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Note: these excerpt threads are subject to continual revision and updating as opportunity and priority permits Eugene H. Peterson: "The Christian Scriptures are the primary text for Christian spirituality. Christian spirituality is, in its entirety, rooted in and shaped by the scriptural text. We don't form our personal lives out of a random assemblage of favorite texts in combination with individual circumstances; we are formed by the Holy Spirit in accordance with the text of Holy Scripture. God does not put us in charge of forming our personal spiritualities. We grow in accordance with the revealed Word implanted in us by the Spirit... Christians feed on Scripture. Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nutures 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... Writing a book involves ordering words in a purposeful way. These words make sense. We do not come to God by guesswork: God reveals himself. These scriptural words reveal the Word that created heaven and earth; they reveal that Word that became flesh in Jesus for our salvation. God's word is written, handed down, and transmitted for us so that we can enter the plot. We hold these Bibles in our hands and read them so that we can listen and respond to these creating and saving words and get in, firsthand, on the creating and saving. The act of eating the book means that reading is not a merely objective act... Eating a book takes it all in, assimilating it into the tissues of our lives. Readers become what they read. If Holy Scripture is to be something other than mere gossip about God, it must be internalized..." [15-20] Eat This Book "As we read these Scriptures, what we realize is that God has a stable and coherent identity: God is one. But God also reveals himself in various ways that at first don't always seem to fit together. There are three obvious ways in which we see God working and revealing himself: the Father (the entire world of creation is in the forefront here), the Son (here we're dealing with the mess of history invaded by Jesus Christ and his work of salvation), and the Spirit (the pulling of our lives into God's life is the experienced element of this). It is always the same God, but the person or the face or voice by which we receive the revelation varies. But here's the thing: every part of the revelation, every aspect, every form is personal -- God is relational at the core -- and so whatever is said, whatever is revealed, whatever is received is also personal and relational. There is nothing impersonal, nothing merely functional, everything from beginning to end and in between is personal. God is inherently and inclusively personal. The corollary to that is that I, because I am a person, am personally involved in the revelation. Every word I hear, everything I see in my imagination as this story unfolds, involves me relationally, pulls me into participation, matters to my core identity, affects who I am and what I do. What I want to emphasize is that Trinitarian thinking developed out of two or three hundred years of our mothers and fathers patiently, prayerfully, intelligently reading these two Testaments and gradually realizing that the differences weren't all that different. As they read and listened to these sentences of Isaiah and Paul, Moses and Mark, David and John, they realized that they were hearing the same voice, which they named the Word of God. And as they heard and listened to this voice, they also heard themselves addressed -- addressed as persons who possessed dignity and purpose and freedom, persons capable of believing and loving and obeying... Christian reading is participatory reading, receiving the words in such a way that they become interior to our lives, the rhythms and images becoming practices of prayer, acts of obedience, ways of love... But not everyone reads the bible this way..." [26-28] Eat This Book "The new Holy Trinity. The sovereign self expresses itself in Holy Needs, Holy Wants, and Holy Feelings. The time and intelligence that our ancestors spent on understanding the soverignty revealed in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are directed by our contemporaries in affirming and validating the sovereignty of our needs, wants, and feelings. My needs are non-negotiable. My so-called rights, defined individually, are fundamental to my identity... My wants are evidence of my expanding sense of kingdom. I train myself to think big because I am big, important, significant. I am larger than life... My feelings are the truth of who I am. Any thing or person who can provide me with ecstasy, with excitement, with joy, with stimulus, with spiritual connection validates my sovereignty... In the last two hundred years a huge literature, both scholarly and popular, has developed around understanding this new Holy Trinity of Needs, Wants, and Feelings that make up the sovereign self. It amounts to an immense output of learning. Our new class of spiritual masters is composed of scientists and economists, physicians and psychologists, educators and politicians, writers and artists. They are every bit as intelligent and passionate as our earlier church theologians and every bit as religious and serious, for they know that what they come up with has enormous implications for everyday living. The studies they conduct and the instruction they provide in the service of the god that is us, the godhead composed by our Holy Needs, Holy Wants, and Holy Feelings, are confidently pursued and very convincing. It is very hard not to be convinced with all these experts giving their witness. Under their tutelage I became quite sure that I am the authoratative text for the living of my life..." [32-33] Eat This Book "One of the characteristic marks of the biblical storytellers is a certain reticence. There is an austere, spare quality to their stories. They leave a lot of blanks in the narration, an implicit invitation to enter the story ourselves, just as we are, and discover for ourselves how we fit into it... Spiritual theology, using Scripture as text, does not present us a moral code and tell us live up to this; nor does it set out a system of doctrine and say think like this and you will live well. The biblical way is to tell a story in the telling invite: live into this - this is what it looks like to be human in this God-made and God-ruled world; this is what is involved in becoming and maturing as a human being. 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..." [43-44] Eat This Book "The story that locates us in the large world of God and that enlists us in following Jesus is told sentence by sentence. Walking and following, for the most part, doesn't require deliberate thought; it employs conditioned reflexes, muscle and nerve coordination acquired in the first few years of life. We walk without having to think about putting one step before another. We read a story the same way, the sentences unfolding one after the other without us having to stop and ponder each period or verb tense. But just as in walking without thinking we sometimes take a wrong turn, have to retrace our steps and recalculate our directions, and just as when we walk without thinking someone sometimes steps in and alerts us to a multitude of important details -- flowers, birds, faces -- we had missed along the way, and stops us so that we look around, amazed at what we had missed, so also in the reading of our Holy Scriptures. As we make our way through this story, finding our lives in this story, following Jesus, we find ourselves from time to time stopping, or being stopped, and paying attention to the details that make up the story. We attend to the language, to the sentences that bring words into relationship with one another and into relationship with us. Words are never mere words -- they convey spirit, meaning, energy, and truth. Exegesis is the discipline of attending to the text and listening to it rightly and well. Exegesis introduces another dimension into our relation to this text. The text as story carries us along, we are in on something larger than ourselves, we let the story take us where it will. But exegesis is focused attention, asking questions, sorting through possible meanings. Exegesis is rigorous, disciplined, intellectual work..." [49-50] Eat This Book "But 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... The story gives form to the sentences; the sentences provide content to the story. Following Jesus requires that they hold together, thoroughly integrated. Without the story form, the sentences in the Bible, the Bible verses, function as an encyclopedia of information from which we select whatever we need at the moment. Without the precisely crafted sentences the story gets edited and revised by seductive suggestions from some and by bullying urgencies from others, none of whom seems to have much interest in following Jesus. But it was to make us followers of Jesus that the text was given to us in the first place and if either the large story or the detailed sentences are ever used for anything else, however admirable or enticing, why bother? ... The task is urgent. It is clear that we live in an age in which the authority of Scripture in our lives has been replaced by the authority of the self: We are all encouraged on all sides to take charge of our lives and use our own experience as the authoritative text by which we live. The alarming thing is how extensively this spirit has invaded the church. I more or less expect the unbaptized world to attempt to live autonomously. But not those of us who confess Jesus as Lord and Savior... One of the most urgent tasks facing the Christian community today is to counter this self-sovereignty by reasserting what it means to live these Holy Scriptures from the inside out, instead of using them for our sincere and devout but still self-sovereign purposes..." [57-59] Eat This Book "My metaphor of choice, Eat this book, is from St. John. We have three sorts of John books in our New Testaments that take particular delight in presenting Jesus as the one who reveals God-speaking, word-of-God core and origin of everything that is... St. John's Gospel opens with with this emphatically verbal beginning... This word, we soon find out, is Jesus... The Gospel story proceeds to present Jesus speaking reality into existence. The letters of St. John likewise go back to the beginning and give witness to the apostolic experience of being convinced that the word of life was Jesus, verified by what they heard, what they saw, and what they touched. Three of our five senses (seeing, hearing, touching) are employed in the verification... This Jesus spoke the commands that resulted in the life of salvation from sin expressed in a community of love. And, finally, the Apocalypse of St. John presents the risen and present Jesus, under the aspect of words, of speech. John gives witness to the word of God and to the testmiony of Jesus Christ. This risen Jesus Christ then identifies himself to John alphabetically, I am Alpha and Omega -- he is the alphabet, all the letters from A to Z, that is the stuff, the vowels and consonants out of which all words are made. Jesus speaks in such ways that the brokenness of the world and our experience develop into a dazzling holiness that evokes worship on a grand scale, involving everything and everyone in heaven and on earth. Language is the primary way in which God works. In the Scriptures that give witness to these words this language is referred to in very physical ways. We hear the words, of course. But we also see the words ... chew them ... taste them ... walk and run in them ... and in this final image we eat them: Eat this book. This word of God that forms us in Christ is very physical. We are part of a holy community that for three thousand years and more has been formed inside and out by these words of God, words that have been heard, tasted, chewed, seen, walked. Reading Holy Scripture is totally physical. Our bodies are the means of providing our souls access to God in his revelation: eat this book..." [60-61] Eat This Book "We enter the world of the text, the world in which God is subject, in order to become participants in the text. We have our part to play in this text, a part that is given to us by the Holy Spirit. As we play our part we become part- icipants. We are given this book so that we can imaginatively and believingly enter the world of the text and follow Jesus... If we have not entered this text as participants we aren't going to understand what is going on. This text cannot be understood by watching from the bleachers -- or even from expensive box seats. We are in on it. The participatory quality of spiritual reading struck me forcibly when I was thirty-five years old... I had taken up running again... Running developed from a physical act to a ritual that gathered meditation, reflection, and prayer into the running... I never tired of reading about running... None of the writing, with few exceptions, was written very well. But it didn't matter that I had read nearly the same thing twenty times before; it didn't matter if the prose was patched together with cliches; I was a runner and I read it all. And then I pulled a muscle and couldn't run for a couple of months as I waited for my thigh to heal. It took me about two weeks to notice that since my injury I hadn't picked up a running book or opened a running magazine. I didn't decide not to read them; they were still all over the house, but I wasn't reading them. I wasn't reading them because I wasn't running. The moment I began running again I started reading again. This is when I caught the significance of the modifier spiritual in spiritual reading. It meant participatory reading. It meant that I read every word on the page as an extension or deepening or correction or affirmation of something that I was a part of. I was reading about running not primarily to find out something, not to learn something, but for companionship and validation and conformation of the experience of running. Yes, I did learn a few things along the way, but mostly it was to extend and deepen and populate the world of running that I loved so much. But if I wasn't running, there was nothing to deepen. The parallel with reading Scripture seems to me almost exact: If I am not participating in the reality ... revealed in the Bible ... I am probably not going to be much interested in reading about it -- at least not for long. 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..." [69-71] Eat This Book "The task of liturgy is to order the life of the holy community following the text of Holy Scripture. It consists of two movements. First it gets us into the sanctuary, the place of adoration and attention, listening and receiving and believing before God... Then it gets us out of the sanctuary into the world into places of obeying and loving, ordering our lives as living sacrifices in the world to the glory of God... 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 ... we are not doing something apart from 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. Liturgy puts us to work along with all the others who have been and are being put to work in the world by and with Jesus, following our spirituality-forming text... Liturgy prevents the narrative form of Scripture from being reduced to private, individualized consumption... There is nothing churchy or elitist about it; it is a vast and dramatic story-ing, making sure that we are taking our place in the story and letting everyone else have their parts in the story also, making sure that we don't leave anything or anyone out of the story. Without sufficient liturgical support and structure we are very apt to edit the story down to fit our individual tastes and predispositions." [73-76] ETB "Words written are radically removed from their originating context, which is the living voice. And there is far more involved in listening to a living voice than reading a written word. Words are spoken and heard before they are written and read. Language was spoken long, long before it was written. There are still communities that get along satisfactorily without a written language, but none that survive without speech. Words are first of all an oral/aural phenomomenon. Most of the words in our Scriptures were not formed first in writing -- they were spoken and heard. The so-called biblical world that we orient ourselves in by means of the Bible for the most part did not have a Bible to read. Many, many generations of our biblical ancestors believed and obeyed and worshipped God without a script. They had the word of God, true enough, but they heard it, they listened to it. The word of God came by means of a voice... The moment a word or a sentence is written it is detached from its origins and lands on the page as isolated as an artifact in a museum or a specimen in the laboratory. In the museum and laboratory we usually count this removal from context an advantage: we can now label it, define its properties, pick it up, turn it this way and that in the light, weigh it, measure it, write about it. With rocks and bones, pottery shards and computer chips, blood and urine specimens -- things -- the less context we have, the more exact we can be. Context contaminates and interferes with precision. But not so with words... Words are inherently ambiguous. They are never exact: the character of the person speaking influences how we interpet them; the attentiveness or intelligence of the listener affects how they are understood; place and weather and circumstances all play a part in both the speaking and the hearing. The more we are in context when language is used, the more likely we are to get it. Barely suppressed irritation and impatient finger tapping, hesitations and silences, gestures and grins and grimaces are all part of it. But the moment the words are written, all of that, or at least most of it, is gone. Even when the context is described, the complex simultaneity of interplay and intricacy is lost..." [85-86] Eat This Book "So, lectio divina. A way of reading that guards against depersonalizing the text into an affair of questions and answers, definitions and dogmas. A way of reading that prevents us from turning Scripture on its head and using it to justify ourselves like that pathetic religion scholar was trying to do with Jesus. A way of reading that abandons the attempt to take control of the text as if it were helpless without our help. A way of reading that joins the Galilean women at the tomb as they abandon the spices and ointments with which they were going to take care of the Word made flesh, the Jesus they expected to find wrapped in grave clothes, and embrace the resurrection of that same Word and all the words brought to life in him. A way of reading that intends the fusion of the entire biblical story and my story. A way of reading that refuses to be reduced to just reading but intends the living of the text, listening and responding to the voices of that so great a cloud of witnesses telling their stories, singing their songs, preaching their sermons, praying their prayers, asking their questions, having their children, burying their dead, following Jesus. Lectio divina provides us with a discipline, developed and handed down by our ancestors, for recovering the context, restoring the intricate web of relationships to which the Scriptures give witness but that are so easily lost or obscured in the act of writing. It is time to deal with the details. What exactly is involved? How do we go about this? Lecito divina comprises four elements: lectio (we read the text), meditatio (we meditate the text), oratio (we pray the text), and contemplatio (we live the text). But naming the four elements must be accompanied by a practiced awareness that their relationship is not sequential... any of the elements may be at the fore at any one time. There is a certain natural progression from one to another, but after seperating them in order to understand them we find that in actual practice they are not four discrete items that we engage in one after another in a stair-step fashion. Rather than linear the process is more like a looping spiral in which all four elements are repeated, but in various sequences and configurations. What we are after is noticing, seeing the interplay... In the actual practice of lectio divina the four elements fuse, interpenetrate..." [90-91] Eat This Book "Reading is always preceded by hearing and speaking. Language is essentially oral. We learn our language not from a book, not from a person writing words, but from a person speaking them. The written word has the potential to resurrect the speaking voice and listening ear, but it does not insist upon it. The word can just sit there on the page and be analyzed or admired or ignored. Just because we have read it doesn't mean we have heard it. The written word is also clearer than the spoken word. Language, as we speak and hear it, is very ambiguous. We miss a lot, we misunderstand a lot. No matter how logically and plainly things are said, the listener quite often doesn't get it right. Conversely, no matter how attentive and knowledgeable the listener, the speaker often doesn't say it right... I sometimes marvel that God chose to risk his revelation in the ambiguities of language..." [92-93] Eat This Book "Plato, writing at the moment when a primarily oral culture was giving way to writing, made the astute observation that writing was going to debilitate memory... When words were primarily exchanged by means of voices and ears, language was living and kept alive in acts of speaking and listening. But the moment that words were written, memory was bound to atrophy -- we would no longer have to remember what was said; we could look it up in a book. Books rob us of the right and pleasure of answering back... Meditatio is the discipline we give to keeping the memory active in the act of reading. Meditation moves from looking at the words of the text to entering the world of the text. As we take this text into ourselves, we find that the text is taking us into itself. For the world of the text is far larger and more real than our minds and experience. The biblical text is a witness to God revealing himself. This revelation is not simply a series of random oracles that illuminate momentary obscurities or guide us through perplexing circumstances. The text is God-revealing: God creating, God saving, God blessing. The text has a context and the context is huge, massive, comprehensive... This world of revelation is not only large, it is coherent -- everything is connected as in a living organism. A living God is revealing himself, and so if we are going to get it at all we must enter the large livingness of it. Meditation rehearses this largeness, enters into what is there, re- membering all the aspects that have been dismembered... Meditation is the aspect of spiritual reading that trains us to read Scripture as a connected, coherent whole, not a collection of inspired bits and pieces..." [98-100] ETB "Prayer is language used in relation to God. It is the most universal of all languages, the lingua franca of the human heart. Prayer ranges from sighs too deep for words ... to petitions and thanksgivings composed in lyric poetry and stately prose to psalms and hymns and spiritual songs ... to the silence of a person present to God in attentive adoration... The foundational presupposition of all prayer is that God reveals himself personally by means of language. The word of God is not placarded on a billboard, an impersonal notice posted to call our attention to something that God once said or did, while we are driving down the road to somewhere else. God creates the cosmos with words; he creates us with words; he calls to us, speaks to us, whispers to us using words. Then he gives us, his human creatures, the gift of language; we not only can hear and understand God as he speaks to us, we can speak to him -- respond, answer, converse, argue, question. We can pray. God is the initiator and guarantor of language both ways, as God speaks to us, as we speak to God... 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. Prayer detached from Scripture, from listening to God, disconnected from God's words to us, short-circuits the relational language that is prayer..." [103-104] ETB "God does not make speeches; he enters conversations and we are partners to the conversation. We enter the syntax, the grammar of the word of God. We are not the largest part. We do not supply the verbs and nouns. But we are without question in it. We provide a preposition here, a conjuction there, an occassional enclitic or proclitic, once in awhile an adverb or adjective. Often it's only a semicolon or comma, an exclamation point or question mark. But we are part of the syntax, not external to it. The text assumes that we are participants in what is written, not accidental drop-ins, not hit or miss bystanders, not an addendum or footnote. By its very nature language connects; it is dialogic; it creates conversation. Prayer is our entrance into the grammar of revelation, the grammar of the word of God. The world revealed by God's word is so much larger than our sin-conditioned world that we can't be expected to grasp it all at once. The world revealed by God's word has so much more to it, in it, and behind it than our ego-centered world that we can't be expected to understand it all at once. But God is patient with us. That is why we pray what we read. Prayer is the way we work our way out of the comfortable but cramped world of self into the self-denying but spacious world of God. It's getting rid of self so that we can be all soul - God aware, God-dimensioned... The reality that God reveals to us in his word is very different, quite other - Other! - than anything we could ever have dreamed up. And thank goodness, for if we keep at this long enough, prayer by prayer we find ourselves living in a reality that is far larger far lovelier far better. But it takes considerable getting used to. Prayer is the process of getting used to it, going from the small to the large from control to mystery from self to soul - to God... Do you want to live in the real world? This is it. God doesn't reveal it to us by his word only so that we can know about it, he continues the revelation in us as we pray and participate..." [107-108] ETB "Contemplative in the context of lectio divina, our spiritual reading of the Holy Scriptures, signals a recognition of an organic union between the word read and the word lived. The contemplative life is the realization that the Word that was in the beginning is also the Word made flesh and continues to be the Word to which I say, Fiat Mihi: Let it be to me according to thy Word. The assumption underlying contemplation is that Word and Life are at root the same thing. Life originates in Word. Word makes Life. There is no word of God that God does not intend to be lived by us. All words are capable of being incarnated, because all words originate in the Word made flesh. All words are likewise capable of dis-carnation, of not conceiving life in our flesh and blood, of being turned into lies. The Devil, according to some of our best teachers, is discarnate -- incapable of getting into flesh, into life. The Devil needs human flesh to do his work. Because the Devil is completely otherworldly, so unWordly, he has no capacity for 'on earth as it is in Hell' except as we flesh and blood speak his lies and act out his illusions. The refusal, whether intentional or inadvertent, to embrace the contemplative life leaves us exposed to becoming carriers of the Devil's lies, disincarnating God's words in the very act of blithely and piously quoting Holy Scripture. For every word of God revealed and read in the Bible is there to be conceived and born in us: Christ, the Word made flesh, made flesh in our flesh... Lectio divina is not a methodical technique for reading the Bible. It is a cultivated, developed habit of living the text in Jesus' name. This is the way, the only way, that the Holy Scriptures become formative in the Christian church and become salt and leaven in the world..." [113-116] Eat This Book |