Lectio Divina

Gutenberg's Revolution

In 1455 all Europe's printed books could have been carried in a single wagon. Fifty years later, the titles ran to tens of thousands, the individual volumes to millions. Today, books pour off presses at the rate of 10,000 million a year. That's some 50 million tons of paper. Add in 8,000 to 9,000 daily newspapers, and the Sundays, and the magazines, and the figure rises to 130 million tons. (John Man, The Gutenberg Revolution, 4)

One of the most underrated influences on biblical interpretation is the invention of the printing press. Most books on the history of hermeneutics leave a Gutenberg shaped hole in their study. One of our most treasured ideals as Evangelicals - personal, devotional study of scripture leading to a very personal and devotional relationship with Jesus - wasn't even the dream of a possibility before around 1455. Luther would never have become Luther, Calvin would never have become Calvin, and Tyndale would never have become Tyndale without this invention which John Man identifies as the third most important invention in civilization only after the inventions of writing and the alphabet. The Reformation probably wouldn't have happened without the assistance of the press. (Man points out that Muslim nations had access to the new technology but for multiple reasons they rejected it. And Christianity had a major reform movement while Islam did not. This is a simplistic analysis, but it's interesting to think about.)

The Internet is the fourth most important invention according to Man which ought to give all of us a pause. Just as the press allowed a new world to come into being, Internet technology is bringing another world into existence. The press undeniably changed the church and certain assumptions about discipleship. We can only assume that the Internet is having and will continue to have similar effects. The press changed the way that Christians interacted with the Word. Look around your church on Sunday morning and take note of all of the people with their noses buried in their phones and it is clear that Internet based technology is also changing the way that people interact with the Word. The question is "How?" And is it for the better or the worse? But I'll leave those questions to the Leonard Sweets of the world to figure out.

Christ-centered reading

For one thing, seeing Christ as central compels us to always try to make sense of everyting we read in any part of scripture in light of our larger knowledge of who God is in Jesus Christ. We do not then read scripture devotionally to try to find tidbits there that are "meaningful to" or that "speak to" us, wherever we are in our personal subjective spiritual experiences. We do not read scripture as detached historians trying to judge its technical accuracy in recounting events. We do not read scripture as a vast collection of infallible propositions whose meanings and implications can be understood on their own particular terms. We only, always, and everywhere read scripture in view of its real subject matter: Jesus Christ...Thus, the great Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon (1834-92) wrote, "O you who open your Bibles and want to understand a text, the way to get into the meaning of a text is through the door, Christ."

Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2011), 98

The Goal of Study

Read whatever chapter of Scripture you will, and be ever so delighted with it--yet it will leave you as poor, as empty and unchaged as it found you unless it has turned you wholly and solely to the Spirit of God, and brought you into full union with and dependence upon him.

William Law, The Power of the Spirit (Fort Washington, PA: Christian Literature Crusade, 1971), 19 quoted in Cymbala, Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire, 140.

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

Transformational Hermeneutics

If you open yourself, day by day and week by week, to the message of scripture, its grand sweep and its small details, and allow the faithful preaching of Jesus and his achievement to enter your consciousness and soak down into your imagination and heat, then the admittedly uncomfortable work of God's word will be happening on a regular basis, showing you (as we say) where you really are, what's going on deep inside.

N.T. Wright, Hebrews for Everyone, 41.

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.

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

Devotional Use of the Bible

"Someone once said: 'Other books were given for our information, the Bible was given for our transformation"...Truly, the Bible as the Word of God has an inherent power, but it is not a coercive power. That is, the Bible does not work its effects mechanically. We don't change just because we read it. Our minds may be engaged in the text, but something must happen in our hearts as well."

Tremper Longman III, Reading the Bible with Heart and Mind, 12.