Scripture as missional and identity-shaping

The best way to describe Scripture is that it is identity-shaping. The Bible tells us who we are, where we are, and where we are going. In fact, its identity-shaping, Spirit-mentored direction propels its readers into a missional life. Eugene Peterson warns of the danger of making the Bible after our own Trinitarian image: my Holy Wants, Holy Needs, and Holy Feelings. Instead, if we read the Bible aright, we are remade--since the Bible as been sent as a word from God to us--into God's image, the perfect Eikon, Jesus Christ...

...This is what it is meant by Scripture being missional: Scripture is designed by God to work its story into persons of God so that they may become doers of the good.  Scripture is missional because it is designed to create restored Eikons who are in union with God and communion with others for the good of others and the world. Scripture, I somethings have to tell myself, is not designed just to be exegeted and probed and pulled apart until it yields its (gnostic-like) secrets to those who know its languages and its interpretative traditions and who can then divulge their gleanings behind pulpits on Sunday mornings or in monographs and academic journals (very few care to read).  Scripture is missional because it is designed to create missional people who learn from their missional praxis how to see Scripture as amissional text that shapes them so that they can live in the story that the church tells in Scripture.

Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), 146-147.

Metaphors are the Spice of Life

Literalists, maybe especially religious literalists, have a difficult time with metaphors. A metaphor is a word that makes an organic connection from what you can see to what you can't see. In any conversation involving God, whom we can't see, metaphors are invaluable for keeping language vivid and immediate. Without metaphors we are left with colorless abstractions and vague generalities.

Eugene Peterson, Practice Resurrection, Loc. 55-58 (Kindle Edition)

Exegesis is a dust cloth...

But, inconvenient or not, we are stuck with the necessity of exegesis. We have a written word to read and attend to. It is God's word, or so we believe, and we had better get it right. Exegesis is the care we give to getting the words right. Exegesis is foundational to Christian spirituality. Foundations disappear from view as a building is constructed, but if the builders don't build a solid foundation, their building doesn't last long.

Because we speak our language so casually, it is easy to fall into the habit of treating it casually. But language is persistently difficult to understand. We spend our early lives leaning the language, and just when we think we have it mastered our spouse says, "You don't understand a thing I'm saying, do you?" We teach our children to talk, and just about the time we think they might be getting it, they quit talking to us; and when we overhear them talking to their friends, we find we can't understand more than one out of every eight or nine words they say. A close relationship doesn't guarentee understanding. A long affection doesn't guarantee understanding. In fact, the closer we are to another and the more intimate our relations, the more care we must exercise to hear accurately, to understand thoroughly, to answer appropriately.

Which is to say, the more "spiritual" we become, the more care we must give to exegesis. The more mature we become in the Christian faith, the more exegetically rigorous we must become. THis is not a task from which we graduate. These words given to us in our Spiritures are constantly getting overlaid with personal preferences, cultural assumptions, sin distortions, and ignorant guesses and pollute the text. The pollutants are always in the air, gathering dust on our Bibles, corroding our use of the language, especially the language of faith. Exegesis is a dust cloth, a scrub brush, or even a Q-tip for keeping the words clean.

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book, 53

Eating the Word

Christians feed on Scripture. Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body. Christians don’t simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus' name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book, page 18

Translation

Every translation is a messianic act, which brings redemption nearer.

Franz Rosenzweig in Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 119.

Lectio Divina

Lectio divina comprises four elements: lectio (we read the text), meditation (we meditate the text), oratio (we pray the text), and contemplation (we live the text)…Reading (lectio) is a linear act, but spiritual (divina) reading is not—any of the elements may be at the fore at any one time.

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 91.

The Role of Experience in Interpretation

What we must never be encouraged to do, although all of us are guilty of it over and over, is to force Scripture to fit our experience. Our experience is too small; it’s like trying to put the ocean into a thimble. What we want is to fit into the world revealed by scripture, to swim in this vast ocean.”

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 68.

The Role of Experience in Interpretation

The emphasis on Baalism was on psychological relatedness and subjective experience…The transcendence of the deity was overcome in the ecstasy of feeling…Baalism is worship reduced to the spiritual stature of the worshiper. Its canons are that it should be interesting, relevant, and exciting…Yahwism established a form of worship which was centered in the proclamation of the word of the covenant God. The appeal was made to the will. Man’s rational intelligence was roused to attention as he was called upon to respond as a person to the will of God. In Yahwism something was said—words which called men to serve, love, obey, act responsibly, decide…The distinction between the worship of Baal and the worship of Yahweh is a distinction between approaching the will of the covenant God which could be understood and known and obeyed, and the blind life-force in nature which could only be felt, absorbed, and imitated.

Eugene Peterson, “Baalism and Yahwism Updated,” Theology for Today (July 1972), 139-141.

Devotional Use of the Bible

I sometimes marvel that God chose to risk his revelation in the ambiguities of language. If he had wanted to make sure that the truth was absolutely clear, without any possibility of misunderstanding, he should have revealed his truth by means of mathematics. Mathematics is the most precise, unambiguous language that we have. But then, of course, you can’t say “I love you” in algebra.

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 93.

Devotional Use of the Bible

What I mean to insist upon is that spiritual writing – Spirit-sourced writing – requires spiritual reading, a reading that honors words as holy, words as a basic means of forming an intricate web of relationships between God and the human, between all things visible and invisible.

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 4

Context

It takes the whole Bible to read any part of the Bible.

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 48.

Humility

And so, as we hand out Bibles and urge people to read them, it is imperative that we also say, caveat lector, let the reader beware.

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 82

Humility

…exegesis does not mean mastering the text, it means submitting to it as it is given to us. Exegesis doesn’t take charge of the text and impose superior knowledge on it; it enters the world of the text and lets the text “read” us. Exegesis is an act of sustained humility: There is so much about this text that I don’t know, that I will never know. Christians keep returning to it, with all the help we can get from grammarians and archaeologists and historians and theologians, letting ourselves be formed by it.

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 57

Humility

Exegesis is the discipline of attending to the text and listening to it rightly and well.

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 50

Humility

We do violence to the biblical revelation when we “use” it for what we can get out of it or what we think will provide color and spice to our otherwise bland lives. That always results in a kind of “decorator spirituality”—God as enhancement. Christians are not interested in that; we are after something far bigger. When we submit our lives to what we read in Scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 44