Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: The following is a legacy recording from the archives of the C.S. lewis Institute. While the audio quality of these recordings may vary, the content remains vital to the mission of the Institute to develop disciples who can articulate, defend, and live faith in Christ through personal and public life.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Dear Father, we realize that you scatter much seed and as you reminded us in the parable of the Sower, the seed that simply is left on the pathway to be trodden down by the complacency and hardness of our heart.
And the seed that only struggles to survive in rocky places where our hearts are bitter and. And resentful.
And the seed that is often choked up by all our emotional concerns and preoccupations and the churning within our hearts that has no rest.
But Lord, we thank you that you do prepare good soil for good seed.
And we pray that we may in our own inner lives be like that ground that bears a hundredfold.
We ask thee then, to bless us in our meditation this morning through Christ our Lord.
Amen.
If I could share with you very succinctly in two, three sentences, really, what has been the pilgrimage of my own Christian life.
It has been, first of all a challenge to pray, and secondly, a challenge to read God's Word.
And the first challenge to pray was something that blocked me for many years until God showed me that if I'm meeting a unique person, I need the resources of prayerfulness for such an encounter.
And so prayer became something that one slipped into as one became a relational person.
And one then discovered that the life of friendship and the life of prayer really are like two wings that we fly with.
So that has been one reality. And last year we were focusing at this time on that theme of prayer.
But the other wing of one's life is the need to study God's Word, to meditate upon it day and night, and to make it part of one's whole life.
And this has been, again, another struggle that I've not found easy because I grew up as a scholar with a great deal of arrogance, like those who feel that they have to protect the ark of the Lord, keep it from falling over.
And so many of us read the Scriptures with an arrogance of rationalism. Oh, yes, of course, we realize that this is all archaic stuff, but.
And then we go on to explain how we bright, clever scholars are really understanding the Scripture.
And that's very inhibiting from really living by the word of God.
And we are in a real crisis today in the church because of that attitude.
So prayerlessness and a total misunderstanding of the way that the Scripture should be read are perhaps two of our primary problems, not only as they were for me individually and still are as I struggle, but also for the church as a whole, for the whole community of God's people in our generation.
And so, with a few years, whatever years the Lord may leave for me, I have these two passionate concerns.
To be a man of prayer and to be a man of the word.
Now, as I said learning to pray, I began to learn relational life. And I saw that prayer and friendship go together.
But I also discovered that by reading classics of devotion. And I began to translate and rewrite some of the material of these great classics in the past, as became this cool room for devotion in my life, I began to realize that the people that I was writing about or translating were people who had an ardor and fervency for God that I had never witnessed in my generation, I had certainly never experienced in my own heart.
And so, just as a friend can lead you to hold hands with God in prayer, so a friend that is a book can lead you to a devotional understanding of Scripture.
And so these have been the two introductions that I've had to the devout life, introduction of spiritual frame, friendship in prayerfulness, and the introduction through books of ardor and fervency that we perhaps may not have in our own cold, hardened hearts that will enable us to move forward in the ways of God.
So as we think this morning about devotional reading, I should have perhaps, instead of calling it the art of devotional reading, called it the spiritual disciplines of devotional reading, because the devotional attitude is one of very strong spiritual disciplining of our lives.
And devotional reading does demand then disciplines of devotion.
The reason why you're frustrated as you read the Bible and say, well, people make such a fuss about it, but really what does it mean? To me, it doesn't mean very much is perhaps because unless our hearts are changed to the Word of God, the Word of God may not mean very much to us.
So how do we enter into a devout attitude towards the Scripture?
I think we enter into a devout attitude towards Scripture when we realize it is the Alpha and the Omega of our existence.
John says at the beginning of his Gospel that this in fact is the affirmation and conclusion of his own life of faith, of life before God, that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
And as he reflects upon that statement and as we reflect upon the whole paraple of the Old Testament, we realize that what the Word has done, and constantly still does, is to uproot the lives of those who touch it, those who hear it, those who respond to it.
It's that call of God's Word that dramatically alters our ordinary existence.
It's the power of that Word that calls us to perform extraordinary tasks and to live radically different lives before we heard the Word of God.
And so, as we think of the way in which Moses was called by the Word of God from Ur of the Chaldees, that call not only radically changed his life, but the whole history of the human race.
The call that came to Moses to lead his people out of Egypt was again a radical transformation of his life.
It was that Word that uprooted the domestic life and behavior of the prophets so that they were never the same again.
It was that Word that ultimately gave Jacob a new name, a new character, that entered so deeply into his whole new identity.
And so, really, as believers, we have to recognize that this is foundational.
In the beginning was the Word.
And it's not only the beginning of human biography, it's the beginning of all things.
Because we read in Genesis chapter one that God spake, and indeed it was by the word of his power that he brought all things into being.
So the whole of that wonderful description of creation that we read off in Genesis chapter one is the recognition that all of reality owes what it is to the Word of God.
So the back of all ontology, back of all understanding of reality, is the reality of the Word of God.
Now, our dilemma is that never, perhaps in the history of man has there been an age that knows more about the Word of God.
There never has been an age that has more tools and skills and scholarship concerning the Word of God than we have today.
But we also have to add, and perhaps there never has been an age, therefore, that has been more disobedient to the Word of God, more misunderstanding of the Word of God than our society.
You see, our contemporary world of scholarship does not say that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Modern exegetes say, in the beginning was textual scholarship, and the Word was with the historical critical methodology, and the Word was humanly interpreted.
And we're suffering from the blight since the age of the Enlightenment, at the end of the 18th century, during the last two centuries, we've suffered from this blight of viewing the Bible like any other text that literary criticism and the object of historical scrutiny and the objectivity that we give to the Scriptures have in fact made It a dead letter for our generation.
And so the development of this kind of mindset has blinded us concerning the Scriptures themselves.
We talk about this whole methodology as the historical critical methodology.
And the operative emphasis, first of all, is it is critical.
That is to say that the dynamo and the motive and the drive for this view of Scripture is that it's to be viewed with all the assumptions of Enlightenment man, all the rationalism of contemporary man.
That is to say, it's an attitude that assumes that there are no miracles, that there's no supernatural, indeed there is no reality of the living God and of his personal acts and history.
For human reason has so presumed to be the final arbiter.
That if the mind of modern man can't accept it, then it's untrue.
If ever there was a bloated subjectivism in the name of objectivity, it's that attitude of the human race today.
And so these assumptions of modern outlook, of what scholarship says so and so indicates that man is the measure of things.
And of course, behind it all is the Greek assumption that the will and conscience are simply dictated to by reason.
And reason is what prevails.
It's critical. Then.
Secondly, it is historical.
And by this is meant, again, something that's very smudged because it overlooks a genuine historical faith to simply generalize about history or to generalize about mankind.
It's told about the historian Carl Becker, that he always went through life with irony on his pen and in his writing.
And the irony of Becker was that he realized what a hoax it was to talk about mankind, what a hoax it is to generalize.
Because in fact, history consists of the acts of specific individuals.
And the way that we generalize, which is part of our Greek mindset, to do so is likewise to view the Scriptures in terms of culture, historical trends, of societal changes.
But the specificity that God speaks to an individual, that acts in specific occasions, that performs particular miracles, is lost in that kind of philosophizing and generalizing.
It's what Pascal had to come to. The discovery that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Jacob is not the God of the philosophers.
That the God of the philosophers is an abstraction is historicism.
It's not the specific God of specific events at specific times in history.
And so one of the things that we have to say to this kind of historicism is. Is that when we view the Scriptures, we find mysteriously, pervasively, eventually, passionately, that Christ is in all the Scriptures.
And we'll come back to understanding in a minute what that means.
And so we have to make the following criticisms and objections to this way of reading Scripture.
What the assumption of these critical scholars is that they're looking for a canon within the canon of Scripture. And what they mean by this is that they want to be able to sort out what is the word of God from what are the scriptures of men.
And so they make a distinction between what is human and what is divine.
We discover that Scriptures really are a seamless garment that is one unity, and that it is humanly impossible for us to distinguish the one from the other. We misunderstand the nature of the material if we view it in this kind of way.
And so the Bible does not permit itself to be separated into a divine scripture and a human scripture, or between timeless truths and time bound truths.
And so you see the problem is that ultimately such an attempt is subjective. It's not as objective as they thought it was.
And thirdly, we can argue that revelation is much more than subject matter.
It's the rationalistic mind that assumes that revelation is merely cerebral.
Now the problem is that evangelicals, as much as liberal scholars have fallen for this.
And because the focus is so cerebral, then they're all hot in the collar about its inerrancy.
When people ask me if I believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, I say I believe much more than that.
Because inerrancy is a form of subjectivism.
The Bible is far more dynamic than simply being a kind of Quranic inerrancy like the Koran, like the Muslims view their own holy book.
The Bible is much more than simply a framework of write statements.
The Bible is dynamic, it's living, it's personal.
And consequently revelation is much more than subject matter.
The Bible in fact brings about a personal encounter with the will of God.
And so the suitability of method to subject matter is destroyed.
When we view the revelation of God merely rationalistically, it's much more comprehensive of our whole stance before him as persons before God.
A fourth criticism that we can make against this whole mindset is that the conclusion is established prior to the interpretation.
There's a methodology that's been set up in cast iron. It's a straight jacket that squeezes everything into its own mold. It's a Procrustean frame. Remember, Procrustes was the, in the Greek legend was the robber who fitted everybody to the size of his bed.
And so modern scholarship has done that with the Bible.
It's assumed that it's their interpretation that provides the right conclusions.
And so we cannot get into the text unless we are in empathy with the text.
What do you think about people who have such rigid views of you that the result is that you can't confide anything to them because they're not prepared to know you?
Their prejudices are such a strong frame against you that you can't begin to have any confidence in them.
And so if we approach the Bible with that prejudice of the modern mind, says so and so, and dictates so and so, then of course there's going to be no empathy, there's going to be no relationship in an understanding of the Scripture.
The conclusion has been established before the interpretation.
And fifthly, critique is not the appropriate way in which to deal with revelation.
In the Old Testament, the ear is very prominent in the physiology of a godly Israelite because he was above all a hearer of the Word. If in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, then in one's anatomy before God, nothing is more important than having the right ear to hear.
And so the appropriate stance for revelation is obedience and humility, not critique.
It's the stance of Job, which is to say, let me be corrected, Lord.
Let me realize how foolish I am, Lord.
Let me realize the limitations of my own logical powers of understanding.
So if God speaks, man can never stand on his own judgment.
Man can never remain independent.
What would we think of a patient who took the doctor's prescription and threw it away because he didn't feel like taking it?
We would say that man was not serious for health and for healing.
And so if likewise we decide that we don't like it, that it doesn't suit the modern mind, then we're doing the same thing with the scriptures.
In John 7:17 we read, if any man will do the will of God, he shall know the doctrine, whether it be of God or whether, says Jesus, I speak of myself.
And so we know God's Word through obedience to God's word.
That's the appropriate stance for a creature to have before a Creator to be creaturely.
There's no other stance possible for knowing God appropriately than to be submissive to the sovereignty of God.
And of course, when people say, well, of course this is a sacrifice of the intellect, it's intellectual suicide. It's being anti intellectual. And all the rest of it we have to say, not at all. It's a misunderstanding of objectivity, because true objectivity is appropriately knowing the nature of the object that we study.
So we view matter mechanically and we relate to people relationally, but we know God submissively.
In fact, this whole liberalism of scholarship, and indeed even in evangelical circles, the whole rationalistic framework with which we treat the Scriptures is in fact something that is a denial of the nature of revelation, which. And we'll say more about it on Friday.
So it means that we're taking an extra biblical position with extra biblical standards, and we've lost the key to an understanding of the Scriptures.
Nietzsche is reputed to have once said, it's terrible to die of thirst in the ocean.
And so we have to ask, do we salt the truth of God so heavily that it can no longer quench our thirst?
Today, in this generation, we're being robbed of the Scriptures because we've salted them all with human reason.
And there's a bankruptcy that occurs in our situation today. You might, if you're interested in this whole subject, read a popular little book by Walter Wink, W I N K entitled the Bible in Human Confrontation or, sorry, the Bible in Human Transformation.
And he talks about the bankruptcy of this whole attitude which is not commensurate with the intention of the text of Scripture, that it has reduced the Bible to a dead letter because it's an inappropriate way of reading the Bible and which draws the student into a false consciousness of error, because instead of being objective, it's irrational, it's not as rational as it thinks it is.
And so we find that the Bible then as a text for scholarship, is no longer a book of devotion.
It's no longer giving us the thought of God concerning the way we should be wise to living.
And so the real problems of actually having a living existence as persons in daily life, that is taken from us if the Scripture is given this perspective.
And so the Scripture in biblical study becomes a prey to technocracy.
It's simply regarded as a need for us to have techniques. And innocently today you'll read a lot of books on how to read the Bible, or you'll be told about the inductive method of reading or other things which appear very innocent and at one level appear to be just exactly what we need to have.
We want tools for Bible study. You know, we talk about that all the time.
And our bookstores are full. Christian bookstores are full of how to books, you see, but the how to mentality subtly determines its own inquiries according to its own own use of techniques. That's the blindness of technocracy.
You're caught into a box, into a circle where everything is self perpetuating in its reductionism, because all that techniques will determine is the direction of further inquiry.
So you want to turn switches and become an electrician theologically. So, all right, you could do that, but that's all. You remain an electrician.
You've lost the mystery of being a person.
And that's the danger of this mindset in a technological society today.
And another thing that we find, the dilemma of contemporary Christian life is that biblical criticism has become cut off from the believing community.
Look at the way in which the Bible is viewed as authoritatively understood only in theological seminary.
It's only understood by the experts.
And this whole question of expertise is handed down to us, you see, from the great expert in hermeneutics and exegesis in the seminary or in the university to begin with, so that the secular teachers in the university are looked up to by those in the seminary, and the MDIV students look up to their teachers in the theological college.
And then the church looks up to the seminary for its inspiration.
And we look up to our pastor for the only man who really knows how to give it to us in the church today.
And so the whole thing is really a delusion, and it has robbed us of the word of God.
There's somebody, tragically, who is today ministering in Houston, Texas, and I think of him as a man who will on Sunday morning turn the key in the Bible because he knows Hebrew, and he says the Hebrew is this and the Hebrew is that. And you sometimes wonder if it isn't. Like a friend of mine who is a young Presbyterian minister in London was a bit afraid as to the impression he was making. So he started saying, you know, the Greek is so and so.
And an old man, an old Highlander, said to him afterwards, oh, my son, my lady, I know the Gaelic as well as you do.
He was turning the wrong key and pretending that he had a knowledge that he did have.
But the attitude of that is that then the speaker or the teacher has a key that nobody else could turn. And so at the end of the sermon, it's locked up again, and you come back next Sunday morning for a further dose.
And meanwhile, you've been robbed of the scriptures, you've been cheated.
There's a hymn. I don't know who wrote it, but it's very poignant in what we're talking about.
It sings like God's own word must not be taken just as knowledge, but as life not alone God's thoughts conveying but himself to us as life not alone God's mind revealing, but his Christ is life within.
Not alone the teaching giving, but experience of him.
It is only knowledge to Us, if we in the letter read.
But when reading in the Spirit, it is truly life indeed.
All the knowledge in the letter only brings us into death.
But the Word in spirit taken gives to us the quickening breath.
If we miss the Lord in Scriptures, it is just as knowledge vain.
But when Christ we touch within it, then his life we may obtain.
When we read the Lord not touching, tis but mental stimulus.
But when Christ we touch by reading, it becometh life in us.
All the knowledge of the Scriptures into life must be transformed.
All the mental understanding must become the life received.
All the knowledge of the letters in the Spirit be conceived.
Just attach the word. For knowledge is to take the very way by which Eve was lured by Satan and by knowledge led astray.
But as life to take the Scripture is the tree of life to eat.
Thus the Word we must be taking in the Spirit as our meat.
The allusion, of course, is to the temptation of Adam and Eve in the garden.
To eat of the tree of life.
To be Godlike without the resources of God's grace is the basic temptation of the human race.
To have knowledge without the Spirit of God is to snatch that fruit and eat of it.
For only God has the wisdom of the knowledge of good and evil.
And so a modern biblical scholarship that has scholarship without the Holy Spirit, that seeks to understand the Scriptures without understanding the Scriptures with transformed hearts, is the great betrayal.
And it's this that Paul warns the Corinthians about in Second Corinthians 3.
Six, that the letter kills, but the Spirit brings life or gives us life.
Let me, as we conclude our time this morning, give you therefore, some of the challenges of the way in which we should handle the Word of God.
First of all, we find that the Word of God awakens the heart.
It's the heart that's a true domain for the Word of God.
It's not the head.
The Word enters through the ear into the head, but it mustn't be lodged there.
It must move into the heart.
And if the Scriptures are what they pretend to be, then the Word of God will only find its truth lodging place in our hearts.
One of the great weaknesses a great deal of Christian ministry is that you get people who are excellent public communicators so they can speak eloquently from the pulpit, but in a one to one relationship, they're absolutely zero.
There's an inconsistency there in the communication of the Word of God.
Those who are teachers of the Word should be relationally as qualified to relate heart to heart as they're able to declare with great brilliance, perhaps intelligence, how the Word of God can be described intellectually.
And so the early fathers spoke of the heart as the place of God within us.
In fact, in Romans 5:5, we read that God has poured his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom He has given to us.
And so the heart, then is where the Word is lodged. In Jeremiah 31:33, we read, Deep within them, I will plant my Word, writing it upon their hearts.
So one of the great needs today is not the verbal communication of the Word of God.
The great need today is the application of the Word of God to every personal situation, every emotional circumstance, every psychical fear and blockage that we may have within our souls to the Word of God.
And so we're reminded so frequently. We were thinking about it this weekend in a weekend seminar.
If you seek the Lord with all your heart and with all your soul, you will find him. Deuteronomy 4:29, or again in Joel, chapter 2, verses 12 and 13. Come back to me with all your heart.
Let your heart be opened and not simply your garments torn. It's not an external form of repentance, but it's a change of heart.
Return to the Lord your God with all your heart.
And so indeed it was the prayer of Solomon at the dedication of the temple in First Kings, chapter 8, verse 61.
May your hearts be entirely with the Lord your God.
So the place for the Word of God is the heart of man.
And if our hearts are hardened and our ears are dull and the two go together, because a hardened heart leads to a dumbness and a deafness of the rest of our life, we can't hear, we can't articulate that the Word does not burn within us as a fire within our very bones.
And so in the parable that we read or thought about in Luke chapter eight, the Parable of the Sower, you can see how essentially the whole dilemma about knowing the Word of God and listening to the Word of God is essentially the interiorizing of the Word of God so that it becomes the most intimate experience of our life.
So that's the first thing. Then the Word of God awakens the heart, expands the heart, dilates the heart, extends the heart in receptivity to its communication.
And so, secondly, the Word of God makes us hearers of the Word. If our hearts are receptive, if our hearts are open, intimacy before God, invulnerability before God, then we become hearers of the Word.
We were referring in this weekend seminar to the way in which listening is not as automatic as we think it is.
You see, we won't listen to other people unless we've listened to ourselves.
Unless we have self intimacy, we cannot have personal intimacy with others.
If I don't know myself, if I'm afraid of knowing myself, then I will be afraid of the consequences of other people. I won't be able to cope, I won't be able to handle it. Too many loud noises are in my emotional life that I haven't cleared out, that I haven't dealt with for me to be able to have empathy and compassion for others as well.
And so if we're not at home with ourselves, we can't be at home with other people.
We'll be embarrassed, we'll be dislocated, will be nomadic in our thoughts and emotions and self alienation then leads to social alienation.
And that's the whole tragedy that we see around us in our society.
Enlisting is also the basis then for all personal interactions. So if we're not listening, what kind of interaction do we have?
And so we discover that today there's this great series of walls all around us where people are not in touch with each other.
How then can we listen to the Word of God?
Listening is in fact more than empathy.
Listening is a veritable self emptying of prejudice, of preconceived judgments and notions so that we are at the disposal of the one that we listen to.
Listening ultimately is accepting the uniqueness of, of somebody else in kindness, giving territory to their uniqueness.
Then we listen and above all, could anything be more unique than the Word of God?
Could anything be more awe inspiring than the voice of God as we listen to him?
And we say in the first place, God, be merciful to me, a sinner.
And then we go on to ask for his saving grace in our lives.
Listening then is to enter above all into the spiritual realm of God's word. Where God's word moves and where God's word speaks and where God's word acts.
And so to listen to him is ultimately to belong to Him.
The best listening, of course, should be in the family between our spouse and ourselves.
In the areas of intimacy of life is where we most listen.
Because listening is at its deepest level a loving surrendering of ourselves to the other.
We cannot listen to God until there's a complete surrender of our life to God.
For listening in this sense is an unrestricted openness, a sheer receptivity, the deepest surrender of our whole being to God.
No wonder we can't Listen to God's Word if our lives are not self abandoned to his will and purpose.
And so we can say that listening then to God's Word is fundamentally when we cease to listen to anything else, it has our full attention.
We can't imagine any higher kind of listening than the self emptying of our lives to the fullness of his message that we receive within the void of our own being.
It's saying like Peter, Lord, to whom can we go?
For Thou hast the words of eternal life in comparison, there's nowhere else where we can turn but to receive your Word in our hearts.
In the cloud of unknowing. A beautiful 14th century writing by an unknown mystic, the writer says one thing alone suffices for your spiritual journey.
That God is alive in your mind, he's active in your heart, and he gently arouses you to everlasting love.
Yes, this is God's way to God and it will never fail you.
This very love that you experience tells you unerringly when to speak and when to be silent.
It will guide you discreetly and without error in anything.
Perhaps the hearer in the Scriptures par excellence is Mary, the Virgin that became pregnant with the Word of God, who bare him holy as the fruit of her womb, and has become for us the exemplar of what it is to be a bearer of the Word of God.
It was because she was a virgin, that is to say, that there was this pure, exclusive healing of the Word, that she became the mother of the Incarnate Word because she heard the Word spoken to her, her womb was blessed, and she has become for us the model of the true contemplative.
But you know, in the history of the Church and in the history of our individual lives, there are two dangers in this Marian analogy, this analogy of Mary in our own lives.
On the one hand, there are those who only see the Word externally. There's a voice outside that we seek to understand.
And the whole Protestant tradition has majored on an understanding of Scripture.
But the understanding of Scripture has to have a commensurate receptivity to Scripture.
And the problem is we know much more than we respond to.
So to see it outside and not receive it inside is to betray the Word of God.
And so the great dilemma of Protestantism today is the dilemma of having too much biblical scholarship for lives that do not act as bearers of the Word.
But the second danger is perhaps the Roman Catholic danger, and that is to regard the Word as so interior within us that we take it all for Granted.
And for centuries, the Church never studied the Word of God.
It. It simply accepted it, just as accepted the Host at the Mass.
And once we've accepted it, that's that it's all very naturally assimilated within us, and that's falsifying the Word of God as well.
And perhaps these two dangers are also the dangers of the masculine, feminine polarity within all of us.
That on the one hand, the male can be too objective and the female can be too subjective, and that all of us then live with the tension in our own personalities that to receive the Word of God is not an easy thing.
In fact, we need the Holy Spirit of God. No one knows the things of God except by the Spirit of God.
And so it's only the Spirit of God, that Holy Spirit that inspired the writers to give us the Scriptures, that inspired the community to accept the Scriptures in their canonicity, is the same Holy Spirit that enables us to understand the Scriptures and to listen to the Scriptures.
The Holy Spirit is no less active in the listening to the Word, as in the communication of the Word, as in the revealing of the Word.
And so there has to be a revival of understanding concerning the role of the Holy Spirit in the interpretation of the Scriptures.
The interpretation of the Scriptures is not based upon methodology.
The interpretation of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Scriptures is dependent on the Holy Spirit Spirit.
Now, most textbooks today on hermeneutics have no reference to that statement.
They don't understand it, but it doesn't fit into the technical scholarship of contemporary math.
It doesn't fit into the program for a PhD and a professorship to follow.
Now, one of the things that we have discarded was what was so typical for something like 1700 years in the history of the church, or 1500 years, and that is seeing that there are four levels of interpretation of the scriptures. And in the 14th century, Nicholas of Lyra recites, what is this four, four level of understanding?
The letter teaches what happens.
The allegorical sense, what to believe, the moral sense, what to do, the anagogical sense, where to go.
These four levels. We're recognizing that of course, foundational to all of Scripture is what literally happened. So we use historical judgment.
So in that sense, it. It is a historical interpretation.
The letter teaches what happened.
But there's also an awareness that just as we use symbols and the symbol is always pointing to a reality beyond itself, so the Scripture has an allegorical sense. That, in a sense, is what cultivates faith.
Faith is, as it were, like a pilgrim that is compelled to move forward from one meaning, from one understanding, from one experience to another.
And so the allegorical, when it's properly used, is really the instrument of faith.
But the, what was called the tropological sense, the moral sense, the ethical sense of Scripture reminds us that Scripture is not to inform but to transform.
It's not notional, it's transformational.
And so the moral sense of what to do in the light of Scripture is what we have to recognize is important.
And of course, there's also an awareness that God is the great orchestrator of all things. He's the Alpha and the Omega.
And so right through Scripture there is what in theological parlance we love to call the eschatological dimension. That is to say that there's an awareness that we are also thinking in terms of the end times or prophecy of the fulfillment of all things. So the anagaral sense reminds us that our lives are stimulated in hope.
So these three cardinal virtues of faith, hope and love, are fed by the allegorical, by the topological, by the anagogical. If you want these words, you see what it means that Scripture really feeds us into this circle of faith, hope and love.
Of faith, love and hope in the sequence that we've been talking about.
Now, in closing, because the time is gone, let me just conclude by giving you some of the advice. Some godly writers who have therefore had this kind of perspective, and I'm afraid shattering, perhaps some of us is mine, because, you know, if this is really how to read the Word of God, then as we'll see on Friday, it's going to lead to such a transformation of life that you can't imagine anything more radical than this.
The radicalism of a political terrorist is nothing in comparison with the radicalism of reading the Scriptures.
Richard Baxter, in his book called the Christian Directory in the middle or in the latter part of the 17th century, therefore gives us a number of precepts. He says, open the Bible in holy reverence as the word of God.
Don't come with unbelief in your heart.
Don't read it like any other book with an unreverent spirit, but remember that it is the very law of God by which you are to live, to be judged by, by which you can be saved.
So make no secret reservations or exceptions to its precepts in your life.
You see, if therefore we open the Bible with this holy reverence, then remember that this is the book of life.
This is eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil authentically.
It's not grasping that knowledge falsely it's eating of it.
As God ordained that we should eat, so reading the Word of God reverses the penalty of Adam and Eve, of the explosion from the God.
That's what it means.
And we'll see again later the references to this in Scripture.
Remember thirdly, says Baxter, that it is the will and testament of your Lord, like the last will and testament of some loved one who's left all the bounty of the estate to us.
So read it with love and great delight and value it more precious than the lock letters of of your dearest friends.
We love those letters because we love the person who wrote them.
We love the Scriptures because the great lover of our soul has inspired them.
And remember that it is the doctrine of unseen things, of the greatest mysteries that we cannot reach.
So don't approach it ever with arrogance that you know better or more than it conveys.
I have to confess that for many years this was my unexamined spirit.
I didn't know I had a spirit, but I know it was there.
And oh, what a waste of life when we have this attitude to the Word of God.
And remember that it is plainly written for the most simple as well as the most learned. That's why sometimes a humble peasant may get more out of the Word of God than a great scholar.
How hard it is for the rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
How hard it is when we're trained to be clever in Washington to read the Scriptures.
So don't go to it, says Baxter, with a carnal mind, with a worldly heart.
For the carnal mind is enmity towards God, and therefore it will be enmity to our understanding of the Word.
Then he says, compare one Scripture with another so that within the inner logic of Scripture, the Scripture is revealed to you by Scripture.
And certainly don't presume on the strength of your own understanding, but continue to humbly pray to God for light. There's a sense in which the more we enter devotionally into the Word of God, the more we'll pray. And the more we pray, the more our prayers will be fed by the Word of God. So never separate your prayer life from your reading of Scripture.
Well, he says several other things, but we'll leave it there. But another person who has also given us a beautiful injunction concerning what he calls the necessary and useful reading of the Holy Scriptures is a man called Philip Jacob Spainer, who was one of the great pioneers of the Pietist movement in Germany.
And he wrote in 1694 the following injunctions about proper Bible reading.
He says the first means to proper Bible reading, heartfelt prayer, so that we read the Word with prayer in our hearts that God will, as we've said already, open our hearts to receive His Word.
And secondly, he says such an approach in prayer to God can only come when we're seeking to please God with our heart.
Quoting from John 9:31, he says, God does not hear sinners, he hears those who fear him and do his will.
So the prayer of a righteous man avails much because he's walking in the ways of the Lord and he's in communion with God.
Somebody is in hostility and rebellion against you. You can't walk together and have a good conversation.
And your prayer life will be determined by your attitude of heart to God.
And of course, if our prayer life is not therefore one with God, then the Scriptures will not teach us very much.
We're not docile, we're not open, we're not repentant.
And so Spina reminds us that the Scripture is given to us only to learn of God and to understand from it what is his will for our blessedness.
Don't go to the Scriptures, says Spina, for information, for knowledge.
Knowledge puffs up.
Go to the Scriptures because you want to live appropriately.
You want to live a righteous life.
And the third thing that Spina says is all knowledge of God and His will according to the law and the Gospel does not exist in mere knowing, but must come forth in action and practice.
To read the Word of God, to be prompted by the Holy Spirit as to what we should do, and then not to do it, is to deny the word of God.
So that may mean that we can only take in one sentence once a year.
The story is told of one of the desert fathers. That disciple came to him, and the disciple, with great eagerness, wanting to learn an awful lot, said, father, give me a word.
And the Father said, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul and mind.
He says, don't come back to me until that is a reality in your life. Well, 25 years later said, give back.
And he said, father, give me another word.
And he said, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. He never came back again.
So we read the Word of God with that spirit.
And finally, another wonderful writer is a man called Frankie F R A N K e. He was also in the 17th, early 18th century, also one of the great pioneers of the Pietist movement in Germany.
And in the Lutheran Bible, in the Lutheran Church in Germany until the interwar period, I think it stopped now, every Lutheran Bible had an appendix.
And the appendix consisted of Frankie's short course of instruction, instructions on how Holy Scripture ought to be read for one's true edification. This is taking the German translation.
Can you imagine what it would be like in the English Bible if we had an appendix and we had the summary from Scripture of these great musings of those who have really lived by the word of God?
And they're really telling us it shouldn't be an appendix, should be the preface.
When you open the Scripture, this is how you should handle the Scripture. This is how you should read the Scripture.
And so this is what very simply Frankie tells us. He says, read single mindedly. That's number one, that if you're reading the Scripture, then you have to guard against false reasoning in your own heart or any unjust purpose in your mind.
In other words, you cannot read like the scribes and the Pharisees, so you come with the single mindedness of a repentant heart.
Secondly, he says that the simple mind, that's not to say a simpleton mind, but a mind with the singleness of purpose, will therefore read with a single minded heart.
One thing have I desired of the Lord, says the psalmist.
One reads the Scriptures with that spirit, but it is to seek to live a life of faith through Jesus Christ by which one reads the Scripture.
So if you endeavor to read the Holy Writ says frankly, then your single sincere purpose must be to become an honest Christian, a real Christian.
You read the Scriptures to be authentic, to go back to the original purposes of God for your life.
And thirdly, says Frankie, the single minded reader then approaches God in reverent prayer.
Perhaps as we open the Bible, says Frank, this is our prayer, O eternal and living God.
How can we ever sufficiently thank you that you have so graciously revealed your holy will and your word so that we may learn from it how we ought to believe and how we can live a righteous life.
Grant me your Holy Spirit, that he may open my eyes, that I may see the wonders of your law, increase faith in my heart and direct my will so that I may joyfully receive your testimonies and wholeheartedly believe in you and constantly keep your word.
There were other things that Frankie said, but I think I can perhaps surfeit you with too much.
Let's stop there. But that prayer, the prayer of Frankie, is perhaps a summary of the devotional life.
Now you can see why you're impatient in your reading of Madame Guyon experiencing the depths of Jesus Christ, why it is you Are frustrated in reading the Cloud of unknowing in the 14th century.
Why it is the treatise of Bernard of Clairvaux on loving God.
Why there are so many other rich treasuries of devotion in the Christian church that are totally inaccessible to the modern mind.
Because we've never had the heart find out.
Never had the heart to seek, never had the desire to search.
I believe that the renewal of the church will take place when we discover that more important than the faculty of reason is the faculty of desire, desiring God intricately.
We live in an age when we want control, we want information, we want success.
We need to discover a new age when the desire for God is our ultimate passion to hunger and thirst as the heart pants are to the waterproof.
Well, the time is gone.
Art, is there any time for questions? Just a few minutes.
Yes. His name is spelled P R O C R U S T. Yes.
And so we talk about the Procrustean method which is shaping everything.
Yes.
So he pulled them or he distorted them or squeezed them to the size of his bed. It's just an analogy.
Who has.
Yes.
Can you remember the poet?
I'll have to look that up. But he's got some wonderful. Yes, I'd love to see it. He's got some wonderful hymns. Important.
But he had that ardor, See, that uninhibited ardor.
I discovered it in Teresa of Avila when I was doing an anthology of her works. And I thought, this woman loves God in a way I've never witnessed.
I've never had this experience. And yet one resonates, you know, in one's heart.
Yeah.
It's because we've been disappointed with man that we're inhibited towards God.
Yes.
[01:05:46] Speaker C: How do we strike a balance between an honest investigation of the Scriptures and perhaps a modern, or maybe just a theological tendency to simply say whatever the Spirit tells me is reality.
It seems that we can argue against the more rational approach and yet then abandon ourselves to whatever seems to please us. Or indeed, we have sort of inner spirit that tells us, how can we strike the man?
[01:06:18] Speaker B: I think it's through relational life, in other words, through other people, that we're prepared to commune and to listen and to grow in friendship together around the word and in prayer together.
But yes, of course, the reaction to technocracy is magic.
So we have high rises that have no 13th floor, because alongside the technology there's a superstition of 13.
So we live between the magical and the rational in our culture, and we oscillate in Wild amplitudes between them.
And we have the same problems in the church.
But I think that what is lacking in the church today is that we've forgotten a covenant with God that gives us covenantal relations with each other.
That's how we. We seek balance relationally.
[01:07:23] Speaker C: So our relational interaction with other people is supposed to buffer us from either of those.
[01:07:29] Speaker B: You see, the best thing I ever did was to marry a wife who flatly contradicts everything I say.
It's a wonderful combination because I contradict her too.
But somewhere there's a modus vivendi of via media and all the other things that will give balance.
So Jonathan Edwards, when he's talking about the gracious affections that the Christian should have describes, and it's significant that he makes this the middle one. You see, he talks about 12 gracious affections, but the middle affection somewhere between 6 and 7. In the middle list is the need of symmetry.
Balance.
A godly life is a balanced life between head and heart, between objective, subjective.
I've just been witnessing a communication of smiling, which means humor and affection.
And one of the things that I think we discover in our devotional reading is that really one of the most laughable things in all the universe is that God intends us to be compelled form to the image of Christ. I mean, could there be anything more incongruous than that?
Anything more. That's a source of real awareness of the comical.
So we read our devotional literature. We read the Bible humorously too, because it's really a very comical thing that we're witnessing God's purpose that we should be transformed into the image of Christ.
So we don't take ourselves very seriously.
We take him absolutely seriously. But we laugh at the antics that we're performing in the meanwhile.
Isn't that right?
Well, perhaps we should stop there.
Questions, shall we? Again just close in prayer.
Dear Lord, we get a glimpse now of how the psalmist could say, how I love thy Lord, how I simply love Thy word.
Lord, give us that delight in the fragrance of scripture that is our meditation day and night, that it is the light to us that lightens our way, that is the source of all blessing and fecundity in our heart, that enables us to live truly in a garden of delights.
Lord, give us the courage not to be afraid of the radicalism of Thy word, that it may break us, may pierce us like a sword that discerns even to the thoughts and intents of the heart.
But Lord, we pray, thank you. That the whole purpose of it is that we should be more like the one who has given us the Word on the God we ask Jesus Christ our Lord.
[01:10:50] Speaker A: The proceeding was a presentation of the C.S. lewis Institute. In the legacy of C.S. lewis, the institute endeavors to develop disciples who can articulate, defend and live faith in Christ through personal and public life. For more information, please visit our website at www.cslewisinstitute.org.
[01:11:09] Speaker B: thank.
You.
