Spirituality and the Bible

Transcription

1 Spirituality and the Bible Sharyn Dowd Professor of New Testament Lexington Theological Seminary There are many things that one could do with the topic of "Spirituality and the Bible." 1 I am going to attempt to do only two things. First, I will offer some reflections on what spirituality will look like if it is derived from the Biblical witness; second, I will suggest a way in which Bible reading could be used to nurture biblical spirituality in God's people. 2 It seems to me that one of the most basic aspects of the Bible's witness to God is that God is real and God is Other than we are (and usually Other than we wish God were). In Genesis the world is not formed out of the divine substance, nor does God give birth to the world, but instead God speaks and the world comes into being. God is Other than that which God creates. In Exodus God acts in faithfulness to the promise to Israel's ancestors and delivers Israel from bondage in Egypt. God is Other than our historical circumstances. At the foot of Mt. Sinai Israel decides that the times call for new models of God 3 and God comes within a hair of wiping them off the face of the earth. God is Other than a malleable projection of what we think we need. 4 Samuel tries to anoint anybody but David, and God says, "This one-this last, least sheep-keeper will rule my people." God is Other than human expectations and values. The cultic officials make a full-time job of putting together quality worship services and God speaks through another shepherd and says, "I hate, I despise your 11:00 festivals and I am not impressed by your solemn assemblies (General, Regional, or otherwise), but let's have some justice and some right relationships for a change!" God is Other than our liturgical re-enactments of God's past.

2 38 Lexington Theological Quarterly Jesus shows up in a filthy feed-trough, consistently associates with the wrong people, finally gets himself executed, and is proclaimed by a bunch of fishy-smelling Galileans as Risen Lord. And it isn't long before the Holy Spirit falls on the Gentiles, of all people, and God says, "You have to let them in because I already have." God is Other than our best guesses about what God is up to in the world. And finally, in that last awe-filled vision called the Revelation to John, the Lamb opens the seventh and final seal and after all the shouting and the prophesying and the earthquakes and the hosts of heaven singing, "Holy, Holy, Holy," and "Worthy is the Lamb," everything comes to an abrupt standstill and John says simply, "There was silence in heaven for half an hour." That is to say, God is still being God even when nobody is talking about God. God is not defined by our feeble words. This is the message we have forgotten, both on the theologically correct right and the politically correct left-that God is Other than all language about God. The God to whom the Bible bears witness is not projected, modeled, or imagined, but encountered as the self-defining, selfrevealing Other who stands astride our roads to Moab and Damascus to inform us that God intends to put words into our mouths and not the other way around. Biblical spirituality, then, is encounter with the God who is real and who is Other than we are. Moreover, the God we encounter is personal. The Bible is not about an encounter with some impersonal life-force, some impulse toward creativity, or some kind of spiritual magnetic field. The inescapable anthropomorphisms in the biblical witness communicate clearly that God is personal; God seeks to relate to human beings. The biblical writers use the most intimate relationships to talk about the ways God relates to God's people. Hosea knows God as the rejected spouse who refused to give up on an unfaithful partner. Isaiah knows God as the one who will no more forget Zion than a mother will forget a nursing child. The Markan Jesus knows God as trusted Abba whose will he chooses even over his own will even over his own life. And Paul asserts in Romans 8 that the way the Spirit confirms in us the sense that we are God's children is by putting that same audacious cry of intimacy on our lips: Abba we love you; Abba, we need you; Abba, Abba.

3 Spirituality and the Bible 39 But the communities that produced the biblical traditions knew that intimacy is not always good news; sometimes intimate relationships are abusive. Abraham and Isaac trade off their wives to save their skins. Jacob conspires with his mother to deceive his father and defraud his brother. Jephthah sacrifices his daughter because of a careless vow. A Lévite offers his concubine to his attackers to be raped in his stead, causing her death. Amnon rapes his half-sister and in turn is murdered by his brother. In the Bible intimate relationships are not necessarily life-giving. So biblical spirituality is not merely intimate encounter with the divine Other, but intimate relationship with the personal God who is always and only faithful covenant love. This is perhaps the best news of all. The relationship with the God of the Bible is the only intimate relationship in which we can be neither manipulators nor manipulated. No matter how hard we try and how many hours we spend in therapy, we often find our intimate relationships with other human beings degenerating into using and being used. God is the only one who consistently resists being used, and God is the only one who is never guilty of manipulation. No matter how we relate to God and others, God relates to us, the people who belong to God, always and only as faithful covenant love. Of course, faithful covenant love is not permissive or indulgent. It involves confrontation. God confronts us, the covenant partners, with our idolatry and our unfaithfulness to the relationship, but God does not abandon us or give up on the relationship. That is why, according to the biblical witness, the judgment of God is never the opposite of God's love, but rather a manifestation and evidence of God's love. "You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities (Amos 3:2)." God is so good that God drags me back kicking and screaming into the relationship every time I choose what seems to be a "better" way because, as the proverb says, "There is a way that seems right to a person, but its end is the way to death (Prov 14:12)." Paul puts it like this: "The payoff for idolatry is deadness, but the free gift of God is real life in Christ Jesus (Rom 6:23)." When God's love manifests itself in judgment, it is always judgment for the sake of restoring the life-giving relationship. So a major component of biblical spirituality is opening the self and the community to the searching gaze of God's evaluation: "Search

4 40 Lexington Theological Quarterly me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting (Ps 139:23-24)." Instead of rationalizing ourselves out of confronting the judgment of God, we ought to be asking God to judge us before our hearts get too hard to hear God. I think hell would be to spend eternity looking into the suffering eyes of one whose love I had habitually despised One who would not stop loving me and would not go away. So biblical spirituality is intimate relationship with the ultimate personal Other who is encountered as uncompromisingly faithful covenant love. Now that we have at least sketched an understanding of the God to whom the Bible bears witness, we need to look briefly at the human side of the relationship. As American Christians living in a culture that values the individual above all else, we need to be reminded that although biblical spirituality is always personal, it is never private. 5 According to the Bible, God is in the business of building covenant community. God did not deliver Moses out of Egypt alone, although in Exodus 32, God appears to regret this and suggests obliterating the stubborn Israelites and starting over with Moses. According to the text, Moses talked God out of this plan, although he lived to regret winning the argument. When the Risen Lord ascends at the beginning of Acts, he leaves behind not a hermit but a prayer group, which is transformed at Pentecost into a church sent on mission to the ends of the earth. The way Matthew ends the gospel story, the Risen Christ sends the disciples out to make disciples of others, to baptize and to teach, promising, "I am with you always, to the end of the age (Matt 28:20)." This promise at the end of the Great Commission is a good example of the way in which the poverty of the secondperson pronoun in English can conceal the New Testaments emphasis on the communal character of Christian life and witness. Greek makes a distinction between "you" singular and "you" plural, whereas standard English does not. 6 At the end of Matthew, Jesus says, "I am with you (plural) always, to the end of the age." The promise is made to the disciples, and by extension, to the church. This means that the presence of Christ is promised to us as a community, not as private lone-ranger Christians. Just as in the Old Testament God tabernacles in the midst of Israel, so in the prologue to John we learn that "the Word

5 Spirituality and the Bible 41 became flesh and tabernacles among us (1:14)." This emphasis upon community becomes important when we come to the passages that deal with discernment, or how we can tell that the presence we experience and the voice we hear is that of the Holy Spirit or of some other spirit. In his extended farewell speech, the Johannine Jesus promises the presence of the Paraclete to the church: "It is to your (plural) advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Paraclete will not come to you (plural); but if I go, I will send. [the Paraclete] to you (plural) (16:7)." A major function of the spirit is to give leadership to the community; "When the spirit of truth comes, [the spirit] will guide you (plural) into all the truth (16:13)." In the polemical situation faced by the author of the first Johannine epistle, it is clear that the need for discernment has become acute; "Beloved, don't believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world (1 John 4:1)," (Both the imperative verbs are second person plural.) Discernment takes place in community. This view was not limited to the Johannine churches. Paul also insisted, "Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said... and the spirits of prophets are subject to the prophets, for God is a God not of disorder but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints (1 Cor 14:29-33)." And what are the criteria that we use to recognize the presence and guidance of the Holy Spirit? The Bible makes several suggestions, and non-canonical Christian literature of the apostolic period adds to theme. I think the candidate for the most unhelpful passage on discernment is Deuteronomy 18:21-22: "You may say to yourself, 'How can we recognize a word that the Lord has not spoken?' If a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord but the thing does not take place or prove true, it is a word that the Lord has not spoken." That works very well in hindsight but is absolutely no help at the time the community is trying to decide to which voice to listen. Fortunately, the rest of the biblical advice on discernment is slightly more helpful. Deuteronomy 13:1-5 offers a theological criterion; even if the spiritual influence does seem to be reliable, it is to be rejected if it departs from the theological tradition, calling the community to "follow other gods." Israel is admonished to follow only "the Lord your God... who brought you out of the land of Egypt and redeemed you from the house of slavery." In the New Testament this becomes a Christological

6 42 Lexington Theological Quarterly criterion: "No one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says 'Let Jesus be cursed!' and no one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 12:3)." "By this you (plural) know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God (1 John 4:2-3)." In addition to the confessional or theological criterion, the Christian tradition offers a number of ethical criteria, some biblical and some extra-biblical. The author of 1 John insists that the spirit that causes rupture in the Christian community is not from God: "Whoever says, Ί am in the light,' while hating another Christian is still in the darkness. Whoever loves another Christian lives in the light, and in such a person there is no cause for stumbling. But whoever hates another believer is in the darkness, walks in the darkness, and does not know the way to go, because the darkness has brought on blindness.... They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But by going out they made it plain that none of them belongs tous (1 John 2:9-11,19)." Furthermore, "No one who abides in [Christ] makes a habit of sinning; no one who sins habitually has either seen or known [Christ] (1 John 3:6)." To these biblical criteria, the Didache adds the financial disclosure test; the false prophet asks for money and tries to overstay his or her welcome at the community's expense. In the Shepherd of Hermas, the false prophet gives private consultations for pay and avoids accountability to the Christian community, whereas the true prophet lives a life of simplicity and submits to the community's discernment. Whereas some of these criteria apply more to Christians who seek to give leadership to congregations than they apply to the typical congregational member, they at least point to some ways in which we can discern various manifestations of spirituality; spirituality may be regarded as Christian if it is theologically orthodox, if it enhances, rather than disrupts Christian community, and if it issues in ethically responsible behavior. Now this is all very well, but if the presence of God is experienced in Christian community and if the church is responsible for discerning true from false spirituality, we are going to have to have different congregations from the ones most of us serve. Discernment is not practiced by secret ballots cast by people who are expressing their opinion. Communities nurtured by biblical

7 Spirituality and the Bible 43 spirituality will be Scripture-shaped communities congregations immersed in the Bible congregations where Scripture is read, discussed, sung, prayed and acted upon. This means that we are going to have to take the Bible back from the fundamentalists. Our students tell me that in some "mainline" congregations it is considered in bad taste to take one's Bible to church. This needs to change, and the pastors are the ones to change it. You start by becoming familiar with the Bible. That means you have to read it. In about twenty minutes a day you can read the entire canon all the way through within a calendar year. You need to do that and you need to encourage the congregation to do it with you not once, but year after year after year. Read it alone and read it together. Read it out loud to your families; have the children read it out loud to you. Encourage Christians to follow the same reading plan and get together on a regular basis to discuss what they are reading. There is no other alternative. No curriculum and no commentary series is a substitute for the consistent reading, discussion and application of the entire canon within the context of the community of faith. If you will do it, it will revitalize your preaching. If you can lead the congregation to do it, it will renew your life together. If enough of you will do it, it will revitalize the church. It will not be easy, but it will be worth the effort. ^hese thoughts were first presented at a Pastor's Conference at Lexington Theological Seminary on June 3, Here I would like to insert two disclaimers designed to lift the responsibility for interpretation from the author and place it squarely on the reader. First, this is an essay, not a report of exegetical analysis or a comprehensive survey and review of literature on the topic of biblical spirituality. That means that the footnotes will be few and the generalizations many. Second, like every reader of the Bible who speaks about what she or he has read, I will use shorthand without apologizing for doing so. That means that I will speak about "the Bible," when what I really mean is "a reading of the Bible by this particular Christian North America Caucasian Baptist female who

8 44 Lexington Theological Quarterly has earned the sort of credentials for reading the Bible that are bestowed by the sort of educational institutions that arise in Western capitalist democracies." That is all the warning the reader will get; the rest of these reflections will proceed as though they were true because, from my perspective, they are. 3 The phrase "Models of God" is Sallie McFague's. See her Models of God. Philadelphia; Fortress, See Luke T. Johnson,itar/i 's Freedom (Minneapolis; Augsburg Fortress, 1990), I first heard the phrase "always personal, never private" used by Michael Kinnamon, Dean of Lexington Theological Seminary. 6 Fortunately for the reader of the Bible who must rely on the English translation, the translators of the NRSV sometimes provide notes to signal when the pronoun or verb form is plural.

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