Jonathan T. Pennington is a professor of New Testament Studies at Southern Seminary and the Pastor of Spiritual Formation at Sojourn East Church in Louisville, Kentucky. His books include Jesus the Great Philosopher and Reading the Gospels Wisely (which students at Tennent have the pleasure of reading).
The following is an edited transcription of an interview that took place via Zoom.
Dr. Pennington, for those who haven’t read Reading the Gospels Wisely, could you explain the Mother-in-Law—Jeremiah 29:11 Refrigerator Magnet—Diet Principle?
I remember going to my mother-in-law’s house many years ago and seeing that she had Jeremiah 29:11 on a refrigerator magnet, supporting her attempt to lose weight. My mother-in-law has not had the opportunity for any formal theological training, nor is she called to that. But what she has is something that we must not lose in the midst of our education — a posture or heart of receptivity toward God.
Before you enter formal theological education, you often read the Bible in a way that’s very receptive to God. Unfortunately, theological education is often deconstructive, not in an ex-vangelical way (although it can be), but more in teaching us what the Bible doesn’t mean.
Theological education is a wonderful gift, but there’s an old saying, “seminary is cemetery.” That shouldn’t be the case, but it can be when all of the skills and knowledge we gain outpace the growth of our hearts. I think of the Grinch, who had a heart “two sizes too small.”
As Don Carson, one of my teachers, used to say, “Ignorance may be bliss but it’s not a virtue.” I’m not for learning less, but going into it aware that we can lose our hearts as our knowledge grows.
So we come back to Jeremiah 29:11. We can learn theologically how to think about it in a more advanced way. It’s true that I’m not a member of ethnic Israel, so fair enough, it doesn’t apply to me directly. But at the same time, from a New Testament perspective, “all the promises of God are yes and Amen in Christ Jesus” (2 Cor. 1:20). Jeremiah 29:11 reveals the unchanging heart of God. So although I’m not an ethnic Israelite, and in some covenantal sense I shouldn’t claim it as my own, the God who said that to Israel is the same God who now and finally has spoken through Jesus Christ and says exactly that to me. We need to go through the disabusing and come out stronger, not getting stuck in that middle stage of seeing all the wrong ways of reading the Bible.
Why is it so important not to denigrate the faith of others?
As we do, so we become. How we inhabit the world shapes who we become.
The Greatest Commandment is very clearly to love God, and the second is like it, to love our neighbor as ourselves. It’s far less often than we think that we need to stand up and correct other people. That’s what I often call “the religion of anti-religion”: to whip a bunch of people up by emphasizing and putting your life energy into “what’s wrong with X.” You’ll get followers, you’ll get atta-boys and pats on the back. But I don’t trust anyone whose life energy is given largely to a critique of other people or institutions.
I think the invitation of the Bible and of God himself is always to build beautiful things, to be constructive, and to invite people into beauty. If one’s energy focuses on denigrating others, as Paul says, “watch out lest you devour one another” (Gal 5:15).
In your opinion, how is it possible for a person to spend thousands of hours studying the Bible and yet remain unchanged by it?
Sometimes we think that reading and interpreting the Bible is a scientific method that guarantees results. The reality is that in our reading of the Bible how we show up matters.
The Bible anticipates a kind of ideal reader, one who is filled with the Spirit; who is born-again, regenerate; who is obedient, humble, teachable, intellectually virtuous; who is involved in the life of the church and reading the Bible for the purpose of being transformed. Your attitude and your willingness to be obedient are a crucial element of the interpretive process.
As Paul says, the things of God are “spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14). At the end of the day, the Spirit must reveal. It’s not just a matter of encountering content, it’s that the Spirit must open our eyes and hearts to see.
This doesn’t mean that non-believers can’t have insights into the Scriptures— that’s part of common grace. But to use Augustine’s language, the ultimate reading builds up love of both God and neighbor, the double-love, which is the deepest sense of Scripture. For that, the Spirit must be at work in us.
You advise that we approach the Bible with wisdom, not only hearing the words of God, but acting upon them (Matt 7:24-27). This seems to relocate wisdom from the realm of dry axioms to a living and vibrant faith. How does Jesus embody this kind of wisdom?
I think it’s important to start with a really clear distinction between two ideas, knowledge and wisdom. They do overlap, but they’re not the same thing.
“Knowledge” is a cognitive reality. We might think of it in terms of acquisition—we didn’t know something, and then we did. But the Bible uses “knowledge” in a bigger sense, what we might call “wisdom.”
Wisdom is a knowing that is personal, relational, transformational, and practical. It’s the language that’s used for describing sexual relationships, knowing someone. The whole Bible is wisdom, with Jesus being the incarnate version of it. It is the invitation to learn to see and be in the world in a way that promises true human flourishing—learning to inhabit the world in a way that promises life.
Jesus says in John 10:10, “I have come that you may have life, and have it abundantly.” He’s offering us what we long for, how to find shalom. How to find what the Greeks called eudaimonia or makarios-ness—how to find true human flourishing. That’s wisdom.
On a more academic side, I can recommend a book from my friend, Jeff Dryden, called A Hermeneutic of Wisdom: Recovering the Formative Agency of Scripture—a really thoughtful book about how to think of the whole Bible as wisdom.
You write that “The Gospels are a deeply profound and universally wide theological message embedded in the most powerful medium, that of a story”(146). How would it affect our reading of Scripture to understand ourselves as characters in that story?
Stories are the most powerful medium because they’re comprehensive, and they allow us to live life vicariously. They either help us to articulate and make sense of what we have experienced, or they enable us to see and grow from something without having to experience it.
However you calculate it, the vast majority of Scripture comes to us in narrative form. That’s surprising to us at first, because while we think of the Bible as a set of theological truths and moral imperatives, it’s primarily an invitation to vicariously see how to inhabit the world, for our flourishing or destruction.
One of my favorite quotes says this:
By telling a story, a book is radically simpler than lived experience. The writer omits a huge amount of detail that could have been included. In the plot, we move from one important moment directly to the next, whereas in life there are endless sub-plots that distract and confuse us. In a story the key events of a marriage unfold across a few dozen pages. In life, they are spread over many years and interleaved with hundreds of business meetings, holidays, hours spent watching television, chats with one’s parents, shopping trips and dentist’s appointments. The compressed logic of a plot corrects the chaos of existence: the links between events can be made much more obvious. We finally understand what is going on. (The Meaning of Life)
I love that—“the compressed logic of a plot corrects the chaos of existence.” This is the power of story—clarity. The reality of life is super complicated and you can’t really understand while you’re in the midst of it. Stories help us make sense of the world and our own lives.
Here’s another great quote from Karen Swallow Prior’s On Reading Well: “The purpose in reading a novel...is not to find definitive answers about the characters. It is rather to ask definitive questions about ourselves.” I think the two questions that really drive our interpretation and engagement with Scripture are “what does this teach us about God?” (revelation), and “what does this teach us about ourselves?” (identification). If you get ahold of those two questions, in that order, they will serve you well in reading the Bible wisely.
What advice would you give a seminary student who wants to retain the simple faith of her mother-in-law while growing in her understanding of Scripture? On the other hand, what advice would you give to an eager roomful of “mother-in-laws”, who love the Lord with all of their heart, but not necessarily all of their mind?
Knowledge is great, but be aware that it puffs up. Don’t let your head outpace your heart. Be regularly involved in serving others. The activity of pouring yourself out—whether that’s discipling a jr. high kid or sitting with a shut-in or speaking to a homeless person—those things will keep your theology and learning real.
You want to be a river, not the Dead Sea. The problem with the Dead Sea is that there’s plenty of input, but there’s no output, so it becomes undrinkable.
The second group? I’d say that while not everyone is called to be teachers in the church, everyone will find benefit from learning to study the Bible better. There are great books to help you do that. I don’t know that you could do much better than my friend Jen Wilkins’s book, Women of the Word. I’m also writing one right now called Come and See, which is meant to be an accessible guide to how to read the Bible well.
Imagine you sat by a stranger on an airplane who confessed that he’d never had any desire to read the Bible and knew nothing about Jesus. If you could give him a Bible bookmarked with a specific starting place for him to read, where would you put that bookmark—and why?
The Gospels. They’re the center of the Bible—God’s final revelation coming to us in a person, not just a book. The books that most clearly speak to us about that person are the four biographies about him (or the biography in four voices).
So which one? The church has indicated with its order of the canon that Matthew should start off our reading about Jesus and I don’t think that’s a bad thing!
But the church has also recognized that John, in some ways, is the easiest access point. What the fathers often said about John was true—it’s shallow enough for a child to wade in while simultaneously being deep enough for an elephant to swim in, the easiest and also the hardest to understand.