Come and See E-Book

Jonathan Pennington

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

3 Effective Ways to Study Scripture for an Essential Understanding of Who God Is The Bible invites us to know God and have eternal life. That makes reading, understanding, and applying Scripture the most important journey we will ever take, but it can be difficult without a guide to provide direction. In Come and See, Jonathan Pennington helps readers understand what it means to know God from the Bible and details 3 effective approaches to interpreting Scripture. Using the engaging analogy of a road trip, he introduces 3 friends who each have distinct, clear ways of navigating the Bible: informational (understanding genres in Scripture and avoiding exegetical mistakes); theological (reading canonically, traditionally, and creedally); and transformational (focusing on the goal of reading Scripture, our posture as readers, and the role of the Holy Spirit). Pennington gives detailed advice for employing all 3 reading modes, equipping readers to gain wisdom and know God better. - Comprehensive: Explores 3 approaches to studying Scripture—informational, theological, and transformational—and includes exercises to practice each - Enhances Personal or Group Bible Study: Helps readers engage in deeper communion with God by purposefully journeying through his word - Ideal for Pastors, Seminary Students, and Laypeople: With an engaging, conversational style, Pennington teaches deep truths about knowing God and interpreting Scripture

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“I remember sitting in Pennington’s class when he presented three avenues of reading the Scriptures. I had been taught to only read in one way, but I realized this was a more beautiful practice. People throughout church history have naturally read with this approach. Let Pennington guide you to a better reading where knowing God will come to life not only in your mind but in your whole being.”

Patrick Schreiner, Associate Professor, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary; author, The Visual Word; The Kingdom of God and the Glory of the Cross; and The Mission of the Triune God

“In Come and See, Jonathan Pennington serves as a faithful guide on the road trip of Bible reading. The church is in need of integrative approaches to reading the Bible, approaches that emphasize information, doctrine, and transformation. That is what this book is all about. If you want to be a better student of the Bible, do not wait to grab a copy of Come and See.”

J. T. English, Lead Pastor, Storyline Church; author, Deep Discipleship; Cofounder, Training the Church and Knowing Faith Podcast

Come and See

Come and See

The Journey of Knowing God through Scripture

Jonathan Pennington

Come and See: The Journey of Knowing God through Scripture

Copyright © 2023 by Jonathan T. Pennington

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover image and design: Jordan Singer

First printing 2023

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated into any other language.

Scripture quotations marked NASB 1995 are taken from the New American Standard Bible®, copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, a Division of Tyndale House Ministries, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-7128-2 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-7129-9 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-7131-2 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-7130-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pennington, Jonathan T., author.  

Title: Come and see : the journey of knowing God through scripture / Jonathan T. Pennington.  

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. 

Identifiers: LCCN 2022015449 (print) | LCCN 2022015450 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433571282 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781433571312 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433571299 (epub)  

Subjects: LCSH: Bible—Hermeneutics. | Bible—Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Bible—Reading. 

Classification: LCC BS476 .P45 2023  (print) | LCC BS476  (ebook) | DDC 220.6—dc23/eng/20221130 

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022015449

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022015450

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2023-03-08 01:59:29 PM

On June 7, 2022, while I was finishing the edits on this book, we learned that my wife, Tracy, had a large brain tumor. Our family’s life was changed overnight.

This book is dedicated to the Pennington Fam Plus crew who have grown even closer together and who are united in trusting that God is doing a thousand good things in every situation.

Contents

Introduction

Starting Out: Road Trip!

1  The First Stage of the Journey

Informational Reading with Ingrid

Reading through Three Avenues

Side Trip 1: Maps and Seeing

Understanding Different Literary Genres

Side Trip 2: Reading in St. Petersburg (and Other Places)

Avoiding Common Interpretive Mistakes

2  The Second Stage of the Journey

Theological Reading with Tom

The Context of the Canon—Canonical Reading

Side Trip 3: Our Right and Left Brains

The Context of the Church’s Tradition—Traditioned Reading

Side Trip 4: Two T. Rexes and the Gestalt Shift

The Context of Creedal Orthodoxy—Creedal Reading

3  The Third Stage of the Journey

Transformational Reading with Taylor

The Goal of Reading Scripture

Side Trip 5: Metaphors We Read By

The Posture of Reading Scripture

Side Trip 6: Knowing through Rituals

The Holy Spirit in Reading Scripture

Epilogue

The Final Destination

Notes

General Index

Scripture Index

Introduction

Starting Out: Road Trip!

Come and see what God has done:

he is awesome in his deeds toward the children of man.

Psalm 66:5

Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!

Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!

Psalm 34:8

“Come and see.” . . . “You will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”

John 1:46, 51

If you have ever made a road trip down the center of Tennessee on Interstate 24 toward Chattanooga, you probably recall seeing sign after sign encouraging you to “See Ruby Falls.” The invitation to come and see Ruby Falls is painted on countless barn roofs and highway billboards along the way. They never say more than that, adding to the intrigue. You have to google it to learn who or what Ruby Falls is. Or you can take the exit and see it for yourself.

Either way, you’ll learn that Ruby Falls is a stunning waterfall 1,120 feet below the surface of Lookout Mountain. It was discovered in 1928 and named after the wife of one of the excavators. The ubiquitous “See Ruby Falls” signs are an invitation to come, to look, to experience something worth seeing. This is a natural response to beauty. When we encounter something beautiful and good, we will inevitably want to tell others about it. Children don’t need to be taught to say, “Dad, Mom, look!”

The Gospel of John includes lots of invitations to look, to behold, to see things wonderful. John the Baptist tells his hearers, “Look!” when he sees Jesus walking by because Jesus is “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29 NIV; see 1:36).

When the first two disciples encountered Jesus, he invited them by saying, “Come and you will see” (1:39). So they began following him. When another potential disciple, Nathanael, was skeptical that anything good could come out of Nazareth, his friend Philip used the same words, “Come and see” (1:46), to invite him to meet Jesus. And when Nathanael finally did see Jesus face to face and believed in him, Jesus promised that he would see much more. “You will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man” (1:51).

When the apostle John was penning these words, he wasn’t just producing a historical record. All of these invitations to see simultaneously serve as an invitation from John to his readers. This includes us. The opening chapter of John’s Gospel is an invitation for us to come and see Jesus in the pages of Holy Scripture. More beautiful and more important than seeing Ruby Falls is following the signs in Scripture to come and see Jesus. This is because, according to John, in seeing we will come to believe, and in believing we will come to have life eternal (20:31).

This same invitation to come and see, to taste and delight in God, is found throughout the Bible. The goal of reading the Scriptures is not merely to gain knowledge about God or to learn certain beliefs and behaviors. The real aim in reading Scripture is to see and know God himself. This won’t fully occur until the redemption of the world that is called the new creation and the beatific vision (the happiness that comes from seeing God fully). But along the way, we get glimpses of what is to come. This happens especially through reading and studying the Bible. On this side of the new creation, Scripture is crucial for discovering the meaningful and flourishing life that will last for eternity.

The Road Trip Experience

There is nothing like the anticipation and excitement that comes with a road trip. Perhaps you remember such adventures with friends in high school and college—a small group of comrades who share your love for the same music and same junk food throwing together a few dollars and hitting the road. Pure joy. You have some destination and semi-plan roughed out in your heads, but that’s all. It’s really about the adventure as much as it is the destination: the unexpected scary or funny things that happen, the jokes that naturally emerge, the split-second decision to take exit 32 to seek out “Kicking Ash BBQ” or “The World’s Largest Rubber Band Ball.” These are what make the memories and immortalize the road trip.

During a stint as a youth pastor many years ago, I took the high school kids on an 899-mile, two-day trip from our church in northern Illinois to our denomination’s youth conference in Fort Collins, Colorado. This trip required a bit more detailed organization than the spontaneous road trips of my youth. I was in charge of renting fifteen-passenger vans, coordinating adult drivers, obtaining insurance, requesting permission slips, and more. Nonetheless, it was a road trip, and it was a transformative experience for all involved. The relationships that were formed, the subculture that was created, and the memories that were born combined to make our youth group different than it was before. Through our long journey together, we came to know and love one another more. This prepared us to meet with God at the mountaintop experience that only a massive youth conference in the Rockies can provide.

The significance of the road trip itself—not just the conference—hit home when two years later I took a group to the next biannual conference but this time in Indianapolis. Anticipation and expectations were high, especially for those who had been with me on the Colorado trip. And the conference was good. However, because the expedition took less than five hours, something crucial was lost. The trip was relatively quick with just one food stop. Relationships, memories, and stories didn’t have enough baking time. Instead of a full-course meal, it was an existential snack. I realized more fully that the road trip itself was indeed as important as the conference.

The journey matters. Life is not a math problem to merely solve. It is a long series of conscious and unconscious moments that we as humans can only experience sequentially, not knowing fully what is coming next. The variation of experiences between the familiar (sweetened and deepened by time) and the new (awaking us again by stimulating our curiosity) is what makes the journey of our lives meaningful. The classic road trip forges and melds together these experiences into something beautiful. New and spontaneous adventures with old and growing friends—it doesn’t get much better than that. That’s why we love the road trip.

A Journey with Three Friends

This book has an important subtitle: The Journey of Knowing God through Scripture. This provides us with the metaphor or image by which we are invited to come and see God. We are going to think about reading the Bible as a journey, as a road trip. Knowing God is not just a pill we can swallow or an app we can open. It is a journey of life experiences that are shaped and interpreted over time by Scripture. The more we understand God’s words, the more we will be able to make sense of our complicated lives. This little book is meant as a guide, a map, to help you make sense of what Scripture is saying. It is an invitation to take a road trip, the most life-giving and life-changing road trip possible.

But a road trip wouldn’t be a road trip without good friends. You can make a journey alone; good can come from such reflective time. But the best trips, the ones that shape us, are the ones where a small group of people—individuals with their own quirks, strengths, and weaknesses—join together on the adventure.

For this road trip journey, we’re joining up with a set of three great friends: Ingrid, Tom, and Taylor. These three friends are different in gender, background, interests, and passions, but they share a bond that is deeper than these limited elements of who they are. And this trip, taken together, is going to make them better people as they journey jointly and learn from one another.

Let’s imagine this is a long trip, one where the friends need to share the driving. As the rules of the road trip go, the driver gets to choose the music and the podcasts to listen to. Ingrid, Tom, and Taylor will each take a turn behind the wheel, and each will set the tone for his or her leg of the journey.

You may have already surmised what I’m doing with these images. These three friends each represent a certain mode of reading, a particular timbre, a kind of approach that is distinctive of the person. Ingrid loves information, and when she is driving it’s all about the podcasts. She fills the car with historical and literary insights. Tom is a theologian at heart. He loves to discuss fine points of doctrine, how the whole Bible fits together, and how the church has understood these great theological truths. Taylor emphasizes transformation. She always directs the conversation back to real life, to the practical outworking of what all their discussion means.

Together these three friends create something that is stronger, richer, and more beautiful than what any one of them could accomplish individually. Together these three approaches to reading Scripture—informational, theological, and transformational—provide a robust and meaningful path for knowing God through the study of the Bible.

But no road trip would be complete without the delicious and spontaneous side trips. Throughout the three legs of our journey, led in turn by Ingrid, Tom, and Taylor, we are also going to pause at a few exits to eat and to ponder some beautiful things. These side trips aren’t directly in the path of our destination, but they’re not mere detours either. They are enriching moments that will provide a kind of experiential glue to the whole journey. And surprisingly, when we look back on the journey as a whole, we will see that these side trips were really connected all along. They all relate to the supersized question of how we know anything (the fancy word for that is epistemology). Like any good side trip, therein lies the real adventure.

So let’s begin. Come and see.

1

The First Stage of the Journey

Informational Reading with Ingrid

You Are Here

The First Stage: Informational Reading with Ingrid

Reading through Three AvenuesSide Trip 1: Maps and SeeingUnderstanding Different Literary GenresSide Trip 2: Reading in St. Petersburg (and Other Places)Avoiding Common Interpretive Mistakes

On this first leg of our journey, Ingrid is in charge. She’s vivacious and vigorous and always fun to be around. When you’re with Ingrid, you know it! She’s passionate about knowledge, and she loves to share it with others. She’s a great friend to have driving for the first stage: we know that we will be headed in the right direction, and the trip will be enriched by what she brings to our discussion.

For Ingrid, it’s all about information. Her chosen podcasts and conversation fill the car with information of all sorts—historical, literary, and logical. As we learn from Ingrid how to read Scripture, we will grow in knowledge and skills that relate to gaining and integrating information. Ingrid will also lead us on two fascinating side trips about how maps enable us to see and how our imagination of the world shapes our interpretation of it.

Orientation

The informational aspect of reading the Bible refers to the fact that Scripture contains content that informs our minds and understanding. Scripture is more than informational content, certainly, but it is not less than this. God speaks to us in many ways, and we know things in many ways—experientially, emotionally, relationally. But one essential way that we know things is cognitively or through our minds. And our cognitive faculties work on content or information.

To read Scripture rightly, then, we must focus on the information it provides that is outside of us, not generated by us. This focus on Scripture’s content entails a wide range of knowledge and the development of some important skills. Many tools can and should be in our informational interpretation tool box. These include understanding the historical and cultural background of Scripture, knowing something about language and how it works, developing literary interpretation skills, and recognizing different genres within Scripture.

Filling Up the Tank

Before we begin, let’s first pause to get some gas (our friends can’t yet afford a Tesla), and then we’ll set off on our journey.

Ingrid gives the first words of her driving time to her beloved Eugene Peterson: “The more ‘spiritual’ we become, the more care we must give to exegesis. The more mature we become in the Christian faith, the more exegetically rigorous we must become. This is not a task from which we graduate.”1

What does it mean to be more “exegetically rigorous”? Exegesis is the act of interpreting or drawing out the meaning of a Bible passage. Thus, to be exegetically rigorous means to engage in a detailed study of Scripture, its background, language, and history. This may sound like something a stodgy old professor might say, a sentiment that feels like a blaring loudspeaker from the ivory tower far removed from real life.

But the person who penned this quote, Eugene Peterson, was one of our generation’s greatest pastors and leaders in spiritual formation.2 Exegetical rigor and spirituality are not opposites, according to Peterson, but intimate friends. Peterson challenges us to make sure we are always doing more than rigorous exegesis—that we are also engaging in theological and transformational reading. But he understands that spiritual study of the Bible is never less than a detailed, careful reading. The more spiritual we are, the more we will give ourselves to watchful and meticulous study of the Bible. Even though spirituality and rigorous study of the Bible are often thought of as contrary to each other today, Peterson is saying what the great Christian tradition has always said.

Now for some people, the idea that rigorous study of the Bible (exegesis) is essential for all Christians might sound like an attempt at job security for people with PhDs in theology. Some might be concerned that this takes the Bible away from the average, church-going reader and requires that we all attend seminary and become learned experts on the nitty-gritty details of the Bible. For other readers, however, this idea is perfectly acceptable. Being academic and rigorous in our study of the Bible doesn’t sound scary or bad, but exciting.

Whatever your perspective, I want to convince you that exegetical rigor is not something to shun, dismiss, or disdain. The reason is simple: if we are to grow in knowledge, wisdom, and love, we need to benefit from information that we don’t currently have. The Bible records God’s speech that doesn’t originate from us. Therefore, to hear thoughts other than our own, we need to learn to listen attentively, to seek to gain information other than what we already possess.

But you might still wonder why learning God’s thoughts takes exegetical rigor. Can’t we just read the Bible and see what it says? Well, yes, we can and should read the Bible and see what it says. And at the end of our journey, we will see that this kind of simple and receptive reading is where we want to end up. But we also need to recognize that the Bible comes to us over a significant distance of time, culture, language, and worldview. We often need help to understand what the Bible is saying, and this is where a careful informational study of the Bible comes in.

We know that communication between spouses and friends often results in misunderstanding. Amplify this potential breakdown of communication across languages, cultures, physical space, and thousands of years, and we can easily misunderstand what the Bible is saying. Maybe even more disconcerting, it is shockingly easy to misunderstand the Bible and not to even realize we are doing so! Having lived in the United Kingdom for a few years, I can testify that unknown mistakes can happen when using American English in a British English context (and vice versa). One can blithely use words with very different meanings—such as pants, sacked, boot, mad, jumper, or vest to name just a few—and be completely unaware. (Even worse is misusing words that you don’t realize have sexual meanings!) Exegetical rigor helps us avoid some of these missteps.

Hear me clearly: I’m not saying that we should think of the Bible as distant and incomprehensible. These are God’s words, and God is always present and happy to speak to us. But wax tends to grow in our ears. Hear Peterson again:

These words given to us in our Scriptures are constantly getting overlaid with personal preferences, cultural assumptions, sin distortions, and ignorant guesses that pollute the text. The pollutants are always in the air, gathering dust on our Bibles, corroding our use of the language, especially the language of faith. Exegesis is a dust cloth, a scrub brush, or even a Q-tip for keeping the words clean.3

So rigorous study of the Bible is wise and practical. We need a good informational reading strategy to clean off these pollutants and to clear out our ears.

We also need exegetical rigor for a more spiritual reason: it is a matter of love. As Peterson points out, the truly spiritual leaders of old were always master exegetes because they loved God and wanted to hear from him—not just have their own self-generated, self-centered “spirituality.” “Exegesis is an act of love. It loves the one who speaks the words enough to want to get the words right. It respects the words enough to use every means we have to get the words right. Exegesis is loving God enough to stop and listen carefully to what he says.”4

Thus, when we give ourselves to the intensive, rigorous study of Scripture (not always an easy task!), we are doing so out of respect and love for our Creator and Redeemer God. Thorough and even laborious study of Scripture is motivated by affection and the greatest human desire possible: to know and love God more. This is not the stuff of dry, arid “academics.” Rather, learning to read in an informational way is like the kind of natural affectionate attention that avid sports fans give to learning their favorite players’ names and stats. It’s like the attention and energy that any lovers of horses or sports cars or fountain pens or mountain climbing give to their area of passionate interest.

But we have not yet really explained what this exegetical rigor is referring to. This is what Ingrid brings to our conversation. This love-based, willing-to-work-hard rigor in reading is what we are calling the informational type of reading. But what does this consist of, what does it require, and what does it look like? What exactly does Ingrid want us to embrace?

We will explore three aspects of a good informational reading of Scripture. These three aspects are (1) using a three-avenues approach to interpretation; (2) developing a sensitivity to different literary genres; and (3) recognizing (and avoiding) some common exegetical mistakes. As we travel on the path of developing these three skills, we’ll also take a couple of fascinating side trips.

You Are Here

The First Stage: Informational Reading with Ingrid

Reading through Three AvenuesSide Trip 1: Maps and SeeingUnderstanding Different Literary GenresSide Trip 2: Reading in St. Petersburg (and Other Places)Avoiding Common Interpretive Mistakes

Reading through Three Avenues

A certified plumber or master electrician must learn a panoply of small skills to be able to function well: how to sweat copper pipe, how to set up a circuit box, how to fix the leak in a PVC sink trap, how to prevent aluminum wiring from causing a fire. So too, a good informational reader must learn reading skills in several areas to gain experience with different types of approaches to interpretation. I like to describe this as learning to read through three avenues.