Reading both critically and spiritually

I think it is essential that we integrate our critical thought with our spiritual discoveries.

“A fruitful interplay exists between the informational [critical thought] and formational [spiritual receptivity] modes. We must have a certain level of information about the biblical passage, some sense of the meaning of the text in its original context, some sense of what God was saying to the intended readers before it can become formational” (Mulholland 61).

I have often thought the true power of the Word of God is when we let it be his true Word and not what we would like it to be. For me this has meant looking at the text using all the Bible study methods at my disposal to try to determine what God is trying to say through this author.

I have found that I am never satisfied with my studies for a sermon until the text has mastered me, breathed new life in me and destroyed me. This has often proved itself to be difficult work, and I often have found myself asking God if I missed the mark in choosing this text because it hasn’t yet shaken me to the core. He impresses on me that the good seldom comes easily and I keep on: reading, rereading, even before I knew what lectio was, until he gets my attention. The text then takes on the spiritual force of true scripture to my soul.

The Spiritual side also must inform the critical study. Barbara Bowe in her book, takes a much more liberal view of scriptures than I do. She betrays her demythologizing tendencies with her reference to the Sea of Reeds (as opposed to the Red Sea), but does it really matter? She still sees and demands the spiritual force of the text to remain.

The understanding of the Bible as being scripture before textbook has allowed me freedom as I have matured. I grew up a fundamentalist, and don’t get me wrong: technically I still am since I still believe in the verbal plenary inspiration of scripture. When I was eight or nine I remember sitting down at my dad’s typewriter one December to harmonize the birth stories in the gospels. When I went to college it still shocked and offended my sensibilities to think that Matthew may not have been the first gospel written, after all its the first one in the book! The understanding of the Bible as a sacred text, as scripture to bring formation and not, in the first place, information, helped me understand that each gospel writer had his message, inspired as it was, to present. Even in the way he ordered his stories served to form us! I loved this idea and by my senior year was really taken with synoptic studies. Form criticism (or as I like to say, formsgeschichte, mainly because it is fun to say) took its place as a powerful way to introduce to me the spiritual message of the evangelists.

Some more random thoughts on Spiritual Reading

Within my ministerial group we have an ongoing debate as to the importance of reading scripture durring a service. The Revised Common Lectionary provides four texts each Sunday. My friend Cliff, an ELCA pastor, is famous for calling us to read all four texts each Sunday.

"Faith comes by hearing," he reminds us, "and God's word will not return void."

Mulholland suggests inspiration has two sides, God breathing the Word to the authors and breathing it again to us a we hear it. The second part requires our attention. Like Joe suggests we must approach it with appropriate postures.

For me this often takes the form of unpacking the scripture, telling the story, or, to say it with it's peculiar title, preaching. Still I wrestle with how to help people attend to the scripture and, with the public reading of it, make it more than just informational or worse a time to zone out.

Perhaps ironically, it was learning to do exegesis that rescued me from informational reading of the scripture. In college I was trying to get through the Bible in a year and I was drying up. My dad sugested that I take the exegetical Bible study methods I had learned and was in love with and really get into the text.

I don't know that I was so much trying to master the text as I was trying to figure out what God was trying to say, and that was terribly formational for me. Exploring what was really intended by the scripture made sure I was hearing the word of God and not the information that reinforced my false self or as Mulholland put it my false word.

It's probably something my dad instilled in me, but I have always sensed the great responsibility to wrestle with the text. If it hasn't my life, how can my sermon change others? It is in the discovery and the journey that I find the ah-ha moment for myself, so I've tried to craft sermons that would bring the audience along the journey in some way. It would be grand if my meager trying would grown into a great wrestling of ancient Olympic proportions - well developed muscles straining...

But then does the Bible have any power apart from our wrestling with it?

If I had lay readers like other churches in the area, I think I'd like to get together with them and talk about the readings so we can get excited about them together.

It seems to me that the acedemic pursuit has well taught me to read informationally, or at least it demands it of me. My approach to a book is different when I have an agenda, and teachers and profs. for the whole of my academic career have seen fit and prudent to impose an agenda on my reading. The call it objectives and due dates and the like. Then they ask me to write a paper of my thoughts justified by the text. So naturally I approach a text, sometimes not even reading (not for this course certainly) just to find a quote or two to back my position. After our study doesn't all this sound repugnant.

The result is I have rarely enjoyed a book I was forced to read. Perhaps the greatest tradgety of my academic career was that I didn't get anything out of Celebration of Discipline the first time I read it as an assignment in class. Fortunately I had some aspiration of building a personal library and didn't sell it back to the book store. I've read it four times since then and what life it has brought!

This isn't the way I approach the novels I read at all. Isn't it ironic that those books that purport to change our lives we read for information and those that merely claim to entertain us can change our lives as we let ourselves be immersed in them. Makes me write the novel version of the Divine Conspiracy.

I keep coming back to the narrative quality of God's revelation to us. I was thinking today as I read Mulholland about the times when I read formationally and when I read for information.

Every night before I go to be I read a good novel to get to bed. I love some Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. Right now I am reading Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. These stories suck me in, I could be reading for hours. I read slowly (much more slowly than my wife) and I feel like I am part of the story for the time I am reading. I am immersed in it, baptized in the authors vision. I often find I am picturing the events from slightly above, as if I were standing on the desk with Robin Williams (like Keating in dead poets society).

I think that is what it is like to read formationally. As we engage our imaginations (I wonder if that is somehow intrinsically linked to our spirits) we make manifest the story in our inward parts.

moved by the music

Rhapsody in Blue has such emotion and force to it. I thought of how I get caught up in it, and imagine and feel what is going on. (I was drumming my fingers on the coffeetable at the time and actually hurt my middle and ring fingertips badly.) I think perhaps transformational reading catches us away like that. I sometimes find when I'm reading books that have the spiritual force, like Rhapsody has emotional force, I have to stop and get up and walk around. I am so caught up with ideas and energy that my soul cannot be still.

So perhaps formational reading is like this guy: completely amazed at the unforeseeable and unexpected power of this (cute) performance of Rhapsody in Blue.