There and Back Again: Scripture in Both Directions, with Spencer Owen - Episode 118

Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of the biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and I am here with my good friend Spencer Owen, and I will give him a moment to talk about what is going on for him here in a second, but to introduce our topic and what we're going to be talking about today, I want to talk about the hermeneutics of the directional reading of the Bible, we might say. Do we read it from left to right, and is that the only and primary way that we read the Bible? Or do we start in the New Testament and go backwards? And a whole bunch of ideas there. We have some questions and topics that we'll kind of get into and really nerd out here.

But I'm not going to [00:01:00] be really drawing out specific academic phrases and things , because there are different ways that people see this, and there are some slight nuances to those different ways, right? So you have canonical approaches, you have different types of biblical theology approaches, and those do have some nuance to them.

So we're not really going to be getting into the nitty gritty of those today, though I probably will in the future. But today we're going to be talking in the sense of how does a serious student of the Bible approach these things in a practical way and you don't really need all of that academic jargon in order to get to all of those ideas.

So that's kind of the approach we're going to be going at here today. And I have brought Spencer Owen here because I really appreciate his views on things and his approaches and his ways [00:02:00] of nuancing the text. And also, he has come to a lot of scripture in very similar ways to the ways that I have, which really is a funny thing to me. Like, very different, but we both love Leviticus for very similar reasons. And so, I think that's really fun, and I think he's going to bring a lot of good stuff to this conversation. So welcome, Spencer. How are you doing?

Spencer Owen: Thank you, Carey. I appreciate you having me on here. Thank you. I'm doing all right. Like I was talking before we started recording, life is in a fascinating season right now. Let's just put it that way. A lot of things going on some good, some bad, and trying to kind of figure it all out and stay faithful in the middle of it.

Carey Griffel: I think a lot of people are in that state right now. And so lots of thoughts and prayers to a lot of people in [00:03:00] these times of uncertainty and times of growth. I would hope is what's going on in the end. But it's scary in the meantime sometimes.

Spencer Owen: Very much.

Carey Griffel: So, can you tell us a little bit about your podcast? Because I don't think I've had you on since you've started it.

Spencer Owen: Sure. Thank you. So the name of my podcast is the Trauma Informed Church Kid. And I started off back in, I think it was August of last year. And what we've been doing is walking so far very slowly, through, the text of the whole Bible.

So we just finished Genesis 10. And what I'm trying to do is, I'm trying to take a look at the scriptural text with a trauma informed lens. Now, the goal of that is not to say, okay, let's make, you know, let's nice up the text and make it seem, you know, less sharp [00:04:00] edged than it actually is.

The goal is to really take a good hard look at all those sharp edges. And not just the ones that are there in the text itself, but to, also really acknowledge and in some cases, apologize in many cases, apologize for the ways in which those texts have been used by the church in the past. And to try to, as I kind of put it in my tagline, Reconstruct religion for the hurting with theology that doesn't hurt.

So the overall approach there is to, in many ways, to do exactly what we're talking about today. To both read forward while also having an eye for reading backward at the same time. So that's kind of the, fundamental approach that I take when I do that. But I also have different episodes throughout where I will either talk a little bit about like the, how of hurt or [00:05:00] just like the way that trauma affects us.

Also doing interviews with a couple of different people that are relevant to the question of church hurt and, healing from that and yeah, overall just trying to walk through the Bible and help people understand it a little bit better and hopefully a little bit more in a way that causes healing and hope rather than harm.

Carey Griffel: Very good. I've really enjoyed what you've been doing and the general approach. Like, you have both the nerdy side of things, where you get into nitty gritty details, but also a real heart to what you're doing, and sometimes that's a little bit missing in the academic discussion, but honestly, I think a lot of people are seeing the need to really get more into the practical side of things.

Spencer Owen: Yes.

Carey Griffel: And approach things the way that people actually do.

Spencer Owen: Yeah, I try really hard because I [00:06:00] am very nerdy. I try really hard to still make it very applicable and very down to earth. So like one of the things that I end every podcast episode with is a little segment where I say, okay, explain it to me like I'm five. So trying to kind of summarize everything we've talked about so far in a very simple, accessible, easy to understand format which hopefully that kind of gives people a sense of both going deep and zooming out at the same time.

Carey Griffel: Very good. So kind of the framework of why we're talking about this. I think is that you'll have some people who will say you have to start with the New Testament in order to understand the Old Testament and to a degree, I completely agree. But that's also missing a lot of things because to the point [00:07:00] that you must read the New Testament first in order to understand the Old ,Testament that leaves a lot of stuff hanging. A lot of questions. Like, are we presuming that many things or even just some things in the Old Testament cannot be parsed or understood without a Christological lens.

And part of why I wanted to have this conversation now as well is because I've brought out recently the idea that there is more continuity in the Old Testament and the New Testament as far as gospel message than a lot of people will think. Right? So you can't really see a Messiah if you don't already have the type of Messiah that is in the Old Testament.

There's a reason that Jesus is a Jewish Messiah. Because he is coming from that cultural and linguistic and all of these different things [00:08:00] that snowball into the time of Jesus.

Spencer Owen: Mhm.

Carey Griffel: And people can't see Jesus without understanding all of that, right? Because they wouldn't recognize a Messiah without understanding, hey, there's a Messiah coming.

So there's all of that, but then also I think there's layers that are harder for a lot of particularly Protestants or Evangelicals to see. Right. Because we kind of zoom in on very narrow aspects of the gospel and Jesus's work, which are absolutely essential. But it's still a narrow view, and I think there's a lot that we can see in conversations about what God is doing in the Old Testament and how we can see his character as being the same as what we have in Jesus.

So, making this distinction. is understandable from a certain perspective, right? Because you do have hard things, like slavery. [00:09:00] What do you do with polygamy? What do you do with the conquest? What do you do with all of these things? And it seems like this is a different kind of a God and a different feeling in the Old Testament, then we get to Jesus, and that's a different feeling.

Spencer Owen: Absolutely. That's one of the things that I wrestle with in my counseling practice. The whole reason why I started the podcast is because I do counseling work that is focused on people who have experienced spiritual trauma or religious abuse and many times that happens because of text being used as weapons.

Very often I've encountered that question from a lot of my clients who are wrestling with how do I see the Bible and how do I see God? It has a lot to do with them looking at the old Testament and saying, well, clearly this guy's angry, wrathful, smiting people left and right.

And then looking at the new Testament and saying, Oh, well, this guy's just love [00:10:00] and mercy and, peace, like How did the two connect? Part of the reconstructing religion project is challenging both of those assessments on both ends and also trying to bring the connective tissue together, which is hard to do because we have to allow Jesus to speak to us as a first century, Torah faithful, Jew.

We also have to allow the Old Testament to kind of speak on its own terms, but it's also true as Christians that the whole of history turns on the Messiah of Israel and everything is different in some way or form and exactly how is kind of difficult to parse out sometimes, but yeah, it's a delicate balance and a very careful project, but it's one that I think is A, the right way, and B, [00:11:00] necessary to avoid causing hurt and harm.

Carey Griffel: Let's pretend for an instant that we don't have the New Testament or that we exist prior to the writing of the New Testament and the advent of Jesus. Okay. Do you think people would have said, Oh, that old Testament God is so evil and wicked.

Spencer Owen: Oh, no, not at all. For a couple of reasons, for one, because of the cultural context in which the text of the Old Testament came in.

So one of the things that I do a lot in the podcast, which is very similar to what you do in your podcast is trying to take a look at the ANE culture and the surrounding context of these stories and setting them kind of side by side to see how they would hit the ears of the original audience, and also trying to understand the terms and the concepts in the cultural river, to borrow a John Walton phrase. And when I've [00:12:00] done that, I have found quite clearly that the gods of the A. N. E. world were very, very different than Yahweh and much more brutal, much more capricious, much more violent much more, corrupted by human emotions and other human desires and those kinds of things. So I think a ancient Israelite, you know, sitting around the campfire, or actually I should say at this point, a, ancient Hebrew sitting around the campfire in their tent clans, they would have heard the story of Yahweh and thought, wow, like this is, this is amazing. I, I want to be a part of worshiping this God. I don't want to be a part of worshiping Chumash or Lotan or, you know, whatever.

Carey Griffel: Part of this difficulty seems to be a bit of the problem of knowledge, right? Like, once you see Jesus, it's hard to understand the [00:13:00] world without Jesus.

And I think that's true even if you're not a Christian, right? A lot of atheists or agnostics will say, we can have morality, we can have all of these things without Jesus, without acknowledging the fact that they are steeped within this context of morality that is brought up in Christian tradition. And so questions like slavery and hard things like the conquest and things like that, I think that if we understand those in context, it doesn't make problems go away. Okay, first of all, we need to acknowledge that we are not softening things and saying there's no problems here. Because I will be one of the first to say, you know what? There's some ethical problems in the Old Testament, and that's just the reality that we see in the description of the text.

So then we [00:14:00] go to ask, why is it polemic? How is it polemic? And what does that speak to about the description of what's actually happening in the culture? And how that is forming a corrective. Also another thing I would say is that if we can't have ethics before Jesus comes on the scene, then what do we do with the exile and people in repentance?

How do they know and how are they going to respond in repentance without any ethical foundations?

Spencer Owen: It really makes it very difficult to understand what the word, tedeka, or righteousness, actually means if we can only see that through Jesus. Now, I mean, certainly he gives us the fullest expression of that and the clearest expression of that, but to say, okay, well, they just didn't figure it out or they don't understand it or whatever they were thinking was so clouded that there was no way for them to [00:15:00] see clearly, that takes a whole, I mean, honestly, the bulk of the Bible and functionally erases it.

Now, I mean, obviously nobody from that perspective would frame it that way. They wouldn't say, okay, we're trying to get rid of the Old Testament. But, there's kind of what's the intent and what's the actual de facto practice.

And I know for me as an evangelical, growing up, of course I knew about the Old Testament. I knew about it. I was like, kind of separate discreet stories just kind of like the children's Bible version of things But I never had a sense of how the whole narrative strung together as a single thread and I certainly never really dove into it in any kind of serious way to really understand it on its own terms.

Like for instance, Leviticus, you mentioned we both love it. Yeah, I do. But that's largely because I've had to re discover it. [00:16:00] So I've gotten to the point where, it used to be that I would just read that and say, Oh, whew, thank goodness. We don't have to do that anymore. And now I read it and I go, okay, this tells me something real and true about Yahweh. Not everything about Yahweh, but it tells me something real and true about him. So that's, that's the best way I, I have found.

Carey Griffel: Okay. So taking the example of Leviticus and the way that people tend to think of it, or at least many Protestant evangelicals will think of Leviticus as there's this sacrificial system. It's based on death and substitutionary death and all of that. People have that really solidly in their mind because they're contrasting the Old Testament with the New Testament, and I think that this is part of our conversation here, too, is the way that the text is taught from authoritative Christian sources [00:17:00] is that it's presuming there is a distinctive difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament to begin with instead of looking at it in a different way.

So when you're coming to Leviticus and you're seeing oh, it's about death. It's about substitution it's about these negative things and this is how the people knew that they needed a Savior because they were going to be killed otherwise, kind of a framework for the book of Leviticus, which is how I was taught it as well. It's hard to read it in any other way, when this is the kind of cultural milieu that we have as Bible readers today.

Spencer Owen: It is. And I look back on how many times I would read through the text and I would see certain phrases or whatever, and it just imprinted an idea in my head right away without really, like, sitting down and reflecting and [00:18:00] considering if that was true or not.

And it was because of the tradition in which I was raised. And so it's been really refreshing to be able to go back and almost like rediscover some of these texts in ways that are both fresh and also familiar at the same time. And that's one of the reasons why I try to make deconstruction, not a bad word on my podcast, because in many ways, deconstruction is necessary.

It's something that people who have a certain relationship with the text, need to be able to, in some cases, tear down, solely because that relationship is unhealthy and is not reflective of the actual God that we see in the text. So I try to make that an okay thing to do. But I mean, obviously without a doubt, I have a standpoint and I [00:19:00] try to be open and honest about that and say, I am coming at this from a certain place, so.

Carey Griffel: Well, and it seems ironic to me too, because people who say we need to start with a New Testament and we need to frame everything in a christological way, then they will kind of turn that around and do the opposite and say, there's these contrasts and we're going to highlight the contrast. This is why Jesus is better because this stuff back here is, maybe they don't say it's bad, but they're putting that stamp of this is not as good or kind of bad compared to Jesus.

Spencer Owen: yeah, there's a deep cognitive dissonance that happens where people will, especially, and there's a whole spectrum here, but sometimes people will look at it and say, okay, that was the old covenant. And Jesus came to put that to an end so that we can now have something different, something new.

[00:20:00] And I hear their heart because they're thinking, okay, the old covenant was law and punishment, you know, condemnation. And the new covenant is freedom and grace. And isn't that wonderful. If that framework was correct. Yes, but I'm convinced that it's not, and specifically because one of the many problems that creates is that first of all, Jesus himself said, I'm not here to do that.

I'm not here to abolish the law and the prophets, and even a very polemic book like Hebrews Relies very heavily on the internal logic of the old covenant and the sacrificial system to make its points. So it seems weird to say, I'm going to rely on all this background knowledge to tell you that all that background knowledge is bad.

Like that's doesn't really make sense. Really at a fundamental level, it causes a serious problem because it almost strips [00:21:00] Jesus of his Jewishness. It makes it something where like being Jewish or following the Jewish religion that Jesus loved and followed is what he came to save us from, and that is a really uncomfortable thing, not only for post Holocaust ears to hear, but it's also, I'm convinced, not at all what Jesus himself was trying to do or what the apostles saw him as doing.

Carey Griffel: Right. Well, and so people tend to think of expecting the Messiah in forms of somebody in the past had a prophecy, and that's going to be fulfilled in Jesus. And I'm, first of all, I'm not saying that doesn't happen, and that that's not there, because it is, and there's plenty of that. But it's also far broader and wider than that.

And the coming of the Messiah is the coming of the king. [00:22:00] It's the coming of the perfect priest and the perfect prophet. In the context specifically of the king, we do have an earthly king in Israel, right? We have human kings, but that wasn't the ideal. That wasn't the goal. That wasn't their true king.

The reason the kings failed was because they decided to usurp the power that God actually had in his own kingship and make it their own. So it was Yahweh who was really King. You get up to the New Testament and Jesus is King. Well, there's no difference there, right? we have the same King.

Spencer Owen: Mhm. Yeah. Your kingdom come, like there's a reason why Jesus talks about the kingdom so often is because that messianic role that he saw himself as fulfilling is very much a kingship and a priestly [00:23:00] role.

And so, it's really hard for us to understand what it means for Jesus to be the Messiah of Israel without understanding all that goes into messiahship and kingship and priestly figures in the Old Testament.

Carey Griffel: Well, and the deliverance factor of the Messiah, right? These are frequent themes and trends that we see. You have the primary story of the Old Testament, the foundational story of the Old Testament is the Exodus, literal deliverance from slavery.

So if you were honestly reading the text in a holistic form, yes, they have slaves. They have human slaves, the culture has slaves. They still have slaves by the time of the first century. Does that then mean that we're like, well, we can't really determine whether or not this is a descriptive or a prescriptive part of culture.

Maybe [00:24:00] slavery is okay. But even in a Christological reading, you're like, well, you're reading the text in light of Christ. Is it so hard to read the Old Testament in light of Yahweh's description and Yahweh's action and his character?

Spencer Owen: Yes, and all throughout, from the very beginning, when he puts out there some rules for keeping slaves, that is very much a progress forward, the surrounding culture and the way that slaves were handled back then.

So not only Yahweh there and then, but then later on, he says to Israel, you're supposed to treat them better because you should know better. Like, you know what it's like to be slaves, which really, if you think about it, drops a kind of logic bomb in the middle of the whole institution of slavery, because this is something that [00:25:00] cannot happen between two images of God. This is just a fundamentally wrong way to see that. And then of course we see that happen or at least come to its fullest expression when Paul writes a letter to Onesimus about Philemon and he says, accept this runaway slave as your brother and if he were to actually do that in real time, that would cause such a upending and upside downness of the master slave relationship that it pretty much would erase it functionally.

So there's this delicate line that the text is trying to walk is saying, I'm going to acknowledge the reality on the ground and see it as it is and deal with humans where they're at. But I'm also going to be opening their minds, expanding their hearts and helping them to just see that I want something [00:26:00] better for them.

And a very good example of that is divorce. I mean, the text of Deuteronomy, actually several portions of the first five books of the Bible, give ways in which it is acceptable to do divorce, but then Jesus comes along and says, that was an accommodation to your sinfulness. That was not the way it was supposed to be.

So this tension is built into the text itself. It's not something we read in because of our modern sensibilities.

Carey Griffel: So, in other words, the Old Testament really is hard, and it really does have those hard edges.

Spencer Owen: Yeah, and when I walk through it, I try really hard to explain it in a way that hopefully helps. But I'm always trying to be really clear that I don't expect that this will make it all better. I don't expect that people will hear me talk about this and it will erase all doubts [00:27:00] or get rid of every discomfort or make everything okay.

Because A, I've seen that expectation leveraged as something close to abuse in the past, but then also because these really are hard edges. They're not supposed to be solved and they should cause us to step back and go, wow, that, I think that reaction is a feature, not a bug.

Carey Griffel: And to think of the text and it's historical period through time as well so you don't have just one group of people at one period of time in the middle of one culture. You actually have the people of God through time who have themselves been on paths of discipleship with God. And so these kinds of things are hard, [00:28:00] probably for the people who are reading the text as it was finally composed and compiled into one form.

Spencer Owen: Yep. Well, I mean, I mentioned divorce earlier. When Jesus was talking about that teaching to his disciples, they said, well, who can follow this? Like that's too much for us because that was the culture of the time. There's always this constant push while also not a shove, which is kind of a very difficult line. That's what I feel whenever I read the text of scripture, both old and new.

Carey Griffel: If you think about the layers and the characters involved in the text, both the people as well as God. So let's say you have somebody who's reading the text and they're thinking about it. They're trying to parse it.

What is the relationship of the people and God? And who is [00:29:00] the source of righteousness? And who are the fundamental problems in the text? Like, these are real people doing real things, and they're messing it all up in royal ways. And God is still faithful. We do have God doing the commandments of this and that, and we have to fit that into things as well.

Spencer Owen: Right.

Carey Griffel: And this is where I think a good, solid understanding of justice and righteousness comes in, which is really hard. Mm-hmm . Because it's not just about legalism and keeping to that, I think.

Spencer Owen: Yeah, which relies a lot on wisdom, which relies a lot on discernment which takes people where they are. I'm thinking of like Naaman, for example. It sure seems in that text where Naaman, who is a pagan says, is God going to forgive me when I bow [00:30:00] down to my national God, basically.

And Elisha says, yeah, you're okay, which is a really shocking thing for an Israelite to say. Now, of course, we could just say, well, you know, Elisha was wrong. Possibility. We could also say that that was kind of like a one time thing, but you know, nobody else should ever think about trying that. Or we could say that that tells us something real about how God works with people where they are and the knowledge they have. And I think that's what he's saying in Romans one through two, in fact.

So, you know, all those threads kind of coming together. You can kind of see, like, as we're talking about this, we keep bouncing back and forth between the old and the new. So we're kind of embodying the practice right here.

Carey Griffel: So you also have this interesting feature of Hebrew text, which is very different in ways that we [00:31:00] don't expect it to be different, because we expect this nice linear progression and things to be all smooth and laid out really nicely, and it just doesn't really work like that. And so you have a lot of exceptions like this. It's like, well. Do we then look at that and say we're going to make the exception the rule and we now are creating a new complete systematic here that is centered on this?

Spencer Owen: Right.

Carey Griffel: Or is the exception pointing to the deeper meaning and this meditative aspect we should have?

Spencer Owen: I don't know that this is the fullness of what that phrase means, but this reminds me a lot of Paul's juxtaposition of the spirit and the letter in the text. Now, of course, we can obviously take that way too far and just make it so generic that there's no specific at all. [00:32:00] Having said that, Christ himself does go pretty generic and big picture when he says love your neighbor love God and the rest is all part of that. That's the inspired hermeneutic that we have.

Now, of course, we also have to remember both of those come from the Old Testament. So to say that Christ came to end the paradigm of the Old Testament makes a mockery of him quoting it and saying, that's what I want. So we have to, I think, live in that tension, intentionally. We have to kind of have one base layer of Old Testament ears and an Old Testament knowledge, and then layer on top of it, New Testament ears and New Testament knowledge, and allow them both to be there side by side in conversation [00:33:00] with each other without ever letting one override or silence the other.

Carey Griffel: That seems a really good way to see how, like the Jews of the first century were very good at understanding scripture in certain ways, and they used the Torah, and they layered the prophets with that, and they used those in this way to say that the prophets were talking about the Torah, but they're talking about in a different way, and the Torah is talking about the prophets even though it's earlier, and that seems really backwards and strange to us. Like, how do you have both things when one of those things obviously happened in time first and the other one happened in time later? And some of the things that it says, it looks contradictory, right?

Spencer Owen: Mm hmm.

Carey Griffel: God commanded sacrifices, and then they later say God doesn't command sacrifices. Oh, well, which one is it? And how do we think [00:34:00] about that? Right. That's tough. And I think understanding also how vastly deep, the distinction is between people and God and God's otherness with people, right? it's not that I don't want people to think of Jesus as human , because obviously, that's what we have going on.

And he has reconciled things and it is a personal thing. And we have that personal relationship with the person of Jesus. But we cannot divorce that from the transcendent aspects of who God is too.

Spencer Owen: Right. I was on a different YouTube channel talking about the suffering of God and the impassibility of God and how we're supposed to understand God being beyond human emotion, but still having emotions, but what that looks like given classical theistic conceptions of God being impassable. And how do we handle that when we look [00:35:00] at the God that we've seen in the text of scripture who is moved in his belly, moved in his bowels by things or Jesus who is greatly moved to compassion. I mean all these things are really clear in the text and you can certainly go the medieval scholastic route and just kind of write it all off as it's just anthropomorphic language, but I think that does violence to this tension, the healthy tension that I was talking about earlier.

I think we kind of have to hold them both together and not just like assert contradictions and claim mystery. Like that's not what we're trying to do, but trying to find a way to, to allow the beauty of both of those aspects of reality to be held together and knowing full well that we will not be able to like fully spreadsheet it out in this really concrete way, but also being humble and realizing that [00:36:00] we are not God and we will not know what that is like.

Carey Griffel: I think what is really helpful in part is to understand that we can have various lenses and that they don't cancel each other out. So one of the ways that I talk about and use and do biblical theology is that I like to do the kind of thing where we look at the context of the original author, the original human author, the original time, and really take that seriously before jumping forward anywhere else.

Because if you cannot do that, then you will by necessity, be missing aspects of things that the author is saying. I mean, that seems obvious. That doesn't do any damage to the way that you can then look at it in a canonical fashion, in viewing the text in its entirety, both within the Hebrew Bible, the [00:37:00] Old Testament, as well as then bringing in both Testaments into that.

And also the Christological lens. And all of those things are going to line up and all of those things should be shedding light and saying well if this hermeneutic over here is saying something vastly different than a Christological lens, then obviously we have something wrong. So that is showing the fullness of God's revelation and the fullness of who God is and his work in the world. That doesn't mean it's not there in the previous ideas and iterations.

We might possibly get things wrong, though. How shocking is that? Wait, humans are wrong sometimes? Wait, what? Yeah, I know, it's true. Sometimes we are. And so, when we have different layers and different hermeneutics, I think that's really helpful. I know it's so popular for the, again, Protestant [00:38:00] Evangelical to talk about the literal, historical, grammatical method and this is the method that we use.

Oh, great! Nobody's saying that's not a thing and that that's not how we're going to be reading things because the history matters. The actual literalness as far as this really is the reality on the ground and the reality that is in existence. And you know language matters But there's other things as well. And if you just go well, you cannot use an allegorical method Then you're gonna get in some trouble because how are you gonna read in a Christological light without an allegorical method as well?

Spencer Owen: Yeah. Well, I mean, and what would you do with Paul in Galatians four? So yeah, it's, it's tough because especially us Protestant evangelicals, we love certainty. We are children of the [00:39:00] enlightenment. We want to know what we know, why we know it, and be certain that we are correct in our knowledge. And so we have this kind of foundationalist epistemological presuppositions about it has to be solid and not just solid, but like unassailable the, Cartesian method of questioning everything, trying to get down to what is certain.

And we think that if we can get there, then everything else we can build up from that is reliable. I am not in any way convinced that that worldview is native to the Bible and I'm not at all convinced that that's what God was trying to do when he inspired that text through ancient people and ancient worldviews and ancient minds and ancient biases and ancient prejudices and all those things. I think that we have to be [00:40:00] really humble and realize that our own lenses are very often distorting things for us, rather than clarifying things for us.

Carey Griffel: One of the things that I do is I admin an apologetics group online on Facebook. It's a pretty big apologetics group, but it's different. It wasn't started as just a typical apologetics group in the way that you would expect. It is set up primarily to talk about things from the context of the Bible, and this group just basically exploded overnight, and we have this massive influx of a whole bunch of people who have no idea that that's the focus of the group, and that that's what we're trying to do.

And so I just had a conversation with somebody in that group who was questioning one of the posts and said, this is not a valid apologetics post here because it's not a defense of your [00:41:00] faith. What it is was a question about family life in the Old Testament, and how do we see that and how do we understand that?

And from the perspective of an apologetics group that is centered on the goal of understanding the Bible in context, that's a perfectly valid question for the group's focus. Well, this particular person I was talking to didn't understand all of that. They were like, well, this isn't a normal apologetics question. Therefore, it is invalid for this group.

I tried to explain. No, what we're doing is a little bit different here and it matters to apologetics because people do have these questions and I think to me I mean, this is completely my bias, but I think understanding the Bible in context is going to help us answer those questions in the best possible way, rather than from that epistemological, [00:42:00] scientific mindset of, here is the answer; I'm going to hit you over the head with so much data that you cannot not believe in God. And this is my approach. And, people come to God that way.

Spencer Owen: Yep.

Carey Griffel: Frequently, all the time. So, if that's your jam, and if that's what's working for you, I'm not telling you to stop it. But, there's other ways and other things that people are struggling with that will be better addressed in contextual ways.

Spencer Owen: Right. Yeah. And. Ultimately, that's what I'm trying to do, both in my counseling practice and also in my podcast because I really want to make sure that people feel and hear from me that It's okay to have questions.

It's okay to have doubts. I mean, my goal is not to bombard them with so much information and context and everything else that answers all the questions [00:43:00] and anything that they might have doubts about, it's just because they lack faith and they should just trust more or whatever. What I wanted to do is just present a different picture and say, you know what?

I could be wrong. Kind of like Tim Mackey, I don't think I am, but I have, I have some, you know, this data point and this data point and this data point that I think supports the way that I read it. However, I'm not marshalling those as unassailable evidence that I think supports the way that satisfies a skeptical rationalist mindset because I don't think that's how we should read the Bible.

That's just my approach and my perception. But what I want to do is to activate a sense of beauty. Activate for people a sense of encountering the text as a living breathing document that is sharper than any two edged sword, you know, kind of like in Hebrews. Although that's also speaking about [00:44:00] Christ, but that's, you know, on the side, but the point being that I want to kind of activate in people a sense of wonder and curiosity and interest and then have them dive into the text on their own-- not solo on their own, in a community of course-- but then also to from that place be able to see it in a different light, with a whole different set of lenses, and along the way, I have no idea where it will go.

And frankly, that does worry me sometimes. I worry that I might be leading people in a certain direction that will shipwreck. But, that's part of the reason why I start from a place of almost shipwreck with people is because I really want to help them put the pieces back together. And every ship that they rebuild in that way will look different. And I don't want to say God's okay with every [00:45:00] single kind of ship being built. But I think he is merciful and I think he works with us and wants all to be saved.

Carey Griffel: Well, and I like your framework of not saying that deconstruction is a bad thing because that means that we can come and deconstruct our ships whenever they need to be deconstructed or deconstruct this. We're going to reformat this area and have this new technology or interpretation or hermeneutic that we're going to plug in and say, hey this actually really makes the ship run better.

Spencer Owen: Yeah. Or noticing, Ooh, we have some rot down here and sometimes that rot can be kind of, you know, peel out a plank or two or seal it up or whatever. And sometimes you have to take the ship out of the water, put it in dry dock, let it dry out, take it apart, restore it in [00:46:00] really fundamental ways and then put it back to sea. And that's why I tell people it's okay with me at least if you don't read the Bible for a while, or if you don't go to church for a while, and I know that's bold and it scares me even as I say it, but I know that sometimes people's paradigm of the Bible and God is so rotted that they have to get out of the water for a while and be up and dry out and I think God will be with them at every step of that process.

Carey Griffel: Honestly, I think that's pretty wise. I come from being raised in a tradition where it's like, you better go to church on Sunday. You better do this. You better do that. Because if you don't, you will not receive the blessings that are attached to that exact action that you're going to be doing, right? And that's an interesting thing [00:47:00] to say, that it's okay to put the Bible down for a little while. That doesn't mean you're not thinking about it. That doesn't mean that it's not there being a focus and a impact to you.

But it's very, very hard to reframe your mind if you keep going back to the same thing with the same ideas in your head. Because you're practicing and everything that you do is forming a habit and making something happen in the future.

Spencer Owen: Right. And for some people, it can be re traumatizing for them to do that. Which is one of the reasons why I want to be I always struggle with trying to know where people are coming from because everybody is coming from a different place. That's one of the reasons why I think questions are so important because there is not like one size fits all way of reading the text and it [00:48:00] looks very different for each person based on their individual situation, but it also needs to be done in community.

People have to feel like there are people near them who are okay with their questions and will not treat them as like pariahs, just simply for asking them. So that's one of the things I really hope that the church as a whole does better with is allowing for people to say, I don't know about this and for that, not to freak people out.

Carey Griffel: I think that can be said for interacting, especially with people of different denominations or Christian traditions as well, which is something that I think should be encouraged more that we really get together and talk together and take each other seriously and say, What do you think about this and you have to let people be able to say what they need to say.

Like if you stop them [00:49:00] in their tracks and say you can't say that, that's not valid, that's not the thing you should say, that's not right, then you're not listening. And as humans, we all have our biases. We cannot look at things objectively. That's literally impossible for us to look at things objectively. What we can do is listen humbly to another person.

Spencer Owen: Yeah, it really is a cultivated skill set and something you have to really work at. And that's one of the reasons why, I encourage people, yes, you can take a break, but when you go back, you really need to immerse yourself, you can't just dip your toe in a little bit, you have to like really dive in deep and breathe in the air and I realize how scary and in some cases dangerous that can be and that's why A, community is so important, [00:50:00] B, why questions are okay and C, why we have to orient ourselves toward beauty first instead of trying to figure out the one right way to read it and then everything else is demonic or whatever.

We really have to come at this and say, where is the beauty of God in this story? And it may be really, really hard to see in many of them, but it's there.

Carey Griffel: That's beautiful. Putting down the Bible or whatever you have to do doesn't mean that, well, now I'm gonna go on a trip to Spain and completely forget about God and do absolutely nothing that has any relation to God. That's the wrong idea here. But you have to be able to reorient yourself in however that looks for you personally.

Spencer Owen: Well, and that has to be done um, with a trusted person. [00:51:00] And that's one of the reasons why I do what I do as a counselor is hopefully to be able to be that person. But again, community is really important and I would add not just community of like people online or people around us. Yes, those two, but I would also say the community of the faithful, all throughout history. So, reading the Mishnah, reading the Talmud, reading the Church Fathers in the first few centuries right after Christ, understanding how the people closest to the text understood the text and being able to see that as something that they, almost like see it with their lens, not necessarily because they're always right, but because that is a very, very helpful guide for us to be able to put ourselves in the direction of [00:52:00] wisdom as we read both forward and backward at the same time.

Carey Griffel: Absolutely, like you are stuck in your own head and you kind of can't help that. The only way to get unstuck out of your own head is to try and get somebody else into your head for even just a moment, right, to see that perspective. It's not about them being right, you being wrong or anything like that.

It's about, what can I learn here to help reframe this and discover things in myself and in what I'm reading in the Bible things like that,

Spencer Owen: Right. Yeah. And that's why not just having some other person, you know be with you because that can become an echo chamber if you all share the same assumptions, but engaging with other traditions, like, you know, if you're Protestant, understand Orthodoxy. If you're Orthodox, understand Protestant. [00:53:00] Understand a Jewish perspective really see things through their eyes again, not because they're right and you're wrong, but because in the process of exposing yourself to different presuppositions, you really question what you wouldn't otherwise question, which can feel very disorienting.

It can also be much more likely to lead you to truth. And in any case, will make it so that the faith you have is your own. And not something that just defaulted it to you.

Carey Griffel: Yeah. Okay, let's end on one particular point here that's going to help I hope really format this idea of Old Testament New Testament and forward and backwards and that is the question of the person of Jesus versus the person of Yahweh, [00:54:00] right? And that's a hard question. Now, here we are with the concept of the Trinity, and how does the Trinity and Yahweh work, is Yahweh only the Father, is Yahweh only Jesus?

It's interesting because growing up in high school, in LDS context, every year in high school, there is this, they call it a seminary class that you take. And my favorite year was Old Testament. Go figure. And it's interesting to me to look back because they were drawing so much on evangelical scholars that a lot of the stuff I was being taught, really wasn't all that wrong.

But of course they would Insert LDS particular theology into all of this and one of the things they would do was say El is the father and Yahweh is Jesus. So in fact in LDS theology Jesus and Yahweh actually are the same So that's [00:55:00] an interesting perspective that a lot of Christians don't understand. If you do understand that and you're having a conversation with an LDS person that could make the conversation go in very interesting ways that it wouldn't otherwise.

Spencer Owen: Oh yeah.

Carey Griffel: But so they had this really strict distinction. And now I really wish I could go back and see the materials and really poke at the teachers a little bit because at the time obviously I didn't understand Hebrew I had no access to a Hebrew Bible to even see the words, you know, this was before online interlinears and all of these things that we have access now. But I still had this sense of, really? It can't possibly be that clear cut, but they would just cherry pick the right examples to show what they were saying, you know?

And so it's described in a biblical way. But of course if I was able to go back and see and be able to look at the text, I'd be [00:56:00] like, yeah, you guys are not telling the full truth here, and so it is kind of hard for us to get from one perspective to the other with a Trinitarian formula in mind, because again, we're thinking in terms of one to one correspondences, propositional truth and all of these things. Like, how is Jesus the creator, but Yahweh is also the father, you know. However you parse that, I don't see how you can divorce the two and say Jesus is not Yahweh.

Spencer Owen: Right. Yeah, I, I don't either. And I think that's actually a really good example of the forward and backward at the same time reading. Where if we read forward, we see these like hints of two powers in heaven and the angel of the Lord who is both distinct from Yahweh and also speaks [00:57:00] as Yahweh.

And this is something that the Jewish commentators saw as well. And so that is something that Is not Christians reading backward into it. And that idea kind develops and flushes itself out and finds an expression in Daniel seven with the one like a son of man who sits at the right hand of the ancient of days.

And then we get to Jesus and he uses that terminology of son of man and a lot of the things he says, none of them are, I am Yahweh in the flesh. And I know a lot of people see that absence and then they say, ah, That's just like Greek philosophy being imposed on the text.

But if we read forward, we see the full flowering of that idea in [00:58:00] Jesus and in the apostolic writings and the way that they talked about Jesus. And then we see the. systematization or, structural expression of it in the councils. And that connects all the way back to the Old Testament language of the angel of the Lord. And so both of those are reading both forward and backward at the same time.

Carey Griffel: I'm so glad that you brought up the angel of the Lord and all of that. That's really, well, it was one of the things that brought me into Trinitarianism itself. And understanding that people could see all of these things in the first century without doing any damage at all to the Hebrew Bible and the way that they were understanding Yahweh and God.

And so, yeah, that's beautiful stuff. And I think that that alone kind of helps us to orient ourselves in [00:59:00] this question of, do we have to have the Christological reading of an Old Testament?

Whereas I'd really say you have to have the reading it through the lens of the character of God, which is Christological and that's the fullness of it.

Spencer Owen: Right.

Carey Griffel: But it doesn't not exist in the Old Testament.

All right. Let's go ahead and wrap up here. Spencer, thank you for having this conversation with me. I really appreciate you coming on here with me today.

Spencer Owen: Sure. Thank you so much.

Carey Griffel: Do you want to tell a little bit about what you're currently working on in your podcast and whatever else?

Spencer Owen: Sure. I think what I'm going to do is wrap up like season one, so to speak, after Genesis 11, and we start talking about like Babel and the disbursement of the nations and the assigning them to different Elohim and kind of taking that Deuteronomy [01:00:00] 32 and Psalm 82 perspective on things because that gets us to the end of the like three falls of Genesis.

So it there will be a couple of other nerd alert episodes about spiritual beings, who they are, what they are. And then also one about anthropology. I'm trying to get one more scholar interview. I have a dream wish list. We'll see if and how many of those materialize. But should it have at least a couple more exegetical episodes, plus a few more nerdy deep dive episodes, and then maybe one more scholar episode. So, you know, that'll kind of round it all out and then take a break and then come back when the school year starts for season two, so.

Carey Griffel: Great stuff. I will be linking your podcast in the show notes for [01:01:00] sure for people to look at. So definitely encourage all of you to check out Spencer's podcast which again it's called Trauma informed church kid and you can find it on all of the podcast platforms, all of those places that you find podcasts. So definitely check it out and see what he has to offer. There is so much good stuff and it's really hitting this sweet spot of need in the church I think that a lot of people have had. So really appreciate your work there Spencer and thank you again for this conversation.

Spencer Owen: Awesome. Thank you so much, Carey.

Carey Griffel: All right. Well, we will wrap up there. Again, appreciating Spencer for his time and his insight on this topic. I will probably be doing more episodes about forward and backward reading in particular, especially getting into some of those nerdy, little bits about canonical approach, [01:02:00] intertextualism, all of those things in more detail, so that for those of you who are interested in that kind of stuff, we will actually be getting into some of the differences and nuance in the ways that you can actually do that.

As always, I want to thank you all for listening, thank you guys for sharing the episodes, thank you for those who participate in my Facebook group online, and thank you to those of you who just message me privately and give me feedback and ask me questions and interact with me in different ways.

I really appreciate you guys. If you guys have any questions, you can always contact me through Facebook or through my website at GenesisMarksTheSpot. com where you can find blog posts, guest profiles, including Spencer's here, and you can find ways to support me if you so desire. A really big shout out to those of you who do help support me financially. You can do so through [01:03:00] Patreon, through PayPal, and even through my store that I have at GenesisMarksTheSpot. com. At any rate, I appreciate you guys. Thank you for listening. I wish you all a blessed week, and we will see you later.