What You Think About God Matters with Dr. Glenn Kreider

April 08, 2021

Jennie Allen

Bible teacher, founder of IF:Gathering

You are in for a treat today. This is the podcast with somebody you may never have heard of, and it will be your favorite one. Everything I do with Dr. Kreider ends up that way. This is one of my very favorite seminary professors. He knows. And everybody that has ever heard me talk about seminary knows he is my very favorite seminary professor. I took, I believe, almost all of my theology courses from you, Dr. K, and you're not supposed to do that. He had me crying in class. He had us listening to Linkin Park. Do not tell people that's probably not allowed at seminary, but that's what he did. He brought to life the story of God and the reason we exist in a way that captured me. It changed my framework for how I think about God, how I feel about myself, and our purpose here. And so I know it's impossible, Dr. K; I think I took five classes from you in seminary, maybe four. So we can't really in 30 minutes here together, you know, bring all of that to all these people. But I do want to give a little taste specifically when it comes to the story of God because, as you know, we just finished the Theolaby series. All of that was inspired by your class about the end times, which I would have expected to get in there. And it all be about revelation, but no, you took us back to Genesis. So talk just a minute about God's story and why we need to understand theology in general, but precisely that narrative throughout scripture.

So I'm not sure who should feel older today. Me or you. Linkin Park?

I know we have all these college girls listening right now that are like Linkin Park? I think they know it. My kids know Linkin Park. Don't listen, guys. There are lots of cuss words. Did you bleep it out? I can't remember. Anyway.

Yeah. So there's no short answer to that question except, I want to go back a step further. The Bible is so incredibly important to us.  It is the very heart of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. We believe the Bible because of Jesus. We believe the Bible because the Bible is God's word to us, but as important as affirming the need and respect for the Bible and trusting the God of the Bible, we know how to read the Bible accurately and correctly. We don't need the Bible to understand who God is. The Bible tells us a creation reveals his eternal power and divine nature. All of his attributes are revealed in creation. We don't need the Bible to know who Jesus is. The birth,  life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth it's not controversial its a well-attested historical fact. 

WHY UNDERSTANDING

We need the Bible to connect who Jesus is to what Jesus did. What often happens, you mentioned eschatology. That's still the reaction of students in that course. They come into that room expecting to read left behind and to spend more time defending the pre-trade rapture in premillennialism and they simply don't care. I'm more concerned, I think,  about those students who do care, who think that's the most important thing. In that course and in everything I do my claim, is that we have to understand how the Bible fits together. We have to realize that God is telling this grand narrative, and all the parts of the story work together in that narrative.  All the genres of scripture that the poetry is not disconnected from that story. The wisdom sayings make sense only within that story. The history of Israel makes sense only within that story. Jesus makes sense only within that story. And you can't understand the end of the story apart from the beginning. It's a story of a God who, for reasons known only to God, created the universe. And he did so knowing in advance that when he created human beings in his image and likeness, they would rebel against him, and he would do something about it. It almost said he would have to do something, but he doesn't. Everything he does, he does by his own free will. He could choose to create or not to create. He could choose to redeem or not to redeem. But what he can't do is not know what he knows, which is, which is true for us too. We can't unsee what we have seen. We can't unknow what we've learned.

So God knows all the past, present, and future. He knows all the possibilities, all the actualities. So he created a world knowing that things would go as they did. And everything from Genesis 3 to the end of the story looks toward the person and work of Christ in his first and second coming. Everything before the gospels is looking forward to Christ coming. What people didn't understand until Jesus came, this freaked his followers out, as they thought Jesus comes; that's the end of the story we live ever after in the new heaven and new earth. And then he leaves. And now we wait. I love the Dave Matthews song; we were in that space between the laughter and the tears that keep us coming back for more. We know what God has accomplished in sending his son the first time, and we know that there's a whole lot more yet to come, and he will make all things new. 

So we have the story of creation, two chapters in the biblical narrative of God's response to rebellion Genesis 3 through Revelation 20, and then two accounts of the new heaven and new earth where God makes everything new. So this story, another essential part of this story is that this story isn't circular. These stories are repeated, but there is a trajectory of redemption that the goal in the biblical story is not to go back; it's not to return, it's not to restore but to recreate. Somebody sent me a Herman Bavinck quote this morning. Bavinck was a Dutch 19th-century reform pastor-theologian, said, and I'm paraphrasing, that in the story of redemption, we're looking forward to a new heaven, a new earth where God recreates where God redeems and makes all things new. And my friend just sent me that. That's his summary of the gospel. It's Revelation 21:5 that he makes all things new. That's some actual, excellent news, not simply during a pandemic, in the midst of all kinds of things going on in the world as they have been. But God has a plan and a purpose, and he's at work accomplishing that plan. So that the short answer, which anybody who knows me knows I can't give quick answers. 

Wait, I've got to give you a little credit. You just did the story of the whole Bible, the story of God, in less than five minutes. So that was well done. 

KNOWING THE STORY OF REDEMPTION

I feel pretty good about that. Yeah. The short answer is we need the Bible. We need to know how to read the Bible, so we know how to interpret this ancient book, which wasn't written to us. It was written to other people in cultures and times and circumstances we've never experienced. Yet, it speaks to us. So how do we move from the ancient world of the text to the modern world we live in? We have to understand how the details of the story, how those Psalms and wisdom sayings, and the narrative of Israel. How does that connect to the story that God has written in the story that God is writing? Otherwise, I could give you expend hours providing you, if I could remember, giving you examples of how we get in trouble if we don't. So we don't go back to the law of Moses to develop our dietary regulations.  That was God's way of dealing for a time. We don't go back to the law of Moses and defend slavery because slavery was practiced then. We have to understand how all of this connects to this story of redemption so that God's people, like God, should be acting redemptively in the world.

So what I love about this is that people who are listening have just never prioritized understanding God; they have faith. They attend church. They might even read their Bible a few times a week, and they keep a journal. But when I say the word theology, they glaze over, and they think that's not for me. Why do we need theology? Why not just read the book cover to cover, read the Bible cover to cover. Why do we need an understanding of these truths that rise up out of the Bible?

Something pretty significant. I learned this recently; something pretty important happened in the enlightenment and its after-effects, where theology was redefined as the study of God. As the study of God turned into heavy academic, impractical, irrelevant arguments among the tribes, tribalism is not some new thing. Social media didn't invent something, it revealed what has always been there, and many people have the reaction you do. So I spent my first couple of days in the first theology course, a prerequisite for every other class, is explaining the answer to the very question you asked. Suppose we understand theology as words or discourse about God, as conversations about God, then any person who is thinking, and everybody is, about the world in which we live and how it's connected to something beyond this world. The eternity in their hearts verse from Ecclesiastes. There's a God-shaped hole from Augusta and Salman Rushdie. There is something in us that screams there must be more than this. There's got to be; there's got to be more than this. 

So that what I'm trying to do is encourage people to de jargonize and de academic-wise, which isn't even a word, the theological task. I want people to recognize when you pick up and read the Bible, you're not reading the Bible ignorant of something. You know, some things when you read it so that you don't read, pick up the Bible and say, I don't know whether there's a God. Now some people do that. But Christians who are reading the Bible regularly, the people you're talking about are, are people who take the Bible seriously, who believe it's important, who believed that God has spoken and continues to speak. So you're reading with some convictions, you're reading with some pre-understandings, you're reading with some prejudices. So that when you come across sections in scripture where things don't seem to fit, what you know about who God is, we don't change our view of God unless your view of God is wonky. You say I know who God is. He's merciful and compassionate, abounding in love and faithfulness. If he doesn't seem to be that way, that's a theological claim, by the way, which comes right from the mouth of God in Exodus 34. If we come across something that doesn't seem to fit that, then we either have to change our view of God or figure out how to read that text consistently with who God is.  And those are theological questions. But when we read the text, even if the only reading for the text is to get wisdom for the day, you're approaching it as a theological read. I think it's crucial here to encourage people to read it in light of some confessional stance. To read it, believing that there is one God, the father almighty, who's the maker of heaven and earth. Jesus Christ is his only son who was conceived by the holy ghost. The language I'm quoting from the apostles' creed, the language of Nicea that's our starting point. That's what we believe in. And Jenny, it's also important to point out that not only is the creed, both of those explicitly Trinitarian, but they also tell the story of scripture. It begins with creation. And then for us, and for our salvation, Christ came and redeemed us. We believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, that there is creation, fall, and recreation in that story. Otherwise, well, here's the problem.  If we don't have some theological convictions, some God word convictions when we read the Bible, we potentially read it not only misunderstanding it but horribly, misapplying it in ways where people don't know that when Jesus said: if your eye offends, you pluck it out, he didn't mean you should do actually that. When he said if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. He didn't actually mean you're supposed to do that. Theology is words about God if it's faith seeking, understanding. It's not impossible to be a Christian and not be a theologian. It's not possible to live in God's world. Atheists are theologians. If theology was part of the transition for me. If theology is the study of God, then it's a bit arrogant and obnoxious to say to an atheist, you're a theologian. But if theology is words about God, the atheist says," I don't believe there's enough evidence to believe in God. Those are theological words. That's a theological position. And I'd like us, and I know you agree, to demystify, de-intensify, and de academic-wise the reading of scripture theology and help people understand what it actually is.

I believe this so much that I took a seminary class and turned it into books for kids. I believe it is the most foundational thing that everyone knows. If we, yes, the word theology is intimidating, but honestly, understanding who God is is crucial and foundational to who we will be and how we will live that the earlier, the better. I remember crying in your class multiple times. And one of the reasons I cried was anger. I couldn't believe I was just hearing that stuff. How did I miss the big picture and story of God? I'd grown up in a Bible church. I had done a million studies, loved the Bible, loved the church, and did Awanas, for crying out loud.  I was 24 when I started seminary, and I had never heard anybody tell me the overall narrative of scripture.

I hope that this will whet your appetite. That you leave this conversation thinking, okay, I want to know this story. I want to know this God because faith is a gift. It's from God. And I'm grateful that that is true. However, how we live will be based solely on what we believe about God. So we've got to do more than just have faith that Jesus was raised from the dead, or we're secure for eternity, but there's no fruit. There's no understanding of who he is and who we are in light of that. And so, my dream is if the theology is everyone's doing it anyway, let's do it well. Let's do good theology based on the word of God.

And let's start early. The earlier, the better. In my experience growing up in the church and serving in the church, so much of the children & youth ministries were childcare and entertainment.  I'm not saying those things are bad or wrong or not, but it's never too soon to teach children to think well. The way we think does manifest itself in what we do. So much of our experience was that the Bible was a document that we mine for information. It was a bunch of disconnected data. Whether it's studying a book of the Bible disconnected from the rest of the Bible. How can you read and study Romans without understanding the same guy who wrote Romans wrote Ephesians & Corinthians. He doesn't contradict himself when he works from one audience to the other. Maybe, even more damaging in my own experience was that the Bible was turned into proof texts. There were tweets before there was Twitter, which is disconnected from the context. I've come to appreciate that proof-texts actually do work if the text is a proof text.  John 3:16 is proof-text, and it works really well. You don't need a whole lot of context to understand it--the Romans road. Romans 3:23, 6:23, 5:8, 10:9, and ten they're proof texts. I think what Paul does in Romans, which he doesn't do in other books, is he sometimes stops and says; this is what I want you to get. So he, he gives you that proof text, but if your approved text is, I'll just make this up, 2 Chronicles 4:12, it probably doesn't help you very much. You probably don't even have any idea what that text means. Someone is going to look it up and tell us that's X changed my life. And it might have because God works in mysterious ways.

HOW DO WE UNDERSTAND THE ENTIRE THE ENTIRE STORY OF GOD IN SCRIPTURE?

What do you say to a teenager that wants to understand this? I want to understand, but they're, aren't ready for seminary. And I'd say a lot of that probably will never attend seminary, and they don't want the academic version of this. How, how do they get that understanding?

Increasingly in the last couple of decades, there have been books written on the story of scripture on the overview. I wrote one called "God With Us, which I think is, is a helpful one. Increasingly there are accessible treatments, and that's the word I want to use. I don't want to imply. In fact, I would strongly condemn the language of dumbing it down or overly simplifying it, but we've got to speak the language that people know and understand. I mean, it's the reason why most of the people listening to you and the people listening to me are not reading the King James Bible. It's not because the King James was a bad Bible was a great Bible for the time when it was the people's language similarly that the language of the New Testament, the language of the Old Testament in the language of the people it's the common tongue. And I think so much of what has happened in theology is the theologians are writing for the Guild -they're writing for one another and not writing for people who don't have the training and expertise. And we need both. We need theologians; we need academicians. And we need people who are writing for a broader audience. The challenge is to live in those two worlds, to be able to wrestle with the problematic theological terms and categories and communicate in a way that people understand. So in a seminary classroom, I will use and define the hypostatic union. Only those words, like students who are paying for seminary education,

Hey, I went and graduated and seminary. I know hypostatic union.  I did keep every notebook from college. I went to seminary before laptops were regular, you know, we had computers, but rich people had laptops. So I sat there, and I took handwritten notes in all these classes. And I still, 20 years later, in the top of my closet, have every one of those notebooks so I can look things up too. 

I probably played Lincoln park in an eight-track tape too. Didn't I?

Maybe think we might've been had CDs 20 years ago. I don't know. Okay. Here's what I think about when I think about the idea that someone is excited right now, going, gosh, I've never learned that. And I've been going to church all my life is. This is actually about know theology. The word sounds boring, and everything we're talking about is a little bit heady, but it is the most exciting story. It is the thing everything is based on like; this is the DNA of the air you breathe, the body that you have everything is knit together by God and through God. And so this is everywhere. Make it look so make it practical. Why do we need to know this? How does theology change the way we live? 

THEOLOGY CHANGES THE WAY WE SEE GOD

It's everywhere and understanding that God has created a world and he is at work redeeming it. And one day, things will be made new. There is something, not the way it should be. One day it'll be better. Or at least the hope that it will be better is so deeply embedded in the world. That hope screams in the world that God has made. When you understand this, you begin to read novels differently. You'll listen to podcasts differently. You'll watch movies differently. Your TV shows will be different because this story is, is deeply embedded in the world. I've been saying this for years, and nobody has yet given me a counterexample. I don't know of any story in any culture, anywhere on the planet that doesn't fit into that creation, fall redemption, and recreation motif. There is something as something is not the way it's supposed to be. And one day things will be better. That is the plotline of the biblical story. That's the plotline of every story. 

So one of the cool things is if God is revealed in the world that he has created, and we begin to see him at work in the world. What I'm trying to do, and this is a straightforward and modest goal.  I was raised in a community where I was taught that the world is fallen, broken, evil, sinful, and other people are out to get you. They trained me to look for the evidence of fallenness, brokenness, sin, and evil in the world. And it's there. It's not hard to find, but it changes everything if the Bible is true. As the Psalmist says in Psalm 33 and Psalm 119, it changes everything if the earth is filled with your love. If God is love, and the earth is filled with his love and we ought to be able to see it. And that change in perspective is the thing that keeps me going. It's sometimes hard, especially in the middle of a pandemic and violence in the streets. However, the story is so important to God that he recorded it in a book written by human beings, superintended by his spirit, the doctrine of inspiration. But some people solved this story in the world who believed in this God and this story long before there was a Bible. Hundreds of years before Moses ever writes the book of Genesis. People have been doing this for a long time. It's so, yeah, it's incredibly exciting. And to go from watching just a real simple example to, for watching movies merely to be entertained, but to see the work of redemption that's going on in that film.

Nobody watches a film where everybody dies at the end because we know they're not, they're not real. Tarantino's doing something when he tells one of those stories because it demonstrates how deeply embedded hope is in the world. 

So yeah, I'm excited about it. It encourages me to know and that you were excited about it. And what I hear from people who are doing this kind of thing, that there is nothing more important than we, that we do then coming, not only to understand who God is and what he's doing in the world but how we join him in his work, how do we, who have the opportunity to address things that are, that shouldn't be the way they are? How do we make things different? It's the old you can't solve every problem, but you can do what you can, where you are. And I want to do that. I want to raise up generations of Jesus followers who want to do that too.

Gosh, I'm grateful for how you've done that for me. And I pray. I mean, I look back at everything I've written. I'm checking it in my head right now. I'm like, okay, Stuck, was sanctification 101. I mean, I can almost point to a class for everything I've written because there was such a passion when I sat in those classes, in taking that to the world. I think we feel the exact same. I felt spoiled rotten, that got that much time and that much excellent teaching on who God is and how we live in light of that. And I'm your most grateful student. I really am. And, and I pray, I, I do well with it, and that you correct me anytime, you see me out there off track because that is very possible. We're all, we're all slightly off track, right? Nobody can have perfect theology.

We all need people who hold us, who care enough to keep us accountable.

What do you say in your class? You have to do theology and community. That was you because you can't sit on an island and think, you know, the best things about God. So thank you for being part of that for us. And I'm telling you, God, With us, I read it. How many years ago did that book come out?. Yeah, I was going to say it was; it was when IF was starting. I don't know that I endorsed it because I don't think I had anybody but 12 Twitter followers that year. So anyway, I would, though, and probably do right now, say that that book was a little bit of Crider in a way that you can read and relate So yes, everybody goes get that. And then the Theolaby is a little bit of Kreider. I should have dedicated them all to you. I dedicate them to my kids. You know, they were kids' books. So other than that, they're dedicated right now. I'm publicly saying it to Dr. K. So, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for how you increased my view of God in such a powerful way.,