Facing the Canon with Andrew Ollerton

hi i'm jay john welcome to my youtube channel my guest on facing the canon is andrew ollerton from the bible society to inspire us to treasure the bible [Music] andrew allerton welcome to facing the canon thank you john great to be with you i'm delighted that you're here well andrew let's tell us a little bit about yourself where did you grow up well i grew up uh just outside we're not far from here actually just outside london in surrey so uh in the uk um and uh my father was actually a pastor of a church so um i was generally intended to go along to that as well but to be honest i love playing rugby so i spent the best part of my childhood and teenage years on the rugby field you know faith was part of that journey but uh it kind of developed into a personal thing i think i certainly in those early years it wasn't my thing i don't i don't if you know what i mean by that but yeah he was i was brought up in it but it was very second hand yeah um so that was part of my journey yeah you had to personalize it receive it for yourself when would you say that happened well i had to get in trouble to be honest before i say sometimes life has these moments of crisis and they're good for us aren't they and i remember the slight crisis which was rather awkward was that the church my father was leading uh there was a youth camp you know when you sort of go away and i was sent home early for bad behavior from this youth camp for i seem to remember climbing over the roof into the girls dormitory so we won't go into the detail of that but uh being sent home from that was a low point but actually it woke me up i think i realized you know because i really um really displeased my parents obviously uh but also i just felt what am i doing you know i was about 15 at the time and um i also just was grappling with this issue around as i had my 16th birthday i remember just grappling with like am i gonna try and just please other people i was a real people pleaser i think particularly in terms of the rugby i wanted to be in the first team and then i wanted to be um the person that you know scored the tries and i don't know it was not a good i realized i wasn't in a good place and so that crisis kicked me into a bit of a change and i remember actually i remember and this is quite a vivid memory for me i remember for the first time actually sitting in church and listening like that was no that was no that was a big deal i'd been to church every week but i'd never really listened for myself age 16 i started listening to my father's sermons this is the ironic thing he was the preacher and i started actually paying attention and that was a real turning point for me because i realized uh well i felt god was speaking to me you know you know that transition of the human voice and then you guys there's another voice within that human voice that's that's speaking deeper and so that really transforms i got baptized when i was 16 um to show that i was heading a new course now you work for the bible society yeah what's your role within the bible society well um i'm i'm effectively involved in communications like how do we communicate the bible in the most compelling way creative way possible bible society is amazing organization i don't know if you you know know the history tell us a little bit about it well it all traces back to a young welsh girl called mary jones or mary jones as they would say in wales and she was wanted a bible this is back in 18 around 1800 she wanted a bible she couldn't get one um and so she walked a marathon 26 miles legend has it barefoot barefoot in north wales to get a bible and the minister thomas charles in in a place called balor where i actually spent my year out will maybe come onto that but balor is this lovely little quaint town in north wales she walked there to get a bible he'd sold out but he was so moved by this girl i mean who would why would someone have to do that to get a bible so he gave her his own copy but i suppose we all have those moments where we see something and in that seeing we get called into it and it's like he he obviously had a moment where he just thought well this has to change and and i'm not going to rest so he was quite well connected in london he came and um along with others famously william wilberforce founded the british and foreign bible society so founded in 1804 british and war and bible society has gone on then to expand globally its mission if you think back to that story was how do we translate and distribute the bible and for a couple of hundred years that was definitely valid that was the big cause but of course things have changed you know the digital revolution has caused change and so now our mission is increasingly not only how do we continue to translate and distribute copies of the bible but given that you can access it as a free download on your phone the real mission now is so how do you help people understand it like how do we how do we make sense of it in our modern age and and help people realize it's worth bothering with the bible absolutely my job you might think is really just helping people realize it's worth bothering with the bible and your new book uh the bible a story that makes sense of life and this has just come out um first of all let me let's talk a little bit about the bible how do we know that it actually is the word of god well uh we don't do we let's be honest the the reason we we believe that we don't know that in any sort of sense that you can put that in a test tube and prove it but we've come to believe that and i think that's important that the bible can be dismissed as merely a human book and many people do but as you journey into the bible as you experience it for yourself i think so many of us have reached a different conclusion and that's that's there's an element of faith involved there you can't test you prove the bible it's not a mathematical puzzle or a scientific problem it's it's a matter of trust and the reason i trust the bible to be not just human words but it's worth remembering it is it is human words it's 100 human you know humans around 40 different authors over many centuries uh actually penned the put pen to paper or the equivalent parchments sure and constructed this thing that we call the bible and many others humans have then been involved in compiling it and and editing it and bringing it to what it is today so it's a thoroughly human thing and we'd say under the inspiration of the holy spirit well exactly and that's that's where faith comes in isn't it because you can either just say well that's just human ideas but then my response to that is well have you actually read it because when you read the bible and particularly when you see how something that should logically keep contradicting itself i mean if you think about 40 different authors compiling something over hundreds of different years the idea that that would have coherence well you can't explain that unless there's something almost miraculous going on there has to be absolutely so you can explain it away as human until you actually read the thing and then you realize wow it's it's like hyperlinked you know it's it's this bit prophesies forwards and tags to this bit well how on earth did that happen and so for me sometimes it's the incredible prophecies that's some of the evidence i think obviously at the heart of the scriptures is jesus christ and what he thought of the the hebrew scriptures that he had i mean that's compelling isn't it he speaks about the scriptures as the word of god and so these these are the things that when you you can dismiss it but then to dismiss the bible i think you just have to make sure you never actually read it but once you start reading the thing it it gets a hold of you and it begins to make sense in a way that no other text does and so my journey with the bible has not been a simple one if i'm very honest i think there are times where i struggle with it i still grapple with it i still got plenty of questions about it but i am persuaded from many readings of it from much study of it that the best explanation for what we have when we hold the bible is that whilst multiple human writers are its explanation in terms of the material realm behind all of that god was bringing together through the inspiration of the holy spirit his word that brings life today and so that's my persuasion and i realize that you know many will disagree but i'm convinced in fact the more i engage with the bible the more convinced i become not because it's easy but because i can't find a better explanation for how the whole thing makes sense when we're reading the old testament and we're wading through all this history and data and how many people and how many sacrifices it is quite hard isn't it wading through it but obviously it's in the holy scriptures because there are principles there that are timeless for us uh but sometimes there's a bit of a confusion as to well what's the relevance of the book of chronicles for example yeah they're absolutely it's funny you mentioned chronicles my son uh who's now 10. he um a few couple of years back he he announced that he was going to read the bible and i actually tried to dissuade him i said well don't start at the beginning you'll never make it you know you know start with jesus kind of thing which is advice i give and i stick by that advice but he was like well no you don't start a book in the middle dad you start a book at the beginning that was obviously so it's so clear and so he begins insurances anyway um i've still got a little note in my little post-it note that he's stuck on my desk and it just says um dad i'm finding it confusing in one chronicles that was what he said in the note and um so i think and i my response to that note was well you and me both son you know there's plenty of things i mean one chronicles you you mentioned it begins the first eight chapters this is enormous genealogy isn't it yes um this incredible list of names and you feel like why am i reading the hebrew telephone directory yeah but i think um a couple of things i think with that particular instance actually what that genealogy is doing is it's it's a narrative device to take hold of one incredibly large story and sum it up in a very short space and that's very important because i think one of the things we often fail to do with the bible is we fail to read it in the light of the larger story so we take one piece of the jigsaw one isolated jigsaw piece makes little sense held in isolation but frame it by that larger story and the individual piece starts to make sense so i think these genealogies the best way i've thought to read them is this is the writer wanting me to remember that as i read the small stories there's this massive story unfolding and if i could just take the small story and read it in the larger the bigger in the light of the bigger story this will really make sense now i know even when you do that there's some hard work there's some not every page of the bible is going to rock your world you know and i often say that to students that i teach it's part of it i think is we actually have to give time and attention to the history yes and almost recognize in this history is something very ancient and very significant in other words it's not that god has suddenly dropped a download he's worked something out over an expansive period of time and we're part of this enduring covenant story of god's people now when it comes to the old covenant it's called that for good reason yes we have to read it remembering that's not our covenant that's not our chapter of the story we're part of the same story but that's not our chapter and i found that helpful because there are some things that as you rightly say they still give great wisdom really important principles for life but they're not laws for us in exactly the same way as they were if you were wandering in the wilderness with the israelites and re reading it so that it's our story but not our chapter has been helpful for me now um many times i myself and i know others we we've claimed promises that we've read in the old testament and personalized them for ourselves right but those promises were given to a particular people or to a particular person are we able just to take out little one-liners and encourage ourselves in our journey of faith is that right to do is it wrong to do well i'd slightly change i'd say are we able i think god is able right so one of the things that surprises me about the bible god is able to take or god is able to work through a text that we've taken in a perhaps not intended kind of way and still speak to us through it so i think i almost with the bible never want to put a lid on what god can do but in terms of what we should do i think we need to be careful and it's one of my concerns is i think too often we read the bible in a very fragmented and individualistic way we we almost are snatching at it to say i need some pick-me-up or i need some encouragement what have you got and there's the sort of random and fragmented way of reading the bible i think isn't largely helpful for god's people i think we have to be more sensitive to reading the bible on its own terms so if it's if it's capturing the ancient story of israel in the wilderness we need to ask two questions i always think it's my encouragement what and now what right so the what question is well what did this mean back there and then and if i pay attention to that and i give time to well what was the context then where does this fit in the bible story as a whole and what did this cultural tradition or this spiritual tradition mean if i'm paying attention and prepared to sort of journey back with the what question i can more accurately then ask the now what question so what did it mean back there and then now what does this mean for me here and now and i think so so my answer is i absolutely believe all the history all of scripture is god-breathed and is profitable useful for teaching so i'm absolutely convinced of that but i think sometimes we have to almost pay it due respect go back in our thinking what did it mean back there and then and then it reveals itself now what what does it mean for me here and now and i think that still really holds yeah now what about when we come across we're reading and it appears that certain things contradict each other um and we can't figure them out you know like the resurrection you know you read from different gospels and it's like wait a minute is there a contradiction here what do you do when you face those issues really honest isn't it to just face that because you know the bible is this complex naughty as i say as i said earlier it's i think it's extraordinary the coherence and harmony that it has so if you think about what's going on with the bible written over but 40 different authors are a huge period i mean i often say to people if you if you walked into your local library and someone said to you yeah there's many different authors in this library but it all forms one big story you'd be like that's impossible how could you poss you know how could that how that's that doesn't work but with the bible it works so so i'm most surprised by the harmony coherence but there are moments where you stumble into something you think hang on a minute um how does that correlate you know sometimes it's the with the gospel sometimes it's the nativity stories people pick up on the bethlehem narrative yes and then as you rightly say at the other end of jesus of jesus life or the beginning of his new creation life there's the resurrection stories and how do the appearances cohere a couple of things i think i would say firstly the gospels are quite unique perspectives on the life of jesus from different angles and it's well documented that when any eyewitnesses see the same event from different angles they will pick up on different details and that isn't necessarily that they're contradicting each other or that they're fabricating the event not at all it can just mean that they have picked up on details that to the to the person who saw it that's what they saw from a different angle they they they focused in on something else and i think what that means then is when the gospel writers who were not um they were not writing history as we think of it they were not writing history almost like a cctv camera i'm just going to describe what happened this is the gospels are not an ancient cctv camera the gospels are testimony they are yes um they are a message john says i've written these things that you might believe that jesus is the christ now that doesn't mean they're unreliable but it does mean that they are not telling us everything that happened in exactly the sequence that it happened they're telling us the headlines of what we need to know about who jesus is and how we can have faith in him so all that to say i stumble into things i'm still grappling with some questions but i fundamentally come to a place where i'm convinced that even if i can't dot all the eyes across all the t's the scriptures themselves cohere they have harmony and we can trust them and i totally believe and agree with that myself as i've grappled of course it you know like the gospels it's like god speaking quadrophonically isn't he yes through four different speakers and giving us different angles now what about take a book like the book of revelation you know it's just i love reading it and i i actually read it every year um but very hard to really understand and sometimes we're trying to put our own human understanding into it do you think maybe with a book like revelation we've just got to hold it more lightly rather than feel we've got to interpret it oh it's a good question it's a naughty one revelation i love it as well actually i love grappling with it i think but part of what's going on with revelation is that um we're the the the visions are giving us uh insights into realities i like this little phrase that are quite literally out of this world right now of course if you're going to do that you've got to bring comparison points and symbolism and all the things that revelation brings because you can't literally again you can't literally sort of show people this is what i'm talking about it's a john is seeing visions of things that that are beyond our human understanding and yet he's wanting to capture through these visions what we need to know and distill it in ways that we can relate he's a brilliant communicator so symbolism is one of the things that often trips people up in revelation but the symbolism and the apocalyptic that we call revelation apocalyptic an apocalypse is just a greek verb meaning to unveil or i mean it's like um when you open the curtains in the morning and i think revelation opens the curtains on what's on two things predominantly what's going on in the heavenly realm right now because we only ever see this earthly realm and we can roughly work out what's going on here and many of much of that is disturbing and for john's readers in the first century what they saw on their side of the curtain was deeply disturbing they were a very persecuted people the early christians so in opening the curtains and showing them the throne of god and the one who looks like a lamb now enthroned in glory he's saying to them i want you to know on the other side of the curtain jesus christ is lord let that you know so jesus often says in these visions do not be afraid it's like you you don't need to be afraid if you've glimpsed the other side of the curtain now of course you've not seen everything on the other side and nor could we but we've seen enough to know that jesus is lord over the challenges we and the uncertainties we face and a friend of mine actually at university he read the new testament on his journey to faith and uh he read revelation and he just had that i mean a few people have said equivalence but he basically just said i really have i'm very confused by this but i understand that jesus is the king you know and i think well that's probably pretty much what you needed to know so that's it so yes we grapple with some of the complexities but know that above all of the turmoil jesus is king that's what's happening now revelation also is the culmination of the bible story and it also shows us what will happen in the end and i think we humans we are hope oriented creatures right we need to know that there is a future worth living for or we lose the will to live right and revelation is saying there is a future worth living for so don't miss in grappling with a smaller detail don't miss the big vision there's something coming our way that is worth living for definitely now um i i follow the robert murray mcshane bible reading plan and um if you stick with that uh in one year you'll read the old testament once the book of psalms twice and the new testament twice in a year and that's why i really like it you know reading four chapters a day what's your personal bible reading schedule how do you do it well it's actually a bit less robust than that well done i um my wife charlotte and i we we tend to read an extract of the new testament in the morning together um one year so we read through the new testament together as a couple and pray and then the old testament the next year so we sort of oscillate between those two that's what we do as a couple but then i tend to in addition to that would often if we're reading the new testament together i'd be reading through the old testament myself as well um but we've also got kids right so we're on this journey where we're reading together as a couple i tend to read a bit on my own and then we're seeking to bring our kids on the journey which is fun and they asked some interesting questions along the way you know how many concubines do you have so we we tend to engage them in reading the bible in different ways sometimes we read through a gospel some we've actually recently been taking them through the big story of the bible in 40 sessions so there's different ways to do it what i also like to so i like the bite size just like yourself i like the daily content i actually as well as bite size i like to binge as well yeah i like so recently i just on a starry night i just read through the book of romans yes and i just found it utterly inspiring you know it's like uh we we were wild camping actually so and the kids had fallen asleep and under the starry sky i just read romans by torch i just thought this is tremendous but some of these letters were were written to be read in one sitting and they they have a power when you read them through so i like to bite size and i like to binge i like that so much you know sometimes we binge don't we on a tv series exactly i think we need to pick up on your little phrase there why don't we binge on the bible i know definitely another thing you've come up with is the bible course yes now tell us about the bible course well the course um originated back when we were living back in in cornwall and we were helping ordinary people get into the bible basically and realizing that for many new christians particularly they we we stumble our way into this thing and we want it because the holy spirit gives us a desire and appetite but nevertheless it's a large and confusing book the bible so the bible course effectively takes people on a journey through from genesis to revelation over eight sessions and it's a mix of video content and group discussion work so the bible courses if you like a slightly deeper dive showing how it all fits together the book i've more recently written is if you like a slightly more inspiring and i mean the sub subheading the bible a story that makes sense of life i wanted to show having published the bible course and almost helped people answer more the kind of where does leviticus fit in kind of questions i wanted to publish a book that said but why would i bother with the bible in the first place like why is this not just dust the old history how is this my story how does this resonate with who i am as a human being and so with the book it's actually in bite-sized chapters um 40 bite-sized chapters that take you through the story of the bible but it's trying to do these two things at once here's how we can make sense of the bible right so that's what the book is doing yes and here's how the bible makes sense of us and i felt like that's that's what we need to bring together so often our resources either make sense of the bible and that's a great thing to do but they kind of leave it there or we write our books and our content around how can i live life well and i wanted to bring those together and say when we make sense of the bible the bible makes sense of us so understand this narrative of scripture not as just israel's story think of it like russian dolls you know you imagine if you've ever played with russian dolls or a nest of tables you've got the one story but hidden inside that story is another story and israel's story of exodus is our story of freedom right when you understand it in the light of jesus this isn't just something that happened in the wilderness this is our human quest for freedom playing out and we understand through israel what real freedom is and how we can experience it through through jesus so the bible course is a sort of slightly deeper dive the book is a much more personal guide but both of them are trying to do the same thing and and that little slogan is what i've really come up with it's kind of the heartbeat of for me it's my passion is when we make sense of the bible the bible makes sense of us and you bring those together great strap line so for you andrew sum up for us why we should read the bible dig into the bible today why should we do that i could give so many reasons i want to be precise and focused and i want to say this if you will keep going with the bible the bible will keep you going and i think that's an important understanding now in other words you've got to keep going with the bible it's not just going to happen for you it's not easy we're not pretending that it is but the bible is a resource that keeps us going if we keep going with it you know if if your bible is worn out you won't be and all these kinds of things i'm sure you said before james maybe i'm even quoting you back to yourself absolutely and i believe it's true i really do i believe it's true that you just you look at even statistically research has demonstrated that when christians have a pattern of engaging meaningfully with the bible they can weather the storms of life and they can flourish in every season psalm 1 puts it this way doesn't it blessed is the person blessed is the man or woman uh who's whose trust is who does not sit in the way of sinners or in the way of mockers but his delight is in the law of the lord and on that law he meditates day and night and then it says and he is like a tree planted by streams of water which yields its fruit in season and its leaf will not wither whatever they do prospers and i think well that's really describing someone who's pitched their life rooted into the bible god's word and they can flourish even in those seasons where there's droughts they have a source of strength you can't see it on the surface but their their roots are deeper than you can see that's the person who's embedded their life in the bible so if you keep going with the bible the bible will keep you going through all of life's challenges and ultimately it will guide us safely home amazing and our mem andrew allerton thank you so much for joining us on facing the canon my pleasure thanks john well i'm inspired i'm passionate about the bible but talking to andrew i'm even more passionate about the bible we really do need to take the bible seriously and we need to dig into it for a time such as this consider getting andrew's book if you're a church leader consider doing the course in your church the bible is the only book that we can read along with the author what a thought thank you for joining us on facing the canon please join us again [Music] you

Channel: J.John

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Keywords: j.john, jjohn, philo trust, philo, Christianity, Christian, Jesus, God, Bible Society, Inspiration, Bible Reading, How to read the bible, Facing the Canon, J.John on Sundays

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Length: 28min 30sec (1710 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 31 2021