Lectio divina: rehydrating the words of Scripture in our lives

Spiritual theologian Eugene Peterson:

There is a sense in which the Scriptures are the word of God dehydrated, with all the originating context removed – living voices, city sounds, camels carrying spices from Seba and gold from Ophir snorting down in the bazaar, fragrance from lentil stew simmering in the kitchen – all now reduced to marks on thin onion-skin paper. We make an effort at rehydrating them; we take these Scriptures and spend an hour or so in Bible study with friends or alone in prayerful reading. But five minutes later, on our way to work, plunged into the tasks of the day for which they had seemed to promise sustenance, there’s not much left of them – only ink on india paper. We find that we are left with the words of the Bible but without the world of the Bible. Not that there is anything wrong with the words as such, it is just that without the biblical world – the intertwined stories, the echoing poetry and prayers, Isaiah’s artful thunder and John’s extravagant visions – the words, like those seeds in Jesus’ parable that land on pavement or in gravel or among weeds, haven’t take root in our lives.

Lectio divina is the strenuous effort that the Christian community gives (Austin Farrer’s “formidable discipline”!) to rehydrating the Scriptures so that they are capable of holding their own original force and shape in the heat of the day, maintaining their context long enough to get fused with or assimilated into our context, the world we inhabit, the clamor of voices in the daily weather and work in which we live. But it takes more than an hour in the bucket to accomplish what is needed. Lectio divina is a way of life that develops “according to the Scriptures.” It is not just a skill that we exercise when we have a Bible open before us but a life congruent with the Word made flesh to which the Scriptures give witness. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that the word of God originated when “long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son. . . . Therefore we must pay greater attention to what we have heard . . .” (Heb. 1:1-2; 2:1; emphasis added). These are spoken words delivered to us by “so great a cloud of witnesses” (Heb. 12:1) and now written in our Holy Scriptures. It is the task of lectio divina to get those words heard and listened to, words written in ink now rewritten in blood.

– Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (pp. 88-89)

On not wanting to get involved with the God of the Bible

Spiritual theologian Eugene Peterson:

It is entirely possible to come to the Bible in total sincerity, responding to the intellectual challenge it gives, or for the moral guidance it offers, or for the spiritual uplift it provides, and not in any way have to deal with a personally revealing God who has personal designs on you.

Or to put it in the terms in which we started out: It is possible to read the Bible from a number of different angles and for various purposes without dealing with God as God has revealed himself, without setting ourselves under the authority of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit who is alive and present in everything we are and do.

To put it bluntly, not everyone who gets interested in the Bible and even gets excited about the Bible wants to get involved with God.

But God is what the book is about. C. S. Lewis, in the last book he wrote, talked about two kinds of reading, the reading in which we use the book for our own purposes and the reading in which we receive the author’s purposes. The first ensures only bad reading; the second opens the possibility to good reading:

When we “receive” it we exert our senses and imagination and various other powers according to a pattern invented by the artist. When we “use” it we treat it as assistance for our own activities . . . . “Using” is inferior to “reception” because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it.

That is why an awareness of what the church has formulated as the Holy Trinity is so important as we come to this book, the Bible. We read in order to get in on the revelation of God, who is so emphatically personal; we read the Bible the way it comes to us, not in the way we come to it; we submit ourselves to the various and complementary operations of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit; we receive these words so that we can be formed now and for eternity to the glory of God.

– Eat This Book: A Conversation on the Art of Spiritual Reading (pp. 30-31)

On my dysfunctional relationship with the Bible

One of the loveliest nights during my 15 month sojourn in the Twin Cities came on a Sunday evening as I left church. I had gotten into the habit of walking the mile and a half to church each week, even when temperatures were hovering around zero. It was a habit I enjoyed and often practiced with gratitude and never more than on this particular night. It was late February so the days had lengthened and it was just past twilight – not yet dark, but clearly evening. Snow fell gently the whole walk home, like Davidman’s snowfall in Madrid: “Softly, so casual / lovely, so light, so light.” The enchanting combination of soft blue light in the evening sky and the snowfall was one of the most intoxicating things I’ve known. I walked up and down side streets, cutting through alleys, noting the homes with basketball hoops or lights on so I could see inside – anything to slow the walk down, to make it last just a little longer. It may have been the most spiritually alive I felt during my time away from Lincoln. I can still picture the snow, the light, hear the slight crunching of my boots tramping through the snow. James Wright ended one of his best poems, A Blessing, with the incandescent line “Suddenly I realize / that if I stepped out of my body I would break / into blossom.” Remembering that night, I have no doubt the same was true for me, winter weather and sub-freezing temperatures be damned.

My pastor Ben calls these sorts of experiences “moments of contemplation.” They’re moments of contentment, wholeness and an unstained delight. I’ve known others: driving home from East High on a perfect spring day, listening to a jam band as the breeze blew in through the open window, grasping the depth of covenantal theology for the first time and immediately making myself a cup of tea and drinking it by the living room window, sitting and listening to a L’Abri friend play Eva Cassidy’s cover of Sting’s Fields of Gold. More recently, standing on the back deck of a local church’s property, smoking cloves and drinking a beer at my bachelor party with several of my Benne brothers. (That was moments before one friend, imitating Binny Hinn, reached out to “heal” another friend. The healee jerked his head away, causing his glasses to fly off and plummet 30 feet into the neighbor’s yard. We spent the next 45 minutes searching for them without success, a process that ended when one of us said, “I’ve never regretted the existence of Binny Hinn more than I do right now.”) Moments of contemplation I know. I know what it is to be content, to feel completed in a moment. Quoting from one of my favorite writers, “I think I know what it is… to be transported above and beyond myself into a world of ultimate reality with the angels and archangels and all the company of Heaven.”

Yet that last quote highlights a certain tension I’ve always felt. When Stott spoke those marvelous words, he was describing his experience of public worship with other Christians. My holy moments have almost never had such explicitly Christian overtones. Indeed, for most of my life attending church has either had no impact whatsoever on my spiritual health or has had a deleterious one. The same goes for regular private devotional practices such as Bible reading and private prayer. The church problem has been resolved in some small way: Grace Chapel. The Bible reading difficulty has proven more difficult.

During my youth, I spent seven years in the AWANA program, a midweek Bible-memorization program for kids from pre-kindergarten through middle school or high school. My best friend and I were always the insufferable youth group super heroes who memorized more verses and did so with greater alacrity than anyone else. And a big part of the satisfaction I drew from it consisted not only of the approval I gained from adults (bad enough) but from the awards given for memorizing verses. I loved filling up my uniform with crowns, badges, and pins quicker than anyone else. I loved the status of it, the superiority of it. (A recipe for a healthy relationship between myself and the Bible, this is not.) Adding to the baggage was a disproportionate emphasis on the importance of “quiet times” amongst youth group leaders and pastors. The unspoken message was that as long as you read your Bible every day, you were basically OK. You could be an asshole for Jesus (several of us were) but if you read your Bible you were good. Indeed, the more you read the Bible the more likely your priggishness was to be counted as “youthful zeal.” (How followers of Jesus could arrive at such a conclusion boggles the mind. But such is the nature of self-deception, I suppose.)

All of these factors have come together, producing a very deep struggle with the idea of regular personal devotions or even with feeling safe around people who thrive on such times. One of the more painful experiences I’ve had in Christian community came when, as a member of a small group, the group leader asked us what we felt would be best for our group to do the following spring. Before I could say, “Honestly, I don’t know any of you and if I’m going to feel safe with you, I need to know you. Can we have an unscheduled time of dinner or snacks where we just talk and get to know each other?” another person in the group began a line that any church burnout will recognize: “Honestly, I just really feel like I need more time in the Word. That’s such a struggle for me… if I could just have some accountability with that from the small group that’d be awesome. Maybe we should read a book of the Bible together.” Everyone in the room voiced their agreement with this person, leaving me feeling like the balding, fat 50 something dude at a meeting of 20-something super models talking about their struggles with anorexia. (And yes, there’s something cynical in my description of the event, that’s a fair observation. But it’s a cynicism learned over years of seeing people who practice regular “devotional” times but whose lives reek of sulphur. After seeing such things for the entirety of my Christian life, some cynicism seems inevitable. And yes, I know, read Dick Keyes’ book. I will. Promise.)

Yet for all this frustration and, admittedly, bitterness, I can still recognize the necessity of the Bible for the Christian life, which inevitably leads to the necessity of some sort of private Bible reading habit. I see in my other pastor, Mike, a remarkable ability to call to mind various texts and passages and apply them to specific situations. Part of that is Mike’s unique gift, of course, but part of it is also the product of long years of study and careful thought. I also remember the experience of seeing a group of Christians from rural Zambia receiving copies of the Bible for the first time. Some of them wept, nearly all hugged their Bibles tightly to their chests. I don’t love the book that way and yet we both worship the same God and belong to the same church. So why am I so cold toward the Bible? Partly, no doubt, I just explained why. But I suspect part of it also goes back to deeply immature parts of my spiritual life. (To be clear here, I don’t mean “religious” when I use the word “spiritual.” I mean the inner life, the realm of appetite and desire, longing and searching. The realm that masters like Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton and Andrew Murray have written of in such stirring terms.) So in search of a healthy – or perhaps functional would be nearer the mark – relationship with the Bible, I’m giving myself a couple measurable goals: First, I’m going to read the book of Acts. Second, I’m going to read Eugene Peterson’s Eat This Book. And, because I’m me, I’ll probably write about it. In my past encounters with Peterson I’ve found him to be a wise, careful, profound exegete of Scripture as well as an enormously gifted pastor. His Long Obedience in the Same Direction is a marvelous and important book I’d commend to anyone. Eat This Book is his book about “spiritual reading.” I’m trying my best to not approach the book as a kind of magic bullet, but simply as a useful guide which will, I hope, help me begin to move toward a healthier relationship with regular Bible reading. And even if the movement is slow and halting (it almost certainly will be), it’s positive movement, for which I’m grateful.

MLK Day Videos

First, MLK’s most famous speech, the I Have a Dream speech given in Washington in 1963. Below the jump, another MLK speech as well as some from Malcolm X.

Martin Bucer and the Question of Christian Unity, Ctd

Continued from part two.

As a result of these convictions, Bucer was generally the most ecumenically-minded of the reformers. His emphasis on love and dialogue made him an ideal “champion for protestant unity,” and motivated him to work tirelessly to unify the evangelical movement as a whole. His ecumenism also led him to work to unify with more Erasmian-minded Catholics in hopes of creating a state-wide German church, much like the Anglican church in terms of its relation to the state, but more evangelical in its doctrine. This ecumenical bent also manifested itself in a more irenic disposition toward those with whom he disagreed. This side of him will be seen as we now examine the nature and handling of his disagreements with the Roman church, with Luther himself, and with the Anabaptists.

Martin Bucer and the Question of Christian Unity, Ctd.

Continued from part one.

Martin Bucer and the Question of Church Unity

In the spring of 2009 I was fortunate enough to do an independent study on Martin Bucer with Dr. Amy Nelson Burnett. Dr. Burnett is one of the foremost scholars on the South German Reformation as well as a phenomenally-gifted teacher. One of my favorite memories of class with Dr. Burnett was one day when she walked into the lecture hall right as class was scheduled to begin. Slightly flustered she set her brief case down on a table, opened it, and began searching for her lecture notes. After about 30 seconds she said, “Well, I seem to have left my notes in my office… Eh, that’s OK.” She then went on to lecture for the next 75 minutes without ever consulting her notes. This was, by the way, a 300 level course. It wasn’t some introductory level class that an instructor could teach in their sleep. It was a meaty course on the history leading up to the Reformation and the years immediately after it began. The lecture, as I recollect, was on the role of priests in the 14th century church. And she spoke on it for 75 minutes without notes. (This is all to say that if you are a student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and you don’t take a class with Dr. Burnett you’re a fool.)

Over the next week or two, I’m going to publish the paper I wrote for her in installments. I’m going to begin today by publishing the introduction, which will begin below the jump.

The First Things/FPR Battle Royal

A few months ago Joe Carter of First Things said this:

Agrarian conservatives are charmingly anachronistic and mostly harmless since even they don’t take their ideas too seriously. (When the agrarian professors give up their tenure at Ivy League U, move back to the farm, and teach at Wendell Berry Community College, I’ll believe they mean what they say).

In a follow-up post he called it “poking gentle fun,” although none of the people being poked seemed to take it that way. Carter chalked it up to their humorlessness. This charge aimed at people who write for a site that posts Jason Peters’ essays – like this one titled “In Praise of Smartassery” – every week.

The Geography of a Study – Rochefort Trappist 8

On the east wall of our study are two bookcases, roughly six feet by two feet, that hold all Joie and my novels. They’re sorted alphabetically by author, beginning with Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and ending with Zamyatin’s We. The two shelves are about two feet apart with a six foot long board laid across the tops, bridging the gap between them. Along that board we’ve stacked our dictionaries, style guides and a thesaurus on one side and on the other we have several of our anthologies – a 1000 page literary theory anthology from my English 270 class at UNL, a couple American lit anthologies, the Kass’ Oar to Oar, and an early 20th century book about Nebraska given to us by a friend. In between those books is a clock with a picture of our Compassion child, a Tanzanian boy named Salum, and a row of beer bottles. The collection includes a couple European beers (including an absolutely fantastic hefeweizen from Munich), some beers from the Great Lakes region and a Newcastle bottle from the duplex’s all-day Lord of the Rings marathon a few years ago. To many, the collection will appear hap-hazard, like something you’d find in the recycling from an apartment of pretentious college-aged hipsters (which isn’t entirely inaccurate). But for us the bottles are anchors to specific memories.

Thomas Oden’s The African Memory of Mark – Introductions

Last fall I was generously given a review copy of Thomas Oden’s The African Memory of Mark from IVP. Unfortunately, shortly after receiving the book a number of things came up that kept me giving it the attention it deserved. As a result, Oden’s book has slipped through the cracks. But I want to dedicate a few posts to the book – and to Dr. Oden’s larger intellectual project, which is restoring African Christianity to its rightful place near the heart of the Christian tradition.

For this post, I’ll be leaning more heavily on Oden’s How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind because I think that book is necessary background for The African Memory of Mark. The basic conceit of the book is easy enough to predict: That Christianity has deep roots in the African continent and that, were those roots subtracted, the contemporary shape of Christianity would change dramatically.