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.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Dear Father, we thank you for the promise of your Word that the entrance of your word brings light, illuminates our hearts, and fertilizes us in new ways.
And so we just pray this morning that as we listen with our hearts and as we wait upon you, that you will indeed give us hope for further change, further transformation of our lives.
You called us to be eyewitnesses of the resurrection.
May that be true, Lord, in the experiences and indeed in the very psyche of our own being.
For we ask it through Christ our Lord.
Amen.
This morning as I was driving here, I left at the same time as on Wednesday.
And yet I was late, as you see. And as I was thinking of the situation, it reminded me as a parable really of our of our own life before the Word of God.
Because first of all, there was a blockage in Georgetown of single traffic moving one way, and the whole air that was cordoned off was supposed to be for workmen and they were just sitting, having their coffee, there was just nothing going on. But the whole zone was sterilized.
And you know, a great deal of scripture is sterilized because scholars are playing their games and they're not allowing the traffic to go through.
It's all very scholarly and textual criticism is very important, but nothing's happening.
And then of course we find ourselves another street that had been completely cordoned off. And when you've got a one way street that is completely cordoned off, you wonder what in the world you're going to do next in the maze of getting through.
And sometimes we may find that in our lives before the Word of God, we have emotional blockages and we really don't know what it is that's keeping us from God. But something really is holding us back.
Very often it's hidden anger, an unforgiving spirit, it's resentfulness towards others. They're really blocking our spiritual progress.
And we have no intimacy with God. We have very little awareness of the efficacy of His Word in our hearts. And we know that that street has just been cordoned off.
And so when we read devotionally, we have to recognize that there are many significant things that we have to look at and to overcome.
The passage I want us to focus attention on is in fact the introduction to the Psalter it's Psalm 1, and not only is it the first Psalm, but it really is the preface.
It introduces the whole theme of the psalter of the 150 Psalms.
And so it begins by saying, blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, or stand in the way of sinners, or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree planted by streams of water which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither.
Whatever he does prospers not so the way of the wicked they are like chaff that the wind blows away.
Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.
For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.
We have there a tale of two approaches really to the Word of God.
One writer and I quote from his recitation of Augustine's confession.
One writer has told us how Augustine entered into the Word of God.
Indeed, it was so significant that it transformed his life. He was converted as a result.
Augustine says, I flung myself down on the ground somehow under a fig tree and kept saying to you, not perhaps in these words, but with this sense, and thou, O Lord, how long? How long, Lord? Will you be angry forever?
Remember not your former iniquities.
For I felt that it was these which were holding me fast. He was really stuck in guilt. That's really what he's telling us. He was so guilty in his life that he was absolutely blocked. And in my misery I would exclaim, how long? How long? This tomorrow and tomorrow? Why not now? Why not finish this very hour with my uncleanness? Why can't I get it over with and finished with?
And so I spoke, weeping in the bitter contrition of my heart, when suddenly a voice reaching my ears from a nearby house.
It was the voice of a child or a girl, I don't know which. And in a kind of sing song the words were constantly repeated. Take it and read it. Take it and read it.
I checked the force of my tears, rose to my feet, being quite certain that I must interpret this as a divine command to me to open the book and to read the first passage which I should come upon.
For I had heard this about Anthony. And Anthony was really the prototype of the monastic movement.
He lived in the Egyptian desert, and his Life by Athanasius was the book that he had already read. So sometimes you See, a devotional classic introduces us to the word of God. That's what it did for me in my own life, and certainly it was true of Augustine.
So, for I heard this about Anthony. He'd happened to come in when the Gospel was being read in church and though the words read were spoken directly to him, received the admonition to himself, go, sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come and follow me. In other words, Matthew 19:21 was the verse that had hit Anthony, and by such an oracle he had been immediately converted to you, O Lord.
So I went eagerly back to the place where Alypius was sitting, since it was there that I had left the book of the Apostle. When I rose to my feet, I snatched up the book, opened it and read it in silence. And the passage which my eyes first fell upon with ease, in other words, he just at random open the book, and he found himself turning to the book of Romans. Epistle to the Romans, chapter 13.
Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in clambering, in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in concupiscence, that's to say, in lust.
I had no wish to read further. There was no need to.
Immediately I had reached the end of the sentence. It was though my heart was filled with a light of confidence and all the shadows of my doubts were swept away.
So that's one way of reading the Scripture.
The other way of reading is like Rene Descartes read in the 17th century.
He read widely the philosophers and the scientific viewpoints of his time.
And one day he too sat, this time not in the garden, but in a chair in the house.
He says, today, as I have suitably freed my mind from all cares and have secured for myself an assured leisure or leisure and peaceful solitude, I shall at last apply myself earnestly and freely to the general overthrow of all my former opinions.
In doing so, it will not be necessary for me to show that they are one and all false. That is perhaps more than we can do.
But since reason has already persuaded me that I ought to withhold belief no less carefully from things not entirely certain and indubitable than those things which appear to me manifestly false, I shall be justified in setting them all aside.
And so what he did was, at that moment he said, I became, in a sense, the eternal doubter.
He doubted everything but the one thing he couldn't Doubt was his own existence as a doubter.
And so it suddenly hit him, that's what he was.
I think, therefore I am, cognito ergo sum.
Now, in our reading habits we are either saying I, I think, therefore I am, or I respond, therefore I am.
And when you think about it, it's a very much wider range of opportunity for one's life.
It's a very much deeper perspective on the reality of living to say I respond, therefore I am in the light of all the external possibilities for my life over against closing in on oneself onto one's own ego in the imprisonment of the me.
And assuming that this egocentric stance in life is really giving a reality.
If you are already Plato's prisoner in the cell, in the cave, you're not going to see very much by the Cartesian framework.
But that's what's happened and Western thought since the 17th century. And this is why of course, Pascal hated Descartes. He didn't even in some of his writings call him Rene Descartes. He had met him, he knew him personally, he, he just talks of him as that man and he finishes it because that man has poisoned the whole spirit of our Western culture. Now Pascal saw that in the middle of the 17th century. Today we see it all the more clearly because it's out of this high price for truth, which is simply assertion of self awareness over all of reality, and that what I don't understand is meaningless for reality.
Out of that perspective has grown the whole of this methodology of viewing Scripture, that this whole historical critical methodology has its foundations in Rene Descartes.
Now it's not all false, it does give us a common sense view of a lot of reality. But when it's taken to its ultimate perspective, it is a falsifying of reality.
And so the consequence is that today we're living in a society of modern thought where the reader is detached from the biblical world and where we have once more to either have a tremendous transformation of our own attitudes towards the Scriptures or else we'll never read them, we'll never understand them in the context in which they were given to us.
So to be critical instead of, to be responsive, to be egocentric, instead of being opening to the other, namely God in our lives, is, is certainly to follow a very different pathway.
The psalmist in Psalm one would contrast the way of Augustine and the way of Descartes as the way of the righteous and the way of the wicked. It's as simple as that, because one is a way that is open to the need of God. As an alcoholic is open to the need of God when he says, I came to a crunch in my life when I knew that I needed a power that was greater than myself.
I knew that I couldn't do it.
I knew I needed the other.
Or alternatively, the way of Descartes, which is the way of saying that my mind is the ultimate arbiter of life and that it's really my reasoning faculty that is the judge for everything within me.
Now, the problem that we find in the second way, this Cartesian way, is that therefore it has the delusion of understanding when it really doesn't understand.
You see, if you are simply seeking to understand rationally an issue which is also emotional, and many of us as husbands and wives are constantly in this conflict, my wife is only more reasonable, you know, more rational, logical. As we read off in the musical by Bernard Shaw and Pygmalion, then life would be much simpler for the male species.
But it's also a life that's emotional, intuitive, that is much more the right hemisphere of the brain over against the left hemisphere of the brain.
And consequently there's a flattening out of reality.
And there is in fact a lack of communication with the Word of God.
There's a very significant incident in the ministry of our Lord which we find in Mark 4, 23 and 24, when Jesus has told the parable of the Soar. We were mentioning about this parable on Wednesday. That is to say that the parable of the Sower is really the parable of understanding the Scriptures, because the seed is the Word of God.
And the receptivity to the seed, the way that we say respondio ergo sum, as I respond, I am. As we respond to the Word of God, so we are as readers of the Word of God. So if we respond carelessly with hardened hearts and say, that doesn't apply to me, that is totally irrelevant to my circumstances. I'm just not listening to what the voice is saying to me.
Then of course, it is like seed that's cast upon the pathway and the birds come and pick it up, and it has no germination at all.
Or it may be that we receive the Word of God with some soil, but it's in rocky places and there isn't enough for it to be nurtured and to grow properly, and so it withers like weeds that die without bringing forth fruitfulness.
Or it may be that the cares of this world are so heavy upon us that we don't allow enough space in our hearts. For the Word of God. So the thorns come up of anxiety, of fear, of all the emotional inhibitions that we live with, and then it chokes the Word too.
And so to receive the Word of God, like Augustine received the Word of God, is to receive the Word on that good soil.
And our concern this morning is to really discover what is that good soil for the Word of God.
What Jesus says, however, is that for us to check whether it's rocky ground or good soil requires of us to act as well as to receive. In other words, to receive is to act.
So to receive the Word in deep soil requires that we receive it emotionally, we receive it sensibly, as well as receive it mentally.
In fact, Paul writes to the Colossians, chapter 3, verse 16, Let the word of God dwell in you richly, deeply, we might say in our generation after Carl Jung, let the Word of God dwell in you psychically.
Let it penetrate not only your conscious being, but your subconscious being. Indeed, let it come from the unconscious as well or into the unconscious as well.
And so one of the things that we find about Jesus teaching is that he teaches in parables.
It seems rather strange to us today why Jesus, in preaching truth, communicates feeble, communicate stories that perhaps were never real at all.
Why this great teacher of revelation of the Word of God, why should he risk so much of the communication of the gospel in storytelling that seems to us fabulous? Because he's perhaps referring to real incidents in his life. He may be making the stories up as he goes along. We just don't know. It doesn't really matter.
Well, there's a curious passage in that incident in Mark, chapter four, that following on the story of the parable of the sower, Jesus says that he spoke in parables precisely because he says, the secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you.
It's been given to you because of obedience, because you become as a little child.
And in the light of that, he then goes on to say, don't you understand this parable?
How then will you understand any parable?
And then he goes on to say, consider carefully what you hear.
And then he goes on to indicate that it says he did not say anything to them without using a parable.
And he explains to us that the reason why he spoke in parables really is because God does not inform us for the sake of information.
God informs us for the purpose of transformation.
So the Bible is not a book of information.
One of the problems in theological education today is we have a surfeit of informational teaching.
Same in Church.
What we need is transformational teaching.
And what's the difference?
Information is simply data for the sake of data.
Transformation is data that is for the sake of being changed, for the purpose of living transformed lives.
And so, in a sense, Jesus parabolic teaching is a kind of breaking system.
It checks the flaw of process, the process of information, so that we'll stop and we'll respond.
Respond you augustum. We come back again to Augustine's stance.
Augustine didn't need to read any further than that passage at the end of Romans chapter 13. He didn't need to go any further because that was it.
And now, in the light of the assurance of God's forgiveness in his life, he could accept and live the life of forgiveness.
And so he took up to read to be a transformed person.
And so perhaps it may be helpful to contrast, if you like, some of you who are making notes, to draw up two tables between informational reading and transformational reading.
Informational reading on the left seeks to cover as much data as possible as quickly as possible.
It's interesting that today the Information Society is also the society that has schools for speed reading.
Now, transformational. And this is what devotional reading is, whether of the Scripture or great classics of faith and devotion.
Transformational reading is qualified reading, not quantified.
So it's slow and it assimilates, therefore, very slowly indeed.
You don't need to have a guilty conscience if you've read one sentence, one word in Scripture this morning. But if that word has hit you like a bomb and is in the process of shattering your worldviews, then it's infinitely more important than reading chapters of the Bible or chapters of anything else.
And so this is the first contrast, the difference of pace, difference of attitude, certainly patience with oneself.
And this gives authenticity, because a lot of our inauthenticity is that we're operating at the wrong scale and with the wrong speed.
When I was in college administration, one of my great pressures was fundraising. And people used to say to me, you know, why are you not more effective and more successful in your fundraising? Well, I said, the problem is that the speed at which I make friends who authentically want to give is much slower than the speed of your ambitions for the budget and much slower than the inflationary rate.
The itch for more.
There's an authentic speed at which we operate. And, you know, if you think about it, the speed at which you have acquaintances is not the speed in which you have friendship.
And if the speed at which you have friendship is much slower, the speed of godliness, which is to be friends with God, is slowest of all.
So the speed at which we read is really related to the process that is taking place then. Secondly, informational reading is linear.
That is to say, it moves from one statement to another and is impatient to get on to the next statement. So when you're reading a detective novel, usually at night, you probably read the small hours, because if it's an Agatha Christie, it so gripped you, you want to find out who done it before you go to sleep.
So the linear pace at which you move takes you spankingly quickly through this story. And it's a good story if the linearity of it is really sustained.
You don't get lost in all the labyrinths of argument.
You quickly get to the point.
That's informational reading. It's linear.
But transformational reading is not of that kind of. It's much more concerned with depth.
You see one of the problems of American Christianity. It's 2,000 miles wide and less than an inch thick because of its linearity, because of its informational character.
It's not practiced, it's not transforming.
And so we read in depth, we discover multiple layers of meaning in the scriptures.
And you see the problem about that kind of reading is it's not successful reading.
Because the very nature of success is that it's intrinsically reductionistic.
You look at people around you who are madly successful in Washington D, they're living profoundly reductionistic lives, emotionally messed up lives perhaps, certainly with a litter of broken relationships, and you realize that however linear it may be in getting my own way and pushing through the crowd, it certainly has no depth.
It has no ecological perspective.
It's not in harmony with the overall patterns of life and their relationship.
So the intrusion of God's presence in our life, which is what devotional reading will do for us, simply shatters all our perception of linear successfulness.
It opens up all sorts of other obligations and attitudes and relationships.
That means that in a sense, we forfeit the mindset of success when we enter into this. We're not reading it for that motive.
So, you know, it's an absurdity to talk about being a successful Christian.
The very nature of being a Christian is to be a konoclastic against success.
That opens up all sorts of other things, but let's leave that there. Thirdly, informational reading has as its underlying hidden motive the lust to master the truth, to control, whereas transformational reading is concerned about allowing the text to master us.
So it's like the attitude of Samuel Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth as that child listened to the voice in the night speaking to him.
So we come openly to the Word, we come reverently to the Word, we come trustingly to the Word.
We come honestly before the Word, we come vulnerably before the Word, we come naked, in other words, before the Word.
It's a very, very different contrast then in these two approaches.
Now, one of the problems that many of us have is because of our mastering of life, we even use the Holy Spirit as an instrument for mastering life. We can be deluded in our religiosity. We can be totally living in fantasy within our religious life. And that's the frightening thing.
And so not only do we have to avoid the delusions of the world, but we may have to avoid the delusions of the mindset that culturally we've been caught up with in our organized Christianity.
So allowing this to happen to us is vulnerable.
It's frightening, but it means that we have, in a sense, ultimately to have faith about faith.
It's not faith in well prescribed dogma, although there's a clarity that will come to us with convincing power when we live the life that is transforming.
We are absolutely sure about its reality because of its depth, but simply a cerebral crust of cocksureness is not the same thing as genuine surety.
Then fourthly, we find that the text in informational reading is out there.
It's an outside object that we can look at, we can admire, we can study, but also we can manipulate.
And so a great deal of the history of the exegesis of the Bible is the slogging matches between rival schools of thought, rival denominations, or indeed the way in which we have used the text to manipulate, to defend our own position. Something that we can argue about.
And even a lot of the debate in America today about the inerrancy of Scripture, people ask me, do I hold to inerrancy? And my feeling is that inerrancy is a reductionist debate.
Because the Scripture is not just simply like the Koran that has an inerrancy of text.
The Scripture has a transforming power that's like hammer blows upon the heart.
It's like a double edged sword that pierces to the very intents and attitudes of our own psychic.
And so we discover then that if we are looking for the authority of Scripture, inerrancy is not enough to express its authority.
Now, not that we deny its reliability factually, not at all, but we're indicating that it's far richer than that kind of framework, because that is where, in a sense, that kind of argument and that kind of attitude stems from. It's a cerebral, rationalistic view of Scripture.
In contrast, we find that transformational reading is fourthly, a relationship with God, so that our reading is more than reading, it's reading to relate, so that as we open the Scripture, we walk with the Lord.
So one of the.
There are two very useful guides for our reading of Scripture, and one is to read a lectionary, that's to say, to read a stated passage and go systematically through the Scriptures on a disciplined, daily basis.
So that, willy nilly, whether we have any interest in the Book of Numbers or indeed in what's happening in the Book of Amos, we find ourselves being driven to read it because. Because that's the passage for today.
So we have this objective, authentic objectivity in that we are commanded really to read all the Scriptures, to search all the Scriptures, to read them all, and find really relevance in them all, even though we may find it very difficult to turn to some of the minor prophets without looking at the index.
But then the other thing that's also valuable as we allow the text to be a reading relationship, is to journal with it.
So we may find that the cultivation and the discipline of journal keeping with the use of Scripture will be very helpful to us then. Fifthly, informational reading is an approach that, as we've seen, is analytical, is critical, it's judgmental, it appeals to the cognitive faculty, whereas transformational reading is humble, is detached in self disinterest, is a willing approach and a loving approach to walking with God in a personal relationship.
Much of our theology today needs to be more personalized, become more relational, more covenantal, for that very reason.
And this will certainly feed that.
And of course, sixthly, informational reading. I've got two more.
Informational reading is problem solving as a mentality.
Saul Bellow, in one of his novels, makes one of the characters declare that when life is all question and answer, it's all flattening reality to problem solving, turning switches and looking at things. Technically, it's a very dull world to live in.
But in contrast, transformational reading is openness to mystery.
It's aware that there are many more dimensions to reality than those which cognitively we can ever reach.
And of course, one of the great things that has happened in the 20th century has been the exploration of the unconscious, or at least the subconscious, and recognizing the role of the unconscious in our lives, which is open to us, the awareness that we are ourselves, great mysteries.
I was recently with a medical doctor who had been to the l' Arche community in France and had lived for six months with these severely mentally handicapped people. And so I said to her, what was the most significant insight that you gained from your experience there?
Oh, she said, it was the mystery of the human soul, the profundity of the mystery of the human soul. And I said, in what way?
Then she said, one day during the mass, there was a severely mentally retarded person who was deaf and dumb and had never spoken, shrieked out in the middle of the service with almost a musical voice that thrilled us to our core, simply uttered the word Jesus.
It was as if the name of Jesus was so sunk deep within the psyche of that youth that even though he couldn't speak, there was something deep within him that resonated to the presence and the love of Jesus in his life.
So she said, I was stunned.
It was like standing before the burning bush and realizing the presence of God in the soul of man.
And so we need, therefore, to be open to the word of God as opening great mystery to us, opening great doors of perception that are beyond the cognitive and the cerebral and the rational. We get hints of that in the exercise of our own intuition.
Sometimes there's awareness as we're in the presence of God that he's really speaking to us in ways that we cannot articulate, we don't need to, because of our own transforming power.
One of the things that we find in the theophanies in the Old Testament, as indeed Jacob at Bethel when he saw that had that dream of the ladder up to heaven, or indeed Moses at the burning bush or Isaiah in the temple, that they weren't interested in curiosity about the incident, but what they were so profoundly aware of was the presence of God. That was more real than any sensation.
It was indescribable because, in a sense, description was not necessary.
It didn't need to assure. The assurance was deep within one's soul what had happened.
And so we need to live with that openness to mystery. Otherwise we flatten life.
And then finally, informational reading is basically directed towards doing transformational reading is towards being.
It's far more important for you to be a Christian for me to be a Christian than it is for us to describe what our faith means in terms of action.
Not that action is not important. Of course it is. It has to be actualized. The word has to become flesh.
But we're not defined functionally. We're defined relationally.
And consequently, we will find that our attitude then to Scripture is so different.
This, then, I believe, is why Jesus spoke in parables. It was like someone who's on a treasure hunt and he's saying, you can't cheat, you can't jump from the first clue, which is your introduction to the word of God, and then think that you can then get into the 10th position of the 10th clue and finish first in the race.
What you have to do is to find the first clue, interpret it, act on it, and you'll find the second clue and the third clue and the fourth clue for your life.
Now, informational reading is trying to jump from the first clue to the goal and it fails.
It's an important approach, but it's only the beginning.
And so really what we're saying is that all that biblical scholarship provides us with is the first clue to the Scriptures.
So that, yes, we look at the Scriptures critically, we look at it with all the fruits of scholarship over 20 centuries, we realize that we have a very much more enriched approach, informatively to the Bible than any previous generation has had. We said that before.
But that is all part of the first clue.
And Jesus says, and the book closes there on you, unless you're prepared to submit to the other clues.
And the other clues are clues that will not simply inform us, but transform us. That's the difference.
And so then we begin to realize that reading the Scriptures is, as one of the writers in this book, which is a rather technical book, but Anthony Thistleton and the Responsibility of Hermeneutics talks about the need for scholars today to. To have a reader response. Hermeneutics, which, in other words, just simply mean being obedient to the Scriptures. That's all it means.
And as we are obedient and respond, so there will be therefore, this new perspective opening to our lives.
There are three blockages, however, that have prevented us from having this kind of response to the other clues.
One of them we've already emphasized very strongly in these two talks. Rationalism, scholasticism, that is to say, being self absorbed in the cleverness of knowing.
Little Jack Connor, you know, who sat in the corner was such a smart little fellow, and he pulled out a plum and said, what a good boy am I.
Scholarship in the Bible tends to give us that propensity.
And so scholasticism doesn't take us far enough. It blocks us.
It's extraordinary how even our public speakers can be so eloquent and intimate in their communication.
But you speak to them personally and you find them fumbling and embarrassed. And really, they're not relational men at All.
And so there's a profound inconsistency and a great deal of biblical ministry because of this absence.
When we were at the weekend retreat, Art was sharing with us the conviction that in Acts 20, we are to communicate the whole gospel of God, the whole panoply of God, the whole of this great revelation of God. And how do we do it? Well, we do it publicly, but we do it personally.
And we cannot have the one without the other.
If I'm not communicating the gospel in my life to my wife, I really shouldn't be standing up here communicating the gospel to anybody else.
And so there has to be that consistency between a public expression and a personalized reality in one's own life. And Scholasticism doesn't do that.
Secondly, the blockage that we might call the blockage of traditionalism, that in our devoutness and even piety, this is the way it is. We've never done it any other way, and this is the way we continue to do it.
And so much of Judaism has been blocked concerning the efficacy of the Old Testament because it got off the rails.
It got into its own form and of interpretation of Scripture. And you could say that the judgment upon the Jewish people today is the judgment of a misunderstanding of the word of God.
It's a misreading of the Scripture and ears they have, but they don't hear.
And lives are blocked because they have. And there's a whole story that we could emphasize and talk about, but I don't want to take the time this morning, but what a solemnity it is for us to recognize that we can completely go off track concerning the revelation of God because we haven't heard aright.
And then thirdly, there's the blockage of mysticism.
And the blockage of mysticism is being absorbed in the experiences of the mystical and speculating about the mystical and being so absorbed in the techniques of meditation and the bodily postures and the various contemplative states that we can all enter into as Mr. Spiritual Fix it, who is really a much more subtle technocrat than even cognitive Mr. Fix it.
You can read books of meditation and you wonder what in the world you're going to meditate about, because it's not the person of Jesus Christ that's the focus of it.
We can read books about prayer or Bible reading, but if the objective is not to walk with the Lord, then of course the consequence is that we get nowhere.
And so this is really what is so important for us. And so we may sum up what we've said so far, by saying these things, reading is not just reading.
We're not innocent readers.
Do we therefore read like Augustine read, or do we read like Rene Descartes was reading?
Is it reading by mental deduction, or is it reading by total response, personal response?
We therefore see that Jesus, in giving us parabolic teaching, was correcting the false assumptions of superficial reading of the word of God.
Superficial? Listening to his message that in other words, he was correcting the tendency to go on the wrong track.
And therefore we ourselves need to avoid the pitfalls of doing so.
Now, in the book of Genesis, chapter three, there's a very telling story that is a warning to us about the false road in reading and the right road in reading.
It's the story of the temptation of Adam and Eve.
It's a story of Eve grasping that fruit because it was attractive and eating it from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
And the essence of the story is, I believe simply that in our lust for self control, to have godlike powers, to have divine attributes, because what is more divine than the attributes of knowing in all reality what is good and what is evil in our lust to be godlike?
But godlike without God is the fall of man is sin.
So that really underlying this whole mentality of cognitive thought for its own sake is the eating of the forbidden fruit.
The antidote to the story that we find in Genesis 3 is the hymn that we read about in Philippians 2, To Be Divine.
So that within the Godhead there is this aspect of God that is so profoundly mysterious that God in his deity does not grasp at deity.
There's a sight of God that we see on the cross.
When he died, he said, father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.
This is the essence devotional reading.
To be Christlike, to be ungrasping, to enter this pathway of self abandonment to the will and providence of God, and to recognize that it's in him we live and move and have our being.
And without him we can do nothing.
You see, cognitive reading that has no motive for transformation of life is what the book of Isaiah describes of as prostitution.
Because there probably is in the story, in Genesis 3, a polemic against Canaanite worship, where the assumption of so much ancient near east religion was that by association with the temple prostitute, by the very sexual act with a prostitute, one entered into this pathway of the mysteries of life.
One entered into this kind of Dionysian frenzy in divinization of life.
And so the eating of the forbidden fruit is in our own generation having sex without love, sex without covenant.
And in a very daring fashion, the prophecy of Hosea is the story of a man that was told to take a prostitute and to exemplify in the tension and the agony of his life what God must feel like with his unfaithful prostitute people.
And so, as you read the book of Isaiah, you find that the whole focus is that we cannot take the Word of God without being transformed by the Word of God.
We cannot have sex without true love, without the covenant, bond of marriage and love.
And so it was when in a sense, there was the whole exposure of what Adam and Eve had tried to do, to have godlike powers or without God. Just as today we have cognitive thought without God, or we have sex without the love of God in our hearts.
And the consequence is fallenness, brokenness, misery, a collapse of human values takes place as a consequence of all these things.
And so we find that Adam and Eve found themselves naked before the presence of God.
All their futility to cover themselves was of no avail.
In that very passage in Hebrews chapter four, where we read that the word of God is sharper than any two edged sword, that it pierces into every attitude of our life, that it goes into the vague heart of our own psyche, it concludes by saying everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.
That is the efficacy then of the Word of God.
It's in this context then. I don't believe it's any. It's an accident that we find in several allusions in the Old Testament that the man or woman of the Word of God is like a tree, indeed like the tree of life that's planted in that garden, like being in Eden, again in a paradisal state of restoration to the favour of God.
And So in Psalm 1 that we read, we were told that the way of the righteous is like a man, like a tree that is planted by rivers of water, like streams and oasis in the midst of all the desert conditions of life, of alienation, technocracy, cognitive rationalism, all of that that forms the desert of our society today.
Man or woman of God is planted in an oasis garden.
And there there is an appropriateness of life. The fruitfulness is the result of delighting in the law of the Lord.
That the way of the righteous is in fact meditating upon that Word of God day and night, and recognizing that all of life is fertilized, fructifies as a result of that relationship before God.
In the Book of Jeremiah, chapter 17, verse 7, we read the same.
Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord and the inferences, trusts in his word, whose confidence is in him.
He will be like a tree planted by water that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when the heat comes.
Its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought, and it never fails to bear fruit.
Many of us perhaps long in our lives to be more fruitful, to be more life giving to others.
How then can we have this? And I want to close with these with an answer to that question.
First of all, there's no question about it that when we read the Scripture, we should read as critical readers, critical in the sense that we are trained to have a commensurate view of the Scriptures as we are trained to view all life around us, so that we are integrated persons. One of the passionate concerns that some of us had when we set up Regent College was to say, say we need to use the same wits for theological education as we use for our secular professions, that to fly with two wings so that we're as articulate and intelligent informed about the Christian life as we are about law or architecture or whatever is our professional approach. We need not to be lopsided Christians. We need to be integrated in that way. So there's a place for critical thought.
There's certainly a place for us to have a historical perspective on the background of the authors and the writings that we find in the Bible.
And it may be that we believe that we should be so critical that we actually learn the original languages so that we enter more deeply into the richness of grammar and syntax and to enter into the mindset of the ancient world.
I haven't done that, but I have enjoyed the fruits of that kind of approach by reading in, say, Kittel, a whole series of word studies of words that give us vignettes of this ancient world.
And so our lives can be greatly enriched by doing word studies, various key words of the Bible.
So we do need that critical readership.
We need to be critical readers in that sense.
But as we've already warned against simply absolutizing that perspective, making that the be all and end all of our reading.
But secondly, we're called upon to be good readers.
CS Lewis has a very interesting essay on the theme that good literature requires good readership.
And the whole art of literary criticism is really the art of cultivating an aesthetic. For what is aesthetic.
Some of us are clueless when we go into an art gallery until we've had an art expert or we're clueless in hearing a poem until we've had a poet, or we're clueless about good literature until we've had refined text tastes for the reading, for the appreciation.
And so we enjoy Scripture because it is good literature, it's good storytelling.
And so there is a need for us, if we take the Word of God seriously, to also become good readers, critical readers, good readers.
But thirdly, we've seen enough this morning to recognize we must also be wise readers, that the Scriptures we're told are able to make us wise unto salvation.
And so, in view of the intent of Scripture to do that, then we have to respond by reading it wisely as well.
And so, in fact, we see that this is the main thrust of Scripture, not to inform us, not even to give us an aesthetic enjoyment of Scripture.
Far more fundamentally, the purpose of Scripture is to make us wise unto salvation.
And so we think of the breadth and length of wisdom. This weekend we've been having a seminar, a series of seminars at Cedar Point Farm. And throughout this week there are other courses which have been focusing on the wisdom of God.
And the wisdom of God is something that isn't talked about.
Wisdom is putting knowledge into practice in day to day life.
It's something that's actualized.
And especially wisdom is for our relationships as relational beings with each other, with God.
And so we recognize the importance then that behind wisdom is experience.
So if we are to read the Scriptures wisely, we are to experience the Scriptures deeply.
We are to particularize their intent and assimilate the importance of for us within our own lives.
And finally, we also have to read the Scriptures soulfully.
As we reflect on that passage that I quoted In Hebrews chapter 4, verses 12 to 13, we realize that if the Word of God can go right into the very soul of our being, then we're bound to be reflective about the Word of God in the soul of our being.
If we're to read the Word of God soulfully, we are therefore to read the Word of God most openly, most candidly, most intimately.
Within our whole being.
Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him with whom we have to give account.
And so in the light of that, we ask God to make us soulful readers.
It's incredible how people that have a high scholarly reputation are blinded to the soulful reading of the Word of God.
They've got blocked in one area, one dimension of their lives.
So when we think of soulful reading, there are four propositions which I suggest we have to bear in mind.
The first is that the intent of the Bible is to speak to the history of the human soul, to speak to its nature, to its fallen condition, to its redemptive possibilities.
And so when we look at the Bible, we realize that we are relating with psychic truths.
They're true at many other levels, but they're most profoundly true so that even that poor incapacitated imbecile can shriek out the name of Jesus through lips that cannot articulate any other words.
That is the power of the Gospel in the human heart.
And so thirdly, the Bible is concerned with the tutelage of the human soul.
We're reminded in second Timothy that all Scripture is inspired of God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
That is to say that its function is really to educate the whole soul, the whole being of man.
And the fourth proposition for such a soulful reading is recognizing that the Bible is rooted in the experience of God himself.
In 2nd Samuel, David in chapter 23, verse 2, says, the Spirit of the Lord speaks by me. His word is upon my tongue.
Or in Jeremiah, we're reminded in chapter one, verse nine, that the Lord puts forth his hand and touches Jeremiah's mouth and says that it's the Lord that has given you utterance.
And there are times in our own life when we're versed in the Word of God, and we're men and women of the Word of God. Our whole lifestyle, our whole person, is shaped by the Word of God.
That we are assured. And Matthew, chapter 10, verse 19, that when they deliver you up, do not be anxious how you are to speak, what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour.
For it is not you who speak, but the spirit of your Father that speaks through you.
There are many times when people may say, you know, what you said was so wonderful, it was so helpful. And you say in astonishment, what did I say?
We have no idea in the mystery of the soul of man, how words have a potency that we never had any inkling of. We may be the communicator, but we had no idea of the effect that they have upon us. And so the Word of God does that in our lives.
And so in consequence of this, we recognize how we should live soulfully before the Word of God.
So when we start in our pilgrimage in Scripture, we start with perhaps a simplistic fusion with Scripture. We have a sort of basic initial naivety about the Scripture. We just listen to it and say, well, this is marvelous. And we recite it and we respond to it, but it's a basic form of fusive naivety.
So then we begin to say, well, this is a wonderful book, I should read about it. So we start reading the books of scholarship and reading about the backgrounds of the Old Testament history and begin to read commentaries as well. And so we begin to distance ourselves from it in a more critical fashion.
But the ultimate need is to return to what Henri Kerr has called a second naivety to scripture that is not fusion, but is now a much more reflective, considered communion with the Word of God, so that we walk and are much more aware of the Lord in Scripture. So the more we read the Scripture, the more self aware we'll become.
The more self aware and individuated integrated our persons become around the Word of God, the more we can listen, not only thoughtfully, but now broadly.
And not only broadly, but wholly holistically so.
Not only holistically so, but prayerfully.
Let me close with the words of.
Two writers on this theme. One is William of Sanctuary, who writes in the 12th century, the first friend of Bernard of Flair Vaux.
He says, it's less what one reads than how one reads that really counts.
It's less what one reads. It's much more how we read that counts. That's what we've been emphasizing this morning.
And the second words are those from a contemporary blank pastor.
And this is what he said.
He said, I discovered that it's not scripture that I have to translate, but it's Scripture that translates my life that I have to accept.
We're not the translators of scripture. It's the Scriptures that are translators of all the confusion of our lives.
And so he then goes on to say, first I read myself full. You know, all you want to read, scurry around and fill your books shelves, and just simply have a very rich, wide, critical approach to the historical reality of Scripture.
So first I read myself full.
Then I think myself clear. Distance yourself, say, what does all this mean? You like the Philippian, like the eunuch that asks Philip, you know, how can I read unless someone help me?
So you think yourself clear.
Then he says, I pray myself humble.
You stand under the Word.
There's no understanding unless we stand under.
But our understanding so often is confused with overstanding standing over. So we stand under it.
I pray myself humble.
And finally, this seems dangerous in this ecstatic generation.
The preacher said, I let myself go see. The prophet found that as he entered into that stream that issued from the temple from the presence of God, that there were waters ankle deep, knee deep, thigh deep shoulder deep waters to swim in.
And ultimately to read devotionally is to find yourself in waters to swim in.
Find yourself like those trees that are planted in that oasis garden and that paradisal state, the God intense for our lives in communion to walk with him.
It enables us to therefore read the Scriptures wisely.
How significant then our life will be when we have this transformation.
Shall we just close again in prayer?
Dear Lord, you do humble us.
You show us how, how unworthy readers we are, how little we really understand of the truth of your revelation.
We just pray that you will help us to let everything go, to count all things but dross for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus our Lord.
Help us with this new longing, this deepen desire to read your word wisely and soulfully, as well as to read it in appreciation and with intelligence.
We ask it through Jesus Christ our Lord.
[01:06:35] 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, articulate, defend and live faith in Christ through personal and public life. For more information, please visit our website at www.cslewisinstitute.org. thank.
[01:07:04] Speaker B: You.
