I make Bible cartoons for the internet. And uh and I've made my peace with that. I actually I I actually get more research time than any of my friends do. So uh it's been the ride of uh uh my life. How John would describe his experience and uh how we've come to talk about it together. We had a teammate who asked us, like, have you guys ever like distilled why you started the project, what problem you thought you were trying to like help solve? And like, what's the heartbeat underneath your mission statement, which is to uh help people experience the Bible as a unified story that leads to Jesus? And we're like five years in, and we're like, oh, that's a great idea. Like, what problem are we trying to solve? Because mostly we were trying to solve John's problem, and that's why we did all of this. I'm completely honest, like he like he was the audience of all of everything that we were making. And we've come to describe the Bible that he encountered growing up as uh the reference book Bible. So this is about being in a faith community in a family where uh you're formed, and what's modeled for you is a way of engaging the Bible that's very similar to how we engage reference books. Now, here's the problem, even with saying that isn't hardly anybody uses reference books anymore. Uh we almost use entirely, you know, uh digital encyclopedias and now like you know, fully AI like, right? Interactive type encyclopedias. But there was a day when like a salesperson would come to your door and you would buy like a set of books, you know, that represented like the state of knowledge on, you know, from A to Z. And then Wikipedia happened and so on. So the point is, is uh do you guys know what it is like to use a reference tool in whatever medium like you encounter it? It all begins with your felt need and your questions. And so you interact with it, you don't like read an encyclopedia from beginning to end. And in fact, usually when you are pulling up some kind of reference or encyclopedia article, you don't read it from top to bottom, but you scan and you're looking for the information that took you to that like resource in the first place. And what often happens in many church communities that have a high value of scripture, that's God's word to his covenant people, which is a conviction that I share deeply. But that's not what's at stake here. The the question is how do we get the Bible to answer our issues or address us with God's word to speak to us in our time and our place? But many communities do it in the form of treating it like a reference book. So let's say you have a question about like a behavior, you know, is should I do this type of thing? Should I not do that thing? And what John saw modeled was skilled engagement of the Bible is memorizing what page to turn to, what paragraph chapter, uh, and then what verse to find that answers that question. Do this, don't do that. Many people in reference book kind of Bible cultures see modeled for them, I have a question about God or about humanity or sin or something like that. And so where do where what page, what chapter, what verse do I go to? And then what it means to be a skilled to like know the Bible

The daily quiet time and the “scrapbook Bible”

Speaker 2 13:30

is to have as many like verses as you can, like in, you know, in your memory to be able to look them up. Uh and maybe if you're less intellectually inclined, but you are still looking regularly for scripture as a place to hear God speak to you, reference book Bible cultures, cultivate a practice that kind of through what's called like the daily quiet time, which is, I think, a phenomenal habit. I'll talk about that a little bit more. But in the daily quiet time, often it can be very short and it doesn't foster uh learning how to read anything in context or read large sections of like say a whole page or even two facing pages, you know, or not much less like a whole book of the Bible. But it's about looking for the warm, fuzzy verse, you know, that makes me feel something, uh the voice of God or the presence of God speaking to me. And that's a precious gift when that happens. What that practice can foster over the long haul, if that's all you ever do, is uh essentially begin to create your own without knowing it, kind of like domesticated Bible or edited Bible. You know that God loves you and has like plans for you and a future to prosper and a hope. But then later down the paragraph, when the Philistines are being destroyed in a land of wilderness and desolation, you're like, oh, I don't know what to do with that. So you just kind of like don't read that. You just nobody knows what I'm talking about here. So we end up kind of creating our own scrapbook Bible and just relating to that. And so what the missed opportunity here is is kind of a double tragedy at work here over the long haul. The first is perhaps we are engaging the Bible to make it work in a way that it wasn't fully designed to do. But I think the intuitions underneath all of these are not only honest, but like right and good. But at the same time, uh, this is a deeply problematic way to engage the Bible because if all you ever learned to do is engage the

Proof-texting in action: what the Bible says about wine

Speaker 2 15:30

Bible in terms of verses, you can actually find verses in the Bible to promote almost any behavior. Not any, but almost any. Let's just take a relevant topic as the consumption of alcohol. Has anyone ever wondered? Like, that seems important to know what God thinks about that. And so I could turn to a psalm like Psalm 104 and learn about how God is watering mountains from his upper chambers, sending the rain, you know. He makes the grass grow for cattle, plants, for people to cultivate, bringing forth food from the earth, including grapevines, wine that gladdens the human heart, oil, you know, olives to make the faces shine, and bread like wheat that sustains their hearts. What a gift the wine is, right, from God, and it makes us happy, you know. It's just fairly intuitive if you've had the experience before. So Psalm 104, you know, you could see where where that's going. Um you can turn to the end of the of the book of Proverbs and find that there's this king named Lemuel. We don't actually know where he was a king of or when, but his mom had some wise sayings uh about him, he says, to give to him. And his mom told him that it's not for kings to drink wine or for rulers to crave beer, because if they drink, they're gonna forget all the like decrees and decisions that they've made, which could lead to the deprivation of the rights of the oppressed people. So bad news. Wine isn't for them. Let beer be for those who are perishing, or wine for those in anguish, so they can drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more. Thank you, Lemuel's mom. Okay? Right? That's that's in your Bible. Did you know that was in your Bible? That's in your Bible. You can turn to, you're like, okay, I'm just gonna go to the New Testament now. So in one of the like early accounts of Jesus, we're told the first demonstration of uh God's power in and through him, one of his glorious signs, was to make the best wine that anyone has ever had in their lives at a wedding feast. Okay, so you're like, that's more Psalm 104 style, less uh King Lemuel's mom style. You get Paul the Apostle, who's just very clear with the Ephesians don't get drunk with wine. You're gonna ruin your life if you do that. Except if you're having stomach problems.

Tim Mackie 17:48

Right? He tells a young pastor protege, Timothy, you gotta stop hydrating so much, man. You gotta have some wine, buddy, especially because your stomach and your frequent illnesses. Okay, how are you doing? So you're laughing, um, but you and I both know that there are behaviors that people could appeal to the Bible for or against. There's doctrines that people could appeal to the Bible for or against, uh, where it's not a laughing matter. And if you've been shaped in a way to treat the Bible in this manner, and that's what it means for you to be wise in knowing how to uh what to do with these texts, uh, I think we're setting our ourselves up for a pretty pretty complicated situation that

The hammer and the shovel: right tool, wrong use

Tim Mackie 18:30

we call the world as we know it. So what what's a better way forward? So I said there's important intuitions underneath all of these approaches that are that are really good. Think of uh that's my hammer. That's a picture up there. I just used it the other day. What happened with my older son, who's now 15, but he was uh like three or four at the time, is he uh went into the our little tool garage and he found my hammer. We have a tiny little backyard, and he wanted to uh dig holes. And what happened was he went into the tool garage and he saw the hammer sitting on the shelf. And he thought to himself, that's a tool that I can use. And is that a good intuition? It's great intuition. So what he proceeded to do was get the hammer out, and then to dig a hole, he just looked at that claw, right? The thing on the back of the hammer, and in his mind, he was like, that's for like hitting the dirt to chop it up, to loosen the dirt, and then just scoop it all out with my hands and like you know, pile it out. And you can imagine how dirty he got in that process, and it was wonderful. And so I remember I don't like I came home from work or I went outside, I don't remember exactly, but I remember seeing him like with the hammer, doing that with a hammer, and I was so like stoked on how intuitive he thought like he wanted to use my use of the tools. And so I walked him back in and I showed him shovel. Here's a tool that's designed for the exact thing you're trying to do here, buddy, and it's way more effective. Are you guys with me? Maybe you can see where I'm going here. So his intuition was right. The way he had chosen to engage that tool, it worked. You could make it work. Is it the most effective use of that tool? Not at all. In fact, that's not what it was designed to do at all. It's designed for nails. And then I showed him nails, and then a lot of things had nails in them in the in the weeks to follow that I that I discovered. Uh but I I I think you get uh my point here. It's a double tragedy because not only uh can he not do very well the thing that he intuited he wanted to do and that it was for, but he missed out on the potential of like what it actually was designed to do. And I think many of us have a very similar uh experience if you've been raised in uh reference uh Bible culture. There's the good intuitions that uh they're not that difficult to name. These are abiding intuitions that communities of Jesus have had about scripture from the very beginning. Scripture is actually designed to teach God's people what is true, that we can encounter reality as it is. That's what scripture is designed to do. The question is, how do we get scripture to do that? Scripture really is designed to give God's people wisdom about how to discern between good and bad and between better and best. But how do we get scripture to do that? It really is designed to foster an encounter with the voice of the living God, speaking into our lives and our communities' lives. But once again, the question is how? The Bible is 70% ancient Jewish narrative and poetry, and about 30% ancient Jewish style prose discourse. And how ancient Jewish narrative and poetry that's highly sophisticated and very creative literary art teaches God's people about what is true and good and to help us hear the voice of God. Well, it's really very similar to the question of like, well, how is it actually designed? And maybe a Reference book approach, it's like a right idea, but like less than helpful execution. And so this is essentially how John and I uh have come to describe the problem that we are trying to solve. Uh scripture is designed to be a gift of God that teaches us about reality and that brings us into contact with what is good and true and beautiful and to hear the voice of God. But the question is, how do I come to terms with what the Bible actually is designed to do?

Seven convictions: an ancient way of reading recovered

Tim Mackie 22:30

We've come to kind of distill, if you were to pull the hood, pull the hood, open up the hood on uh the car engine of the Bible project, uh, and look at what's underneath our mission to help people experience the Bible as a unified story that leads to Jesus. We've discerned seven key convictions about scripture, and we didn't make them up. They're actually ancient. They're the most ancient ways that the smartest Christians uh have talked about for a really, really long time. Just so happens we live at a time in the history of the Jesus movement in our corner of the world in the Christian tradition where many of these have been forgotten. And so we're trying to help recover them. And everything we're doing in all of our work is a way of modeling and inviting people into a much more nuanced and uh honoring uh approach to what these texts are and what they're designed to do. So I'd like to briefly share those seven with you. This is gonna become a podcast series and a whole video series that we're working on right now. So this is kind of like test driving ideas to help us kind of work out and refine uh things that we're gonna put into other forms of media. How are you guys doing? Great. Okay.

Conviction 1 — Collaborative literature (heaven and earth meeting)

Tim Mackie 23:40

Are you ready? Ready for action? Okay. One of the most important kind of underlying assumptions about what uh scripture is, uh, is what we've come to call is that it's collaborative literature. I mentioned our first video that we made was about the story of the relationship between heaven and earth throughout uh the story of the Bible. And the thing that was really surprising to me, and I remember it really, really dawning on me uh during my time here in Madison, being exposed not just to reading lots of Hebrew Bible, but also reading lots of ancient Jewish literature, like from in between the period of the Hebrew Bible and the time of Jesus, was how convinced biblical authors were about how heaven and earth, while distinct spaces, like earth is down here, heaven is high above, uh inaccessible to us. But at the same time, these are spaces that do overlap and that are meant to overlap. And the story of the Bible begins with heaven and earth in the same space. It's called the Garden of Eden in Genesis chapter uh one through three. And when Jesus arrives onto the scene, he taught his disciples to pray, Our Father, who is in heaven, hallowed be your name, may your kingdom come, and may your will be done. Where? Here on earth, as it is in heaven. I mean, it's a prayer for the reunion of heaven and earth, in and through the work of Jesus and the Spirit in his communities of his followers. But just like the reunion of heaven and earth and the overlap of heaven and earth throughout the storyline of the Bible is the case, it is also the case that the origins of the Bible itself is a claim that in these human authors that produce all of these texts, heaven and earth were meeting, as it were, in the production of these texts. My experience in the first church communities that I was a part of that had a very high view of the Bible as God's word to his people, tended to uphold that value, tended to minimize the agency of any humans in the origins or the historical origins of the Bible. And if it was admitted that the Bible was written by humans, and you kind of have to, because it like it's in the Bible itself, then it, you know, the idea was they kind of went into a trance, it was like, we're kind of taken over, and they were just like passive vehicles, you know, like writing down something that they didn't know. And again, the main problem here is you actually turn to the stories that describe the writing of the Bible in the Bible, and none of them are like that. There are lots of people who have like kind of blow your socks off encounters with God, Moses and Isaiah and Ezekiel, uh, but none of those are stories about the writing down of any of the books of the Bible. And then there are lots of descriptions about the writing down of things that uh became a part of the Bible in the book of Exodus with Moses, Jeremiah, and so on. And what the descriptions are are people in full possession of their faculties crafting these scrolls, and a conviction that in and through the human brilliance of these authors, God's spirit is doing something. As it were, their minds become a meeting place of heaven and earth, so that what they write is exactly what God wants his people to hear. This is a conviction right through the Hebrew prophets, like Zechariah here, that what God was saying through the human prophets is what God's spirit is saying to his people. So what we're what I'm at least trying to do is reset the categories. I don't know how many cups of coffee I had down at. I'm pretty sure it was espresso royale. Is that still rolling down on State Street? No? Did it close? Bummer. Okay. Well, whatever it's now, it was a coffee shop that I had a lot of conversations with undergraduate students who were taking introduction to biblical literature at UW. And they were having a crisis of faith because they were being exposed to the very publicly available knowledge about the historical origins of the Bible and about when and how and manuscripts, and a lot of that information is in the Bible itself. A lot of it was surfaced through other historical discoveries and archaeology. They're having a crisis of faith, and I begin to realize like these are people who are coming from church traditions that don't have any categories for the marriage of heaven and earth in the mind and heart of the prophets. So that what the brilliance and intentionality of these human authors is how God's Spirit is speaking to his people. You don't have to minimize one to highlight the other. It's a marriage of, as it were, uh, divine and human in the minds of the prophets. This is exactly how the Apostle Peter talked about the origins of Scripture with a really cool metaphor about it's as if the prophets were carried along by the Holy Spirit. So, you know, you can just imagine, like, if you like swimming at all, if you like to swim in any of the lakes in the summer, that's something Jessica and I always enjoy doing. And you know, can a human swim just like jump in and swim and use your limbs? Like, of course, of course you can swim. And you can make a lot of progress doing that. But here's the thing: there's something called a boat. And you right, on a windy day on, you know, Lake Minotah or Mendota, uh, you get into one of those sailboats and the wind in the sail and you're moving at like four times the speed. Are you with me? That's the metaphor at work here. It's like the Holy Spirit doesn't minimize or negate the agency of these humans, it actually supercharges them, as it were, carrying them along super speed. And that is at least my experience with the profound artistic beauty of scripture, its narratives and its poetry as a joining of heaven and earth. And so the Bible as collaborative literature, holding on to the human and divine origins, is a really key part of our work and what we want to help people recover. Another

Conviction 2 — A unified collection that leads to Jesus

Tim Mackie 29:25

key conviction about scripture is that it is a unified collection of ancient Jewish texts. Unified in what way? In a lot of different ways. Uh, one of the most easy to understand ways uh is from the first sentence of the Bible, which is in the beginning. What types of texts usually begin with phrases in the beginning? Like stories, like narratives that are going somewhere. And there is a narrative architecture to the whole collection. It doesn't read like one like constant story sequence. It's more like there's a big story told in the first part from Genesis to a book called Kings, from creation to the exile of Israel. And then you get books that like, as it were, give you little headings that say, hey, dear reader, here's a collection of poetry coming from a prophet that was like right here in the storyline. Here's the next one, and it's right here. Here's a set of poems that's connected to this person in there, right? And so it kind of self-references, but what all these collections are doing is reflecting on the big ideas about God and human nature that were at work in the story. But the overall uh story arc is going in a linear direction that leads to Jesus. There you go. Now that's a that's a statement, you know, this confessional statement made as a as a Christian. So the Hebrew Bible is also the Bible of like other religious communities, Jewish and Muslim. But as a Christian, what it means to be a Christian and read the Christian Bible is to say we believe this story all along was going somewhere, and that Jesus is the one in whom the story finds its ultimate fulfillment and the gift of the Spirit, so that Jesus' work in the world continues in and through his people, empowered by the Spirit. So it's unified as a storyline, but it's also unified as an actual like editorial unity. So all the different parts of the Hebrew Bible have been knit together. It's collections of stories, composed and arranged, and every part of the sub-collection of the books is self-referenced and connected uh together. We have lots of videos on this. I won't try and give a summary about it now. It's unified in many ways, but these are not all your options. If you turn to any individual book of the Bible, and uh what we did with our book of the Bible overviews was show how every single scroll in the biblical collection has been carefully architected. And the big ideas that um are repeated throughout all the different parts, each scroll has its own like sections and units that are knit together, and then there are keywords and ideas that connect them all in an overriding set of themes. Every book is like a masterpiece of literary architecture in this way. So that's a whole thing you can nerd out on. You can also take like big repeated ideas that run from beginning all the way to the end. And so this is a big project that we've been doing uh throughout the years of the Bible project is just to take one big idea and run it from cover to cover and show how every one of them finds its uh climactic fulfillment in the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit leading to the arrival of new creation, to the reunion of heaven and earth. And so, you know, for the last 12 years, we're almost a teenager as an organization. We've been at work doing this, and it has been so much fun. And I'm now more convinced than ever that the scriptural collection is a unified story leading to Jesus in all of these different ways, in a way that just keeps. I mean, now I'm just I'm convinced one human lifetime isn't enough to learn everything that I hope to learn, and that I've had to learn how to deal with that. Uh, here's another key conviction, and I'll guarantee nobody's

Conviction 3 — Ancient literature: honoring context

Tim Mackie 33:05

learning anything right now uh with this one, and that's the Bible's ancient literature. What often happens in Bible cultures of churches or families where the Bible is a reference book is it's very easy to forget that fact or to not treat it like that. And so it's often treated as if it dropped right out of heaven to speak to me and my time, and that every you I read is me, like God talking to me. And what we're doing is we're bypassing a really, really important value, and that's that God chose. Why you have to ask God about that, but God has chosen to reveal Himself to the human family, first and foremost, through like all the cosmic order of the snow globe in which we find ourselves called the universe, and then through the history of his covenant purposes with one particular family leading up to the arrival of Jesus Messiah, his family story, that is the people of ancient Israel. And it's actually through what God was doing and saying with those people at that time in those languages, that that's the vehicle of his word to all people of all times, and especially the covenant people of the Messiah. And so honoring the ancient context of when Paul said a certain thing to what church is really important uh in honoring what these texts are and hearing them on their own terms. And it often feels, I think to certain people brought up in reference, you know, book Bible culture, is that you're taking the Bible away because now it's not speaking to me. But none of these texts were written to anyone in the 21st century, right? They were written to audiences that lived in really different time and culture. But again, the intuition is that these texts, while they haven't been written to our place in our time, they are for God's people of all places and all times. And how ancient texts are for all people, well, that's an exciting dance that uh involves a word that you learn in seminary called hermeneutics. It's just the art and science of wise Bible interpretation in community. But honoring ancient context is really, and it's a part of what makes uh biblical studies such a fun uh adventure, is because you learn about human history and about really different ways of seeing the world than our own. I could give a whole talk on any one of these seven just for the whole rest of the evening, but we

From where the Bible is from to what it’s for

Tim Mackie 35:30

got to keep going. Now, here's something John and I discovered as we were drawing up this list is that these first three here on the left all have in common about where the Bible is from. Like it's from the result of this divine human collaboration. It's uh from a group of ancient Israelite scribes who saw it all as a unified, interconnected collection. It comes from the ancient world. But then as we start to think about other of our core convictions that we're trying to recover about how to read scripture, uh, we realize that these next three are less about where the Bible's from, but about what the Bible is for.

Conviction 4 — Messianic literature

Speaker 2 36:05

How is it actually designed to be engaged, and what is its purpose? And so uh the first one that we've put language to is actually maybe the most intuitive, uh, is that it's messianic literature. What we mean by that is that the Hebrew Bible by itself existed long before Jesus as a collection. And what it is about is a storyline about God and humans on the stage of our uh of our world, on the dry land especially, about working out a partnership that God has chosen to engage us in. Why? Again, I don't know, right? But that's just the setup on page one is that God said, um, hey humans, you and your your very existence is meant to be an image and a reflection of me as you take responsibility for the world on my behalf. And um, humans uh don't do a great job on that end of the partnership because we're gloriously stupid and short-sighted and pretty ignorant and selfish, but also like highly creative and capable of like God-like capacities in the world to shape it according to our ideas and our values. And the crisis of the biblical story is God's constant desire to keep working with humans as he finds them, even though they keep messing everything up, like and hurting themselves and other people in the process. So he chooses one family out of the many and like tells them 600 times over how to be a human being. And even that doesn't work out, and you end up with the crash and burn story in slow motion of the people of ancient Israel. And what the whole story is building towards is man, what we need is someone who can like be the human partner that we're all made to be, but consistently fail to be. And one of the titles in Hebrew uh for that role of somebody that we need is the Hebrew word mashiach, which means an anointed one, which is like pouring or oil over something. This is what the word means. But pouring oil was a symbol of the uniting of God's heavenly life in the form of liquid life and the oil on a person, as it were, a meeting place of heaven and earth. And the Hebrew Bible is saying, like, position open, apply within, human being who will consistently love God and love neighbor and be so united to God's will that what this human wants is what God wants for the goodness and flourishing of his world. You know, resumes accepted tomorrow, that kind of thing. And what the Hebrew Bible does is it sets up that crisis, and it is exactly that job description that Jesus of Nazareth is presented as entering into. And the twist that you kind of saw coming in a pretty important way, but that really like is revealed in and through the life of Jesus, is Jesus is God becoming the human partner on our behalf because we're just so bad at it, right? And actually, God becomes the human partner to do what none of us can consistently do, to actually redeem and recreate the human heart and mind so that we can become the kinds of humans that He made us to be all along. It's a messianic storyline. And so what it means to read the Bible is messianic literature is that every single one of those themes, oh yeah, Jesus said it. Uh everything written about me and the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms had to be fulfilled. Look at your notes, Tim. Just follow the talk. What it means is that every big idea that you find in Scripture in some way is setting you up for that fulfillment, that climax, and finds its fulfillment and ongoing history in the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus. And if I have any idea from the Bible that I haven't run through the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus, I'm not reading the Bible really as a Christian anymore, as messianic literature. I'm reading it in some other way. And that's what it means to read the Bible as a Christian, which means messianic literature. Lots of implications to that, I just don't have time to explore, but it's a key, key idea for us. Um, this was one that surprised me and John and I as the years went by, is that the Bible is communal literature. Here's what I mean when I say that it surprised us. If you start going through, I mentioned these, all of these little references to the writing of the Bible within the Bible and what people did with the Bible as it was emerging within the storyline of the Bible, what you will notice most consistently is that scripture is a set of

Conviction 5 — Communal literature: the public reading of Scripture

Speaker 2 40:30

texts that was meant to be read aloud within a group of people and then prayed over, processed, and discussed. This happens in the Torah itself, in the book of Deuteronomy. It happens in the book of Kings, in the time of Josiah, it happens again in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah. Jesus revealed his identity as a Messiah to his people in a public reading of Scripture in a synagogue up in Nazareth. Maybe some of you know the story. It's a reading from the Isaiah scroll. Paul the Apostle told Timothy, that protege, who he said you should start drinking some wine. Uh, he also told him in a nearby paragraph, like, hey, don't stop the public reading of scripture. Like it's vital to the health of God's people. The major, major theme that scripture was designed not just to be read as individuals, it was way too expensive for everyone to have a copy back then. It was first and primarily designed to be read aloud over and over again over many years in the community of God's people. Most people heard the Bible long before they ever learned to read it, and then they would then they would memorize it. And so a communal reading of scripture is both part of where the Bible originates from, and it's also how the Bible is designed to be engaged. John and I realize a number of years in how much we were learning from each other. And even though, yes, like I'm kind of like the nerd in the relationship, it's actually his questions, time and time again, that have helped me see things that I never would have thought to ask, I never would have thought to even notice. It's actually in like the community of Bible reading that is our relationship, where we are learning together now for 12 years on a regular basis. And I am more convinced than ever that for communities that really emphasize individual Bible reading, that that's super important, but just as vital and just as ancient is the practice of fostering uh Bible reading communities where you commit to reading scripture out loud together over a long period of time. That's the whole thing. We made a video on it called the public reading of scripture. This isn't just like, oh, here's a nice thing you could do. It actually is actually a really, really important historic practice, and it's how the texts are designed to be engaged. I guess

Conviction 6 — Wisdom literature and the tree of knowing good and bad

Speaker 2 42:40

done. The Bible's wisdom literature. Now that might not be news to many of you, because you might say, well, yeah, there's the Proverbs, right? That's wisdom literature in the Bible. And I guess there's Ecclesiastes, which was a little more on the cynical side, you know? And then there's Job, which is like, I don't know, what is happening with that book? I have no idea. That's one of the ones you you don't really want to read again after you read it. So, okay, there's wisdom books in the Bible, but like, what's the Bible? The whole Bible? Like, but there's stories in there and there's Psalms, right? And there's like letters, like, oh, is that wisdom literature? Here's what we mean when we say this. The first main storyline that's opened up after God installs his human images and partners in creation is a choice that they have to face. And it's a choice about knowing good and bad represented by that tree. The riddle of the tree of knowing good and bad, the forbidden tree or the forbidden uh fruit. In fact, the irony of opening up my device every time and having a reference to Genesis 3 on it. Anyway, thanks, Steve. Jobs. This story is at the beginning of the Bible for a reason. It is the agenda setting, template setting story about the essence of the human condition. And what this tree is all about, I don't we use this whole evening's talk. This tree represents a choice. If humans are going to take it responsible. Responsibility for the world on God's behalf. They're going to have to make some calls. Yeah? If you're in charge of something, you have to make decisions. And if you got to make decisions, you're really going to need to be able to know the difference between like a good decision and a bad decision. Anybody with me? Even if you aren't in charge of anything big, you're in charge of your life, right? You have to make decisions. So it's kind of this paradox on purpose at the beginning of the story of the Bible. How is it that these humans are supposed to like take responsibility for creation, but not know the difference between good and bad? Like, what is that about? And so what God gives is a command, and what God says is if you listen to my command, if you listen to my command, you will have life. If you don't listen to my command, and you get into the habit of taking and defining good and bad by your own wisdom, by your own eyesight, by your appetites or desires, it's gonna go badly for you. And that is exactly what happens in the story. In Genesis 3, what's happening within the portrait of human nature is not deliberate, rebellious disobedience, though that really comes into focus in the next story with Cain and Abel and later. It's a story of folly. It's a story of disordered desire. It's a story of a human who's deceived. There's the snake in the garden, saying you can't trust God. He's holding out on you, even though he's given you existence and everything else, he's holding out on you on this one thing. And man, you know how you could actually be more like God than you already are if you were to take that knowing of good and bad for yourself. And so the essence of the storyline of the Bible is humans are gloriously stupid, right? Images of God who are fundamentally ignorant about how to most wisely discern the difference between good and bad. And our desires and our appetites and our eyes might lead us towards what is good, and they might lead us towards something that is good that will kill us. And that's what the biblical story is trying to explore, like the paradox of the human condition. And so what it means to listen to God's voice, to listen to his wisdom, to hands off of the thing that I think that I want and that God wants to give me, but in God's timing, in God's wisdom, and in God's way, this is the essence of the biblical drama in character story after character story. And what it is, is a whole set of case stories of how not to be a human being, essentially. It's called the Old Testament. And it's a story mostly of just people destroying their lives and of destroying their communities' lives leading up to the need of somebody who can like be the human and the Messiah stuff. Remember? See how this connects together? So this whole thing is about the redemption of human agency and the redemption of human purpose in the world leading up to the life and the death and resurrection of Jesus. Wisdom is a huge theme. It runs right through the Proverbs, uh, it runs right through the teachings of Jesus, who summarizes most important body of teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. And he said, These are my words to you. If you listen to them and do them, guess what you become? You become wise. Wisdom really mattered to the biblical authors, it really mattered to Jesus. It's about becoming mature, wise human beings who are filled with the Spirit of God, who are growing in our discernment of good and bad for how best to love God and love neighbor. The Bible is wisdom literature. And then this was a really great example where a passage I had read like so many times throughout the years, when the Apostle Paul, back to talking about Timothy, after he tells him to just drink some you know wine and then don't stop the public reading of Scripture, he says, You know what scripture is for, Timothy? This is fantastic. He says, Timothy, from infancy you've known the holy scriptures, and what's their purpose? What's the first thing that he says? To give you wisdom and how to discern between good and bad. What do I need to discern good and bad about? Well, it's about how you need to be rescued. And I don't know, look around, everybody. I don't have to, you know, exhibit A, human history, right now. You know, we're not doing too well. We're gonna destroy ourselves. Odds are very high, we're gonna destroy ourselves. We need to be rescued. And man, how can you be rescued? Well, for humans, it's it's probably gonna mean doing a lot less and really becoming skeptical about a lot of our like certainty about what we think we know about good and bad. And it's through putting ourselves in places of vulnerability and trust before God. And if we are rescued through trust, that's gonna need to be trust in somebody. Yeah, that's the Messiah. Oh, who's the Messiah? I'm a Christian. His name's Jesus of Nazareth. Are you with me? Look at the progression right there. The the Bible is a wisdom curriculum for how to become mature, wise human beings. First of all, by recognizing I'm a gloriously stupid human being. And then in his mercy, God has actually become the version of me that he designed me to become and that he is rescuing me into. Are you guys with me? The Bible is wisdom literature. Whew, how are you doing? That's six.

Conviction 7 — Meditation literature: the meaning of hagah

Speaker 2 49:00

All right. So that's from where the Bible's from. So what the Bible's for? How? Like, how do you like engage with these texts? Does the Bible have any like self-reflection on what you actually do with it? And you're like, well, it's a book, so you read it. Well, okay, yeah. But how do you go about reading it? And in one of the most important kind of meta reflections on scripture within scripture itself, uh, we're given a picture of the ideal Bible reader in Psalm 1, which uh invites us to meditate on this collection of texts. Now, I say the word meditate in 21st century Madison, Wisconsin. A whole bunch of things are coming to your minds. Um, most of them are not what I mean, or at least they're not what the biblical authors mean. We're not about emptying your mind, though that is actually a really important practice. Um, what we're talking about with meditating on scripture uh is the Hebrew word haggah. Won't you say it with me? Hagah, you know it's gonna teach you some Hebrew tonight. You could expect it. It's predictable. So haggah is an awesome word for lots of reasons. It's spelled the same backwards and forwards, so it's got a cool like mirror structure to it, its root. But also, this is a verb that describes what a bear does in Isaiah chapter 30. What a bear does um when it has just caught its prey and its mouth is on it and it's like slobbering and like what it, you know, think up the nature videos or whatever, you know, the hagah. Hagah uh in the Psalms is what the sound that doves make when you hear them kind of quietly up, like in the right eaves of your roofs, like a woo, a hoo. So haga is about a low volume sound, but when humans do it in the Psalms, what humans hugah on is the glorious acts of Yahweh that He's done to save His people. It's about storytelling. To haggah on scripture is about a quiet, repeated recitation out loud to yourself or with a community of people, where you read and you reread, you recite over and over and over again on scripture over and over again for how long? Day and night for like the rest of your life. These texts are so dense. The Bible is like a puzzle literature. This comes from ancient Israelite culture that doesn't actually value putting the cookies on the bottom shelf. Uh it's literature that makes you work to discover the meaning by reading and rereading and sitting with the puzzles and the confusion and the dismay of like God said what? God did that person said that. And you sit with it, and what you will find is every one of those confusions or moments of dismay are answered, addressed, unpacked, or resolved in other interconnected parts of the collection. That's the unified, uh, interconnected part. And so sitting patiently with the parts of the Bible that you hate is a practice in cultivating patience and virtue, in learning to be patient with the parts of your life that you hate. And learning how to uh sit with the parts of the Bible that confuse me or that offend me or that warm my heart is also formation of like my human character and learning how to sit patiently with the parts of my life and my relationships that confuse me. Right? Anybody have those confusing relationships in their life? It's as if we're being trained to be human as we sit with this puzzling uh collection of texts. And so meditating and learning how to read and reread uh over the course of a lifetime is a really, really uh important practice. There's so

An invitation: there’s always more

Speaker 2 52:30

much more to say, but I feel really happy uh with this little list of seven. Of course, there's seven. Like the days of Genesis 1. Uh we truly didn't plan it, right? It just kind of happened. But this really is the essence of what we're about. And so, like, I don't know where you're coming from in terms of your own family of origins or church community of origins. We all have different histories with the Bible. Some of some of us, like me, it was no Bible baggage at all. Like it was just pure fun and enjoyment, you know, and I was 20 and started reading the Bible. But all of us come from somewhere. And so wherever you're at, we just want to encourage you. And if our resources are helpful for you, that we're making through the Bible project, we want to spark your curiosity, help you see that there's more. And whatever version of the Bible that you have encountered, been inspired, or hurt by, there's more. It's a much older, deeper, and beautiful set of texts than any of us have ever imagined. And they have the capacity to foster an encounter, a healing, wisening encounter with the living God in and through the person of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit. And so everything we're making is in service of that mission. And so we hope that this is helpful for you. And I just would encourage you to be open to trying again with Scripture and deepening uh your engagement in another way. And if our resources are helpful for you, thanks be to God for doing

Closing reflection & credits

Speaker 2 53:55

that. Thank you guys for letting me present.

Dave Conour 53:57

Tim Mackey reminds us that the Bible is more than a collection of verses or answers to life's questions, it's a unified story, a wisdom-forming library, and an invitation into a lifelong conversation with God and with one another. If this episode sparked your curiosity, we encourage you to explore more of Tim's work through Bible Project and to revisit the scriptures with fresh eyes. The Upwards Podcast is a production of Upper House Studio, an initiative of the SL Brown Foundation, located in the heart of the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. Our mission is to create a welcoming space for students, faculty, and the broader community to explore life's biggest questions through the lens of Christian intellectual tradition. To learn more about Upper House, upcoming events, and to find other podcast offerings and event recordings, visit slbf.org. Until next time, keep looking upward and living with purpose. Go in peace.