BEMA Discipleship

BEMA 0: Introductory Lesson (2024)

Transcription Status

30 Dec 24 — Initial public release

20 Dec 24 — Transcript approved for release

Transcription Volunteer: Sergey Bazylko

Introductory Lesson

Brent Billings: This is the BEMA Podcast with Marty Solomon. I’m his co-host Brent Billings. Today we’ll have an introductory conversation about the world of the Bible, investigating the differences between Eastern and Western perspectives.

Marty Solomon: This should be a great place to start. Brent, hopefully people are finding us at the beginning of the journey, this is a good beginning to have.

Brent: Yeah, and I’ll just throw a reminder in if you’re new to BEMA, listen on from here, you’re in a great spot. But just know that if you’re moving fast, we are in the middle of at this point in our timeline, maybe you’re coming to this later, and it doesn’t matter.

But if you’re moving fast, you may run into some of our older material. We started this podcast in 2016 and Marty used to refresh this material every two years. We’ve had the same material up for 8 years, so it’s just time to come back and incorporate some of the things that we’ve learned.

If you’ve been listening to BEMA for a long time and you want to know what’s different for now compared to what was before, listen to episode -1. We go into great detail about everything we’re doing, but just want to throw that disclaimer in there for people who haven’t listened to -1 or aren’t aware of what’s going on, you’ll be able to tell because the music will be different, will probably sound a little different because we’re in different recording environments. This disclaimer is here in case you encounter something that makes you think, “Whoa, what’s happening now? They sound eight years younger.” They sound eight years younger.

Marty: [laughter] Well said.

Brent: So with that, let’s lay some foundation for all of the future teaching. We’ve got 200 episodes coming up in this body of material.

So Marty, you have this differences between Eastern and Western thought. What does that even mean? We live in a Western culture. We grow up in Western culture. This is what we know. What does Eastern mean? Does that mean it’s from China and Japan? Does that mean something else, what does that mean?

Marty: Right, yeah.

Brent: Like what, what do we not know here?

Marty: And this ends up being for a lot of people starting the journey here is what’s so critical and so important, because it’s going to explain why we’re approaching the Bible the way we’re approaching the Bible. The fancy word for this will be hermeneutics is the word they’ll teach in Bible college. But why are we asking these questions? Why are we approaching the Bible this way? And for a lot of people, this ends up being kind of like the “big deal,” if you will. And it is a big deal.

The Bible’s not just, I think a lot of us grew up in a Western world, like you said, where the Bible, we interacted with it as if it was just kind of full of data and information. And there is some great data and information in the scriptures, but that’s not really its design. It’s not just a capsule holding a whole bunch of data. It’s also full of images. It’s full of pictures. It’s full of, because the Bible wasn’t written in a Western world. The Bible wasn’t written by people that are like us in Year of Our Lord 2024, whenever you might be listening to this in America. The Bible wasn’t written to us. And I know a lot of people have heard the saying, “The Bible wasn’t written to us, it was written for us.” And I like that. That’s generally what I think I’m trying to communicate here.

But the Bible wasn’t written to us as modern readers. The Bible was written to an ancient audience and that ancient audience had an ancient context. Like the world of the Bible is different than our world. And a lot of what they’re trying to do is often lost on, like lost on our culture. The Bible is full of like rich images and stories. And those images and those stories, it comes from a time and a culture that’s very different than the time and culture that we live in.

And those writers of the Bible aren’t Western Americans, they’re Eastern Hebrews and coming from different ancient Hebrew contexts. And they’re writing to these ancient Hebraic, Greco-Roman, Hellenistic audiences. And so we don’t want to lose that. We don’t want that to be lost in our culture. So then when we come to the Bible and we don’t know that, or we don’t remember that, what we do is we end up trying to explain the Bible through our Western lens and through our Western assumptions and our Western questions. And then we just tend to get even more lost.

And so what we’re going to try to do is we’re going to try to learn how to think Hebrew. When I say that, Brent, we’re not trying to become Hebrew. We’re not trying to become anything different than who we are. We are who we are. There is absolutely nothing wrong with who we are. But who we are relates to a Bible that’s written by people who are not like us in a particular way.

And so we want to talk about the difference between Eastern and Western thought. And to be even more specific, Brent, we’ve learned this over time, to be more refined in our definitions. When I say Eastern in this context, I’m not talking about just Eastern Eastern. I’m not talking about the Far East. I’m not talking about, like you said, China, Japan. I’m not talking about those ancient dynasties or cultures. I’m particularly talking about East as it relates to the Hebraic biblical culture of the Jewish people and the Israelites.

So when I say Eastern, I don’t even really mean Eastern, but it feels funny to say Western versus Hebraic. Yeah, I was trying to even think about where my concept of that came from because it’s That might be more technically correct, but it rolls off the tongue a little bit better in my mind to say Eastern versus Western.

Brent: Yeah, I was trying to even think about where my concept of that came from, because it’s like, well, Israel is in the Middle East. So it’s right there in the name. But I’ve just never thought of it as Eastern before going through BEMA myself. Obviously there are differences between the Far East and the Middle East. But at the same time, like the way they look at things in pictures and like a lot of this stuff is going to apply.

But of course there are differences in other ways too. So we’re not, like the entire Eastern culture is not a monolith. So yeah, we are focusing on this specific Hebraic and specifically ancient Hebraic way of looking at it. We’re trying to get into the minds of the people who were first hearing these stories, first writing these words, and understand it from that way.

Marty: Right. Absolutely. Of course what we’re going to talk about in this episode today is an oversimplification. Like it’s oversimplified on purpose because it’s hard to learn something new and deal with all the nuances and complexities and layers and all those things. So let’s just say up front that there’s always going to be exceptions. There’s going to be ways to hold this that aren’t nearly as heavy handed or comprehensive or exclusive in the idea as it kind of rolls off the tongue today. But that’s just so that we can learn some new ideas. And so it is an oversimplification.

I ran into some helpful, thoughtful critique of my book recently. And one of the things that they pointed out was how oversimplified sometimes the East versus West conversation as it comes out of my mouth or off my keyboard. And so it’s worth saying. That’s well said. It is an oversimplification. So just keep that in mind as we learn it. And it’s not, again, I want to say this again, Brent, because it’s so critical. We’re not trying to be Eastern. I’m Western.

Even myself, as I have Jewish heritage, so I have a Jewish identity. We’re not going to unpack that on the podcast. This really isn’t about me and my own story. But that will be relevant kind of throughout. Is Marty from a Jewish voice and perspective. Brent from a Gentile voice and perspective. I was not raised in my Jewish heritage. I’m as Western as they come. Like, I am even even with my own Jewish identity, I am completely Western. And that is OK. We’re not trying to be less Western.

We’re not trying to be anything other than who we are. It’s not a sin to be Western or to make Western assumptions or to think in a Western way. We just want to be aware of how the book that we’re studying when it comes to the Bible is not making those same assumptions. So I’ve got 2 illustrations, one that my teacher taught me.

My teacher, Ray Vander Laan, I remember one of my first interactions I can remember with Ray. He was at our church and he was speaking and Ray said we were in our sanctuary and Ray pointed towards the back of the room to one of the windows, the giant windows in the back. And he said, imagine that for 20 years you had stood right outside that window. You can’t enter this room like you can’t get into this room, but you can look through the windows and you’ve stood for 20 years and looked through that window over there. And so we all kind of thought about it. And Brent, if you were if you can imagine being in this exercise, if you’re looking through that window, that same window of any room that you can imagine, would what you’re seeing is what you’re seeing accurate?

Brent: Presumably. Yeah. I mean, unless I forgot my glasses, what I’m seeing is what I’m seeing.

Marty: Absolutely. Like what you’re seeing is not a mirage. It’s not fake. If you were to walk into the room, there wouldn’t be anything else there. What you’re seeing is an accurate perspective. And you’ve had that perspective.

And then I remember Ray saying, “Now imagine that after 20 years of standing there, somebody comes and they take you by the hand and they walk you all the way around here.” And he points to the other side of a room where there’s another window, actually a doorway. And he said, “Now imagine for the first time in 20 years you stand in that doorway over there and you look into the same room.” It’s the same room. And yet you’re and is that perspective accurate, Brent?

Brent: Yeah. But I didn’t know there’s a piano in the room.

Marty: Oh, my goodness. You can’t even see it from the other window. Like you’re noticing things that you like you didn’t even notice before. And so it’s not that one view is accurate and inaccurate. It is not that one view is wrong or it’s that both views are somewhat incomplete. Both views are limited.

And Ray said, “That’s the difference between Eastern and Western.” We are Western. We’ve been looking through the same window our whole life, somewhat unaware that there’s another perspective and another side of the room and another window, another doorway that you can look into the same room and see things you’ve never even seen before. And I love that. That day, I mean, I remember that teaching example, that metaphor just helped me, shaped me, rocked me to the core. I was like, “Oh, my goodness, there’s a whole world I need to start swimming in.”

And that was beautiful. I have at times felt like that metaphor, as I learned, as I kept learning, I don’t know if it goes far enough, Brent. And I feel like I want to humble myself even as I say that, like how dare I suggest that my teacher’s metaphor didn’t go far enough. But I don’t know if it did. And so we have another metaphor. You mentioned that there is a piano in the room, right, Brent?

Brent: Oh, yes.

Marty: You saw a piano. And let’s talk about the piano. Like if anybody’s familiar with the piano—many have played—maybe you had a lesson, a year of lessons in your young childhood, or maybe you’re a piano player—even those that haven’t often understand the piano on some basic level. If you’re playing the piano in the left hand, Brent, what are you playing?

Brent: Those are the bass notes, like the full body of the sound structure. It’s like the richness.

Marty: Right. Absolutely. And then on your right hand on the piano, you’re often playing more of what?

Brent: The melody—the part that you’re going to hum.

Marty: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a great way of putting it. So on the left hand, you have the foundation, the bass, the undertones, the musical foundation chords for what the song’s going to be doing. And then in the right hand, you have the particulars, the essence of the song.

So if we were to just take a song, like, let’s, let’s think of like “Old McDonald Had a Farm.” And imagine that somebody sits down to the piano and they sit down to play “Old McDonald Had a Farm,” but they play it only with their left hand.

[piano music, left hand only]

Marty: Now, unless you have some insider information, I don’t think, Brent, do you think you would even have recognized that as “Old McDonald Had a Farm”?

Brent: I mean, maybe we shouldn’t have even said the name.

Marty: Right. Would have been even better. Like, we don’t even know what the, what, what, what song we’re even listening to. It’s wonderful. Very great. Logan Daily, wonderful job executing that in the left hand. And then on the right hand—imagine playing “Old McDonald Had a Farm” in just the right hand.

[piano music, right hand only]

Marty: Now, Brent, did you recognize the song?

Brent: Much more recognizable.

Marty: Right. Got it. Kind of felt a little tinny, maybe a little empty.

Brent: I mean, I could probably sit down for an hour and play that myself.

Marty: Absolutely.

Brent: I don’t play the piano.

Marty: That’s right. But now imagine taking those two hands and putting them together to play the full song.

[piano music, both hands]

Marty: So this, for me, has served as a little bit better metaphor for me to understand when I talk about Eastern and Western. It’s not just that there’s two windows. It’s not just that there’s two perspectives and they’re both kind of equally valid. They are equally accurate. They’re equally useful. And yet I feel like one perspective by itself, I’m not even sure if we recognize the song.

And most of us have just been trained to read the Bible through that left-handed perspective. We just kind of, we get really, really good. We’re experts at the base chords. And we just, we just kind of pound the song out in our left hand. And we may not even recognize the song for what it is.

Of course, if we only had the right hand, we may still be missing something beautiful. And what I love about the version of the song there that Logan played for us was how wonderfully, like he didn’t just do solid bass chords in the left hand. Like it had this busy sound, there was this complexity. It was this beautiful, busy left hand in that song, which I really do feel like it represents the Western. We have so many beautiful things that we’ve done in theology, so many wonderful, complex things that we’ve done. And yet it’s all just the left hand.

But once we look through the Eastern lens and understand the Bible, we start to recognize the song for at least what it is. And when we put the two together, you get this beautiful, robust, full expression of what the scripture is trying to do.

Brent: And I think it’s probably a good idea to—at this point—that it’s not our job to reject our Western perspective, our identity, the thing that we’ve grown up in, that we have as just this instinctual way of thinking. Like we’re not trying to throw all of that away and become something that we’re not.

Marty: Like God has always been interested. We’ll look at this throughout our study, Brent. God’s always been interested in all nations. Like there’s not a people group. There’s not a nation that God’s not wanting to reach, that God doesn’t want to flourish. God’s always been interested in all nations. God has always been interested in unity, not uniformity. Like God has not been trying to make everyone the same.

God’s not trying to make everyone Jewish. God’s not trying to make everyone Eastern. Like God loves unity. So we’re not trying to get rid of those distinctions or that beautiful diversity. Our job is to do our best to understand the inspired conversation in the Bible by understanding the world that the Bible is writing to, the assumptions that they’re making, the questions that they are, because they’re assuming different things than we are assuming.

They’re asking different questions than we’re asking. They’re thinking about different things than we are thinking about in our context. And so another way to rephrase this would be talking about authorial intent, or I’ve heard a lot of scholars talk about communicative intent, authorial intent, communicative intent. What is the author trying to communicate?

I will often say this. What did the author mean when they wrote that? And what did the audience hear when they heard it? So what did the author mean when they wrote it? What did the audience hear when they heard it? That conversation is the inspired one, and that conversation is what we mean when we say authorial. What was the author’s intention and the authorial intent? And so that’s one of the driving questions that will frame our journey into Bible study.

Brent: And I’m trying to think of a good example of this, and maybe going backwards is going to be easier. Like for us, we’re just thousands of years in the future, and so things have changed and we’re in a different perspective. But maybe if we think about it in the other way, if I make a reference to the Super Bowl, I think pretty much everybody is going to understand what that is, even if they don’t care about football.

Marty: Sure.

Brent: Even if they don’t watch, they don’t go to the game like it’s just part of the culture. We know about it. But go back 200 years and make a reference to the Super Bowl. Wouldn’t work. Nobody, like what are people going to think?

Marty: Yep.

Brent: Like are they going to think it’s a literal bowl and it’s just like the biggest bowl that mankind has ever made?

Marty: Right.

Brent: Or like you can come up with all kinds of ideas. Maybe there’s some other bowl reference that is of their time and they’re thinking like, oh, this is the biggest or the most extreme or whatever. And it’s just like, “Wow, how do you explain that to somebody who has no concept of football or the competition, like all of that?” None of that was happening 200 years ago.

Marty: Right.

Brent: And so for us, 3000 years removed in the other direction, but 3000 years removed. The advantage is we have the ability to go back and study. But this takes time. Like you’re going to have to give yourself grace and lots of time, lots of grace. We have instincts that are deep inside of us and we have these mental ruts where we read a passage and like we’ve thought about it that particular way for 20 years or 30 years or 70 years. Like this is going to take time and you’ve got to give yourself lots of grace as you go through it.

Marty: We do have instincts. We do. We do have ruts. We do have assumptions. We also have a slideshow, Brent Billings.

Brent: Yes, we do. A presentation, we call it.

Marty: You can find that in the show notes to the episode, which is probably at the bottom of your player. If you’re brand new to this journey or on the website at the bottom of the episode page, you can find links to those presentations. We’re going to go through this, Brent. We have a whole bunch of things that we’re going to look at kind of contrasting again, and this is somewhat oversimplified, but we’re going to contrast all these different categories of how the Eastern, the Hebraic versus the Western perspective is different. And so we’re going to start with a couple of different ways of thinking.

Brent: Yes. And the first couple of slides are some stuff that we’ve kind of already talked about, but we just kind of put it in a succinct reference sort of way. I think in the future for, you know, when there’s pictures or something, I’ll put those into the podcast artwork, so it’ll just come up as you’re playing. But in this case, it’s quite a bit of text. We’re doing some comparisons. And so, yeah, the presentation is the way to do it.

If you don’t see that link in your podcast player, for some reason, you can always find it on the BEMA website, bemadiscipleship.com. And if you type slash episode number, so bemadiscipleship.com/0, it’ll take you straight to the episode page. And you can find that there if it’s not in your podcast app.

Marty: Okay. So let’s talk about the way of thinking when it comes to words. Like how a Greek Western thinker versus an Eastern Hebrew thinker, how do they think about words differently? So for the world that you and I are familiar with, Brent, the more Greek Western world, we express truth using words and those using words, ideas, definitions. When we’re talking about these things, we prefer prose. We prefer outlines. We prefer lists or bullet points. And if, you know, if you need proof of that, just look at the presentation in front of you. Like we love to categorize things, list things, use words to explain things. That’s how a Westerner thinks. We think in terms of abstract definition.

Brent: And so far I’m thinking as a Westerner, we express truth using words. Yeah. Duh. How else would you do it?

Marty: Right, right. And yet that Eastern Hebrew thinker expresses truth using word pictures and stories. So words will still be involved. And yet the words aren’t communicating an abstract definition or an abstract concept.

The word is actually a picture, an image. They prefer poetry, imagery, symbolism,as opposed to prose, outlines, lists, bullet points, definitions. So an example of this, Brent, would be if I were to ask you, Brent, to talk about God from your Western perspective, what kind of things would you say?

Brent: Oh, I mean, stuff like omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent.

Marty: Perfect. Great examples. Those words,those are words loaded with meaning, loaded with definition, deep, precise theological words. We love to talk about those very Western of you. If I was to ask an Eastern thinker about what God is like, they would say, what are attributes of God?

They might say things like God is a strong tower. God is a rock. God is living water. Because these pictures and images also communicate depth, but in a wildly different way. It’s not in an abstract way. It’s in more of a concrete way. So there’s still lots of things to be understood. They just assume a different reference point in their way of thinking.

 After that, we have a way of thinking when it comes to numbers. This one will get you even more, Brent. You were talking about words earlier. Like the Western Greek mind, they see numbers primarily as quantity. And you’re thinking to yourself, like, of course, like that is literally the definition of a number. Like, how could a number be anything other than quantity? And yet for the Eastern Hebraic thinker, numbers are about quality or symbol. They don’t even have numbers in the Hebrew alphabet. They have to use the letters. The letters have a corresponding numerical value. And so they don’t even have those, like, what would you call that, Brent? Like, what do we call the numbers in the…

Brent: Numerals.

Marty: Numerals. Yeah, they don’t have numerals. All they have is the alpha, the alphabet. And so all they have is that. So it’s quality and symbol. When we think of five, we think of the quantity five. Like, if you were to put five apples on a table, the Western thinker sees five apples, a quantity of apples.

If you were to put five apples in a line on the table for the Eastern Jewish thinker, they’re going to see Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. And those are those primary ways of associating. In fact, when they went through their schooling, they would often learn math in this way. They would learn Books of Moses versus Tablets of Moses equals Days of Creation. Five plus two equals seven. We learn that as a mathematical quantitative reality. Mechanically, they think of pictures, images, and symbols. They learn Books of Moses, Tablets of Moses, Days of Creation because numbers have additional qualitative meaning.

Okay, the next thing that we could look at is, like, life. How does the Westerner interact with the concept of life versus the Eastern Hebraic thinker? And let’s talk about eternal life. Like, life as in eternal life. For the Greek thinker, eternal life is detached from this world. It’s linear. It’s quantitative. Again, you’ll often notice its quantity versus quality, East versus West. So,for the Western thinker, eternal life is something that starts—notice the linear nature—it starts when this world is over.

So, I have my living life, and then I die, and then eternal life is something that begins and goes on forever. It’s detached from this world. For the Eastern Hebrew thinker, eternal life is in this world and every other world that could possibly exist. It’s not detached. It’s within. Eternal life is in this world. It’s not something that begins when my life is over. It’s life lived in harmony with God. So, it’s not a quantitative, linear understanding. It’s a qualitative life. So, it’s not life that goes on forever in a linear. It’s the kind of life that always has been and always will be and always could be. It’s the quality of life that is eternal. That eternal is a qualitative statement.

So, in the Hebrew, the phrase is olam haba. And you can talk about it in quantitative ways, and the Bible even does. Like, it can use those words in that way. But their assumption in their mind, their reference point, is qualitative. In the Greek, it’s even more so aionos zoe. You see, in the Greek, there are ways to talk about life in quantitative ways.

Brent: Greek language.

Marty: Greek language, absolutely. You could talk about that in very quantitative ways. You could talk about bios. Bios, we get the word biology from bios. That’s quantitative life. It’s the kind of life that is physical and material. Zoe is a qualitative word in the Greek.

So, zoe is qualitative. Bios, quantitative. And yet, eternal life is not bios. Eternal life is aionos zoe. And aionos is also a qualitative Greek term. So, aionos zoe is a qualitative understanding. Not entirely. It’s not that you can’t use it in a quantitative way. But the assumption for the biblical world is not the assumption that you and I typically make. It’s the flip-flop.

Brent: So, even Western thinking and Western culture has evolved over time, because that’s—it’s just, like, we don’t even—we don’t really think about that in the same way today. We’ve gotten more literal, more extreme, more definitive about everything. And even back then, like, there was more to—I mean, I don’t know.

Marty: Yeah. And I think I would somewhat push back on that a little. Not that’s not true. But I think that’s what these Jewish thinkers—see, oftentimes people will say, okay, the Old Testament was Eastern, Marty. But the New Testament is Western. It’s Greek. It’s written in the Greek language. The New Testament is very Western. And it’s not.

They’re using a Western language because of its ability to be precise. But it’s talking about a very Eastern worldview, Eastern assumptions, and making some Eastern points. And so when they—where they could talk about life, these Jewish, rabbinical, apostolic teachers who are writing these letters in the New Testament are actually writing about Hebrew concepts using a Western language. And so that’s why some of the differences.

Brent: Makes sense.

Marty: So the next one would be life as it pertains to community and individual, community versus individual. The Western Greek worldview is going to focus on the individual. It’s about me. It’s about me. I’m—I’m the center of gravity. I’m the center of the paradigm, the perspective. I remember our worship music used to be a lot worse than it is today, Brent. When I was going through youth group and then Bible college, worship music was very I and Jesus and me and God and I and I and me and me and I–very individual.

And over the last decade or two, it’s somewhat, you know, become aware of that, and it’s far more communal. The Eastern Hebraic worldview is far more communal. It focuses on the community. It focuses on the us first and foremost. And then it breaks down to the individual. But it doesn’t start with the individual and then go to community. It does the opposite.

It starts with the community and then goes to the individual. And that will come into play with things like sin. I think we in the Western Christian world focus on sin and the individual and the individual reality. And that certainly is a reality. The biblical conversation is often focusing on a communal reality of sin.

Both of those are realities. And so it’s helpful to know what assumptions people are making up front. So then the next one we have is life as it pertains to error and sin, error and sin. For the Greek Western thinker, error and sin is about wrong belief or incorrect thinking. I think this shows up a lot in our theology. It emphasizes what a person knows, what a person knows intellectually.

A lot of people will have heard a lot of sermons about the word for repent in the Greek metanoia, a change of mind, a change of thinking. And we talk about it in a very Western way when we talk about that. But for the Eastern Hebrew thinker, it’s about wrong behavior and it emphasizes what a person does. So one is about more abstract what’s happening in your mind, a intellectual belief where the Eastern thought is more about action and behavior, what a person does.

We’ll go ahead and just keep on moving here. What about let’s talk about how they view God, the Western. How about God’s existence? The Westerner, the Greek thinker tries to prove the existence of God. The Hebrew Eastern thinker assumes the existence of God.

And this is a great slide, Brent, to show where this ends up being so important, because when we go to the Bible and we keep trying to get the Bible to do what we want it to do, when we try to get the Bible to meet us on our terms versus going and meeting the on its terms, we get everything a little, it becomes a little wacky because the Bible’s not trying to prove the existence of God, but we often try to use the Bible in that way.

I had a friend who said it like this. When we ask questions the Bible isn’t asking, we always get the wrong answers. So the Bible’s not having, it’s not asking the question about the existence of God. It’s not trying to prove that God exists. The Bible assumes the existence of God. But if we try to make the Bible do what we want it to do, we end up twisting the Bible and getting it all distorted. And it’s a great slide to encounter why this matters. How about the next one?

God in terms of how we describe God, God’s description. For the Greek Western thinker, the focus is on the nature, the nature, again, notice the abstract, the nature of the being. What or who is this God? What is this God like? What are his abstract attributes? Where in the Hebrew Eastern thought, it’s going to focus on the nature of the relationship. It’s going to be concrete. How does this God relate? How have I literally experienced this God? So abstract versus concrete.

The next one would be when it comes to God, how we talk about faith. For the Western Greek thinker, faith is intellectual. Faith is abstract. Faith is documented in terms of creeds and doctrines and belief statements. We proof text to support those belief statements. So we have, again, an abstract intellectual relationship to faith.

We use the Bible to then prove that very Western approach where in the biblical culture of the Eastern Hebraic culture of the Bible, faith is relational. It’s not about creeds and doctrines. It’s about experiences with God, the stories we’ve told of what happened between our forefathers and God, what we learned through our ancestors and their experiences with God. There’s no attempt to explain or to rationalize, only to give testimony.

And that’s a huge oversimplification on some level, because Judaism loves to explain, loves to rationalize on some level. But again, they’re not doing it for the purpose that the Western mind is. They’re doing it because they’re trying to explain and learn from and be guided by experiences.

So then there’s truth. We can start thinking about how the Westerner and the Easterner think about the idea of ultimate truth. For the Western Greek thinker, truth is rational and scientific. The focus in scripture is on how and what belief comes as one thinks through validation. So think about the creation story, Brent. The dominant, very familiar relationship we have with the creation story is on how creation happened.

Was it young earth creationism or was it 14. 6 billion years? How did creation happen and what exactly took place historically? So our questions are always about how and what. And then we think through and we have apologetics and we prove, we validate, and that’s why truth is real.

For the Eastern biblical thinker, for the Hebraic thinker, truth is religious and experiential. The focus in scripture is not on how and what, but on who and why. So again, the focus on in creation and the creation story is on who created, why was it created? Adam and Eve, not what happened and how did sin enter the world, but instead who and what little journey that lies ahead of us, but who, who is humanity? Who is God? And why do we sin in the first place? Those are, are different relationships to ultimate truth and what matters for the Easterner belief comes through experience, not through rationalization, not through validation, but through experience.

The next one. Is this my favorite one? Oh, yes. This is my favorite one, Brent. That’s my favorite. This is my favorite slide.

Brent: I hope so. Cause it’s the last one.

Marty: Oh, good. We ended with my favorite. Truth over time, truth over time. For the Western Greek thinker, truth is static and unchanging. Now in our world, we typically.

Brent: Of course, Marty. Of course.

Marty: Of course. And we’re kind of used to this in this world because since the rise of post-modernity, Western thought talks about two things, absolute truth and what truth, Brent?

Brent: Relative truth.

Marty: Relative truth. We give these two options. Truth is either absolute or truth is relative. Both of them are, when it comes to the biblical worldview, bad options because truth is neither. Both of those understandings would be static. They’re static definitions. They’re static reference points. Truth for the biblical thinker and the biblical audience is dynamic. It’s truth is unfolding. That is not the same as relative Brent Billings. And that’s, that’s a key distinction.

Truth is not relative. Truth is unfolding. So truth is truth. And yet, and truth really isn’t. It’s our relationship to truth that’s dynamic because truth just is. And yet we learn more. We understand more. Our understanding as a human race, our collective consciousness. We evolve. We develop. We used to think that, you know, whatever you want to say. We used to think that.

Brent: Used to think the earth was the center.

Marty: The center of the universe. We have since discovered that’s not true. Don’t want to spoiler alert anybody there. We used to think all kinds of things. Like we used to think all kinds of like, I could, I don’t want to get lost in a bunch of examples.

Brent: We used to think centuries old heresy there, Marty.

Marty: We used to think lots of crazy stuff over the recent history, past ancient history. And we discussed truth is always unfolding. There’s things we don’t know right now, Brent. Can you believe that? Like things that we’ll know 400 years from now about the cosmos, about the universe. Like, is the universe expanding or is the universe shrinking? And I’ve been told both. I don’t know. We’ll have to ask Neil deGrasse Tyson or whatever, but it’s all about like where we’re standing.

It’s all about where we’re like, what will we know 400 years from now? We talk about quantum mechanics. We talk about dark matter. We talk about what we’re going to know that we don’t know. Truth is always unfolding and we grow. Truth doesn’t change. It’s not relative, but truth is dynamic. Truth is unfolding.

I often picture like in my brain, I have this digital cube that just kind of keeps unfolding. Like the cube just keeps unfolding in different directions and going in different places. It keeps growing and expanding. And it didn’t move. Truth didn’t move, but it’s dynamic. It’s not static. And that for me has been, those are just some things that have been super helpful for understanding the difference between Eastern versus Western, Brent.

Brent: Okay. So with all these examples and all these different things, there are just so many of them where like, how in the world am I supposed to be able to think this way? Like, how do we, how do we get over this hump and actually look at the Bible from this Eastern perspective? I won’t even say a new perspective. New to us. Very old perspective.

Marty: Yeah. And we’ll just give some to close this episode. We’ll just give some brief encouragement, Brent. Number one, just stay at it. Stay at it. Brent mentioned earlier in this episode, this is going to be, this is a lot, it takes a lot of time. Yeah. You got to have a lot of grace. You just stay at it. And this probably on some level is super frustrating as you start to learn it.

But for most, for most of us, especially the ones that will kind of make it through and hang with this, cause they’ll find it life giving because it resonates. Like it checks out. It checks out with the things that we, we kind of, we kind of know and we sense and we’ve experienced these things before. So just stay at it. Cause you won’t be able to learn it in a heartbeat.

It’s like, you’re taking new wine—to quote Jesus—it’s like, you’re taking new wine and putting it into old wineskins and you will try to hold on to both. You’ll, you’ll try to hold on to both. Everybody does. And at some point you keep putting new wine into old wineskins and the skins burst. Like you keep kind of, you keep trying to hold on to this old paradigm that you had and you keep trying to put new information into it. And some people, it happens for everybody at different spots.

For some, it’s going to be 4 episodes ahead. And for some, it’s going to be 40. And it will just happen for people at different spots along the journey and for different reasons and in different ways. There’s no way to control it or manufacture it. But at some point those skins will probably burst. And that’s nature. That’s the experience that so many of us have had. And that’s what this whole study is about.

This whole study is about asking these questions, being guided by hopefully a more historically informed hermeneutic, hopefully valuing the scripture and the Bible as what it is, the inspired authoritative thing that it is, and constantly wrestling with what that means. It’s about having a newer, for us, like Brent said, a better conversation. It’s not about fixing. It’s not like 4 episodes, 40 episodes down the way, we’re going to fix everything. And now you just have it right.

And no, it’s going to be a journey of constantly wrestling, constantly asking questions. It will be a dynamic journey, not a static one. We’re going to try to change our relationship, our relationship to truth, like how we posture ourselves and relate to truth and theology and certainty. These are things that our old wineskins used to put on a pedestal and value. And sometimes that’s good. And oftentimes it’s been destructive for so many of us. And so we’re going to try to just slowly go on a journey to deal with those things. And you have to, you have to stay at it.

And I always think of one thing, Brent, when you start this journey, these old rabbis back in the day of Jesus, not that the rabbis were old, but those, those ancient times,those good old rabbis, when Jesus was walking the earth in the rabbinical era, there’s a story that’s often told about how rabbis would bring these young students into their schooling and into their class. And they would ask them to start quoting, they would tell a young student, five, six, seven years old, to start quoting the book of Genesis. And Brent, I’m confident of you. Go ahead and go ahead and start quoting the book of Genesis, Brent.

Brent: In the beginning, God created…

Marty: Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. Okay. Go ahead and do it again. We’ll try it again.

Brent: In the beginning, God created…

Marty: Stop, stop, stop, stop. Okay. Just one more time, Brent. Let’s see if we can get it.

Brent: In the beginning, God created…

Marty: Stop, stop, stop. And the rabbi will look at this young boy, young girl, and he will say, in the beginning, God, if you can remember this, the study of Torah will go well with you.

And I think we have an interesting relationship with answers, with understanding the whole theological system and got it. And so we get really uncomfortable and we start to get really, and we start to get really angry and very frustrated. And I hear the voice of a rabbi saying, in the beginning, God, because a lot of things we don’t know, and there’s a lot of things we’re not going to know, but if we can remember that in the beginning, God, again, not the how and the what, but the who in the beginning, God, the study of Torah will go well with us all. And that’s one of my favorite things to remember.

Brent: There’s one other thing that I’ve heard you say that I think fits well here. There’s, I can’t remember if it was just a general like Jewish idea or if it was a rabbi or something. But this idea of like, when you don’t know something, do you know what I’m talking about?

Marty: Yeah. I learned it from Ray and I don’t know what its original source was, but he said one of the things that he’s learned from the Jewish mind and all the study that he did in the Jewish world was that when the Jews don’t know something, they will often dance. When we don’t know something, we get angry. We get frustrated. We have a very negative reaction.

And when the Jewish mind doesn’t know something, when they find something that they just have no idea about, it’s completely mysterious to them, they have this positive reaction to it. And that’s because they know that there’s so many things that they don’t understand. And they have this expectation that, in fact, if this is important, God’s going to, if I stay at this, God’s going to reveal this for me someday. And so I dance for the things that I don’t know today, but I dance for the things that I will know later. I’m going to discover something amazing someday. And it’s not today. I don’t know today the answer to this question, but I dance because someday maybe I will. And I do love that. I do love that story as well.

Brent: Well, I think that’s a good place to end this episode, but I would just encourage people as like, this is going to be like, again, this is going to take time. And we have 200 episodes in these first five sessions that are going to take you through this whole journey through the Bible and through church history up to where we are today. So if you’re like, how in the world did we get to where we are today?

We will get to that over time. We’re going to get to how, like, why does the New Testament seem so different from the Old Testament? Where, where are they getting all this stuff? Where are they coming up with these ideas? Why do we think this, not that we’re going to go through all of that.

So I would just ask that you be patient and give yourself grace and don’t get stuck because we hear from a lot of people who get into Session 1 and there’s a lot of interesting, fun stuff to study and then just get stuck in Session 1. And then you never get through the Bible. You never get through church history. You never have the full perspective of this thing that God is doing in the world. And so just stick with it.

Marty: It’s a good word. A great place to start.

Brent: Okay. You can go to bemadiscipleship.com to find the show notes, find that presentation. If you didn’t have a chance to pull it up, if you were driving or something, check that out later. You can get in a group. You can find upcoming events.

You can use the contact page to get in touch with us. All of that is on the website. And so thanks for joining us on the BEMA podcast this week. We’ll talk to you again soon.

Ambur Miller: I’m Ambur, the newest member of our BEMA team, and I’m working on things like the Companion that you can find in the show notes. Our hope is to have listeners like you share prayers and blessings each week. So here’s the first prayer from Episode 0’s Companion.

We bless you, God, for the people that surround us. Take our hearts and minds and bodies and make the space we inhabit one of safety, peace, and authenticity. As we begin to read the text through this different perspective, help us to also keep in mind the differences of each one of us and the light in what you’re going to teach us through the voices of one another. Bring us compassion. Bring us humility. Bring us community. Amen.