Today will wind up what I have to share on the overall theme of Reading the Bible. Mind you, reading the Bible is a lifetime task, privilege, challenge, and great joy – so we’re not done. Actually everything I ever send out on any topic via these emails is informed by my life of delving into and reflecting upon Scripture.
My new friend and theologian Kevin Vanhoozer, in his great new (highly academic but marvelous) book Mere Christian Hermeneutics, compares Bible reading to a mysterious episode we find in the Bible itself: Jacob struggling or wrestling through the night with a stranger. Is it an attacker? An angel? God himself? Jacob holds his own, somehow.
At one point in the tussle, Jacob grabs the stranger, thinking God is somehow in all this, and declares “I won’t let you go unless you bless me.” Keep reading the Bible, don’t let it go until you are blessed. And blessed again. And again. When the story ends, of course, the sun is rising – a powerful image. The God who started everything with the words “Let there be light” is in every sunrise, every glimmer of hope. And then the Bible ends with Revelation – when everything isn’t merely lit, but actually light.
Many churches in worship do what we do off and on but should do always? Right before reading Scripture, there is a “prayer for illumination.” We pray for light, for a miracle: that by reading and listening those black and white, verbalized words will actually become for us God’s voice, and we will not only hear but also see God’s glory. We need help to hear and see what God is trying to say to and be for us.
James K.A. Smith says this prayer for illumination “challenges our confidence in self-sufficient reasons. We train ourselves in a stance of reception, dependence, and humility.” I love the Kenyan prayer my friend George Ragsdale always prays before he preaches: “From cowardice that dare not face new truth, from laziness that is contented with half truth, from arrogance that thinks it knows all truth, Good Lord, deliver us.”
Pray that before you read the Bible. As Vanhoozer wisely puts it, “Illumination involves restoring readers to their right senses, not dispensing new information.” I’m not gathering new thoughts so much as I’m letting God re-orient me so I recall how to us what’s sort of a sixth sense, a spiritual sense, the ability to perceive the glory of God.
One last thing. When I was in seminary, three different professors within a week quoted the 4th century theologian Athanasius, making me wonder if they’d chatted about it over lunch or a beer: “For the searching and right understanding of the Scriptures, there is need of a good life and a pure soul. Christian virtue guides the mind to grasp the truth concerning God. One cannot possibly understand the teaching of the saints unless one is trying to imitate their life. Anyone who wishes to understand the mind of the sacred writers must first cleanse his own life and approach the saints by copying their deeds.”
Before hearing these words, I’d thought you’d read the Bible and, hopefully, because you’d read and got it, you’d live a little differently. Athanasius reorders things. Start living the life. Be or at least strive to be holy and pure – doing already and living like the things you’re about to read in Scripture. Then, in a fully embodied and participatory way, you understand, you grasp more – and then you live even more differently, readier then to understand even more.
Thank you for joining me in this journey. This series hath ended – but there will always be more emails!!