Welcome to our podcast! We’re two brothers, Daniel and Zach, who decided to read each chapter of the Bible together and take the time to really examine and enjoy the text. Through this podcast, we invite you to join us on our journey.
Though many people in my (Daniel) life took the Bible seriously, and though my life was immersed in it, I didn’t find myself reading it often. I occasionally felt compelled to dig in. I might stumble onto some of the more fantastic stories, and that was often fun. But then I would hit something like Leviticus, and I would immediately lose interest.
I grew up among people who talked a lot about the Bible. We lived in a city that included many churches, where people read from and heard the Bible. Our city was located in a state that prides itself as being part of the “buckle” of the “Bible Belt.” That state is in the center of a country that has, for its entire history, been made up of a majority of people who would call themselves Christian, and, therefore, value the Bible.
The Bible inspires. But it also confuses, challenges, and offends. The Bible is a messy, complex collection of “stories, poems, and other people’s mail” that have been held together by a community and used to nourish it as it seeks to love God and love one another.
Many of us, though, probably do not devote as much time to reading the Bible as we would like or as we think that we should. We get busy; the Bible gets weird; the Bible doesn’t seem to be doing anything for our lives.
I have a Ph.D. in Theology, with a focus on the Old Testament. But even for me, reading the Bible can become a chore. Zach and I were talking about this fact one day. In a moment of self-awareness, we realized how infrequently we have slowed down enough to read the Bible closely.
In light of that, we challenged ourselves: we would commit to having a conversation on every chapter of the Bible. We don’t plan to answer every possible question. We just want to have a conversation as we read the text together. Sure, this will be challenging. And even if we met together every week to discuss one chapter, it would take somewhere around twenty-two years! This is no small commitment. But if we take the Bible seriously, as we say we do, we feel like we should read it and talk about it.
Since we committed to that, we thought, “Why not record it and invite others to join us on the journey?” We thought that there might be others out there who, like us, would love a non-threatening space to read the Bible honestly and openly.
With that in mind, we welcome you to The Good Book Podcast. We invite you to join us on this journey. We do not promise that all of your deepest questions will get answered. In fact, you might come out with more questions than you brought in! But along the way, we hope to have the opportunity to grow into better, kinder humans. We hope to treat the Bible, as Walter Moberly said, “not as a fortress to be defended, but as a mansion to live in, to explore, and to invite others into.”
You can find our podcast episodes on these major podcasting platforms:
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