What role should the Bible play in the life of Christians, individually and collectively? How is the Bible to be read, interpreted, applied, and lived out?
This month in the theology reading group, we are discussing Eugene Peterson's book, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading.
It is the second book in a five-part series. Last year we discussed the first in the series, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places.
The title of the book is based on Revelation 10:9-10
...I went to the angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, ‘Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but “in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey.”’ I took the little scroll from the angel’s hand and ate it. It tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour.
Here are the main ideas from the book that stood out to me. They are interrelated. Some may seem basic or obvious, but they come alive through the power, creativity, and beauty of Peterson's prose.
1. The Bible must be central to the lives of Christians. It requires diligence for the Bible to not become peripheral due to the busyness of modern life and the seductive power of the self (the trinity of my Needs, my Wants, and my Feelings).
2. The Bible is to be lived. It is a great story that we are invited to participate in. This means obedience. Bible reading is not to be primarily about gathering information, but formation.
3. The Bible invites us into a "strange new world". [Here, Peterson is using Karl Barth's phrase.] It is counter-cultural to every culture of all time. To enter this strange world, we must read it as literature, having our imagination opened up by narrative, metaphor, and connectness.
4. The Bible is accessible to all regardless of their background (perspicuity). It can be and should be read by all. Just the plain old text! This accessibility does not preclude or diminish the value of careful and diligent scholarship.
5. Translation is necessary, subtle, and contentious. Translation is not just a technical exercise of precisely matching individual words in ancient Greek and Hebrew to words in modern English. Words are ambiguous. Phrases and sentences are even more ambiguous. "Context contaminates and interferes with precision" (p. 86) Translation matters because it makes the living Word of God accessible.
6. Lectio divina (reading spiritually) provides a model on "how to" read the Bible. But, it "is not a methodical technique... It is a cultivated, developed habit of living the text in Jesus' name." (page 116). There are four elements, and they are not necessarily sequential. Lectio (read the text), meditatio (meditate on the text), oratio (pray the text), and contemplatio (live the text).
7. Bible reading is not just to be done alone. It is to be done in communities and out loud. The written word and the oral word are not the same. The original texts were largely read aloud and listened to by communities. Bible reading and liturgy should be inseparable.
Below are some choice quotes from the book.
“The Scriptures, read and prayed, are our primary and normative access to God as He reveals Himself to us. The Scriptures are our listening post for learning the language of the soul, the ways God speaks to us; they also provide the vocabulary and grammar that are appropriate for us as we in our turn speak to God.”
“The Bible is basically and overall a narrative - an immense, sprawling, capacious narrative.”
“All serious and good writing anticipates precisely this kind of reading-ruminative and leisurely, a dalliance with words in contrast to wolfing down information.”
“It is useful to reflect that the word 'liturgy' did not originate in church or worship settings. In the Greek world it referred to public service, what a citizen did for the community. As the church used the word in relation to worship, it kept this 'public service' quality - working for the community on behalf of or following orders from God. As we worship God, revealed personally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in our Holy Scriptures, we are not doing something apart form or away from the non-Scripture=reading world; we do it for the world - bringing all creation and all history before God, presenting our bodies and all the beauties and needs of humankind before God in praise and intercession, penetrating and serving the world for whom Christ died in the strong name of the Trinity.”
“The Holy Scriptures are story-shaped. Reality is story-shaped. The world is story-shaped. Our lives are story-shaped. 'I had always,' wrote G.K. Chesterton in accounting for his Christian belief, 'felt life first as a story, and if there is a story, there is a story-teller.' We enter this story, following the story-making, storytelling Jesus, and spend the rest of our lives exploring the amazing and exquisite details, the words and sentences that go into the making of the story of our creation, salvation, and life of blessing. It is a story chock full of invisibles and intricate with connections. Imagination is required.”
“We are fond of saying that the Bible has all the answers. And that is certainly correct. The text of the Bible sets us in a reality that is congruent with who we are as created beings in God's image and what we are destined for in the purposes of Christ. But the Bible also has all the questions, many of them that we would just as soon were never asked of us, and some of which we will spend the rest of our lives doing our best to dodge. The Bible is a most comforting book; it is also a most discomfiting book.”
“Obedience is the thing, living in active response to the living God. The most important question we ask of this text is not, 'What does this mean?' but 'What can I obey?' A simple act of obedience will open up our lives to this text far more quickly than any number of Bible studies and dictionaries and concordances.”
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