How did you learn to speak? Did your parents lock you in isolation for a year or two until you gained linguistic competence? Were you alone as you prepared to unleash yourself on other speakers? Did your parents give you a handbook of speech, full of enumerated rules, and expect you to figure it out? If so, congratulations! You’re the first of your kind.
We may have a biological or genetic predisposition toward language. But we learn actual languages by being spoken to and by learning to speak back. We learn to speak in communion.[1] Our drive to speak arises from a desire for communion. Speech deepens and sustains communion. Conversation is the ground in which our created capacity for language becomes fruitful. As in God, Word and Breath are the bond of our communion.
How did you learn to read? Were you locked in your first-grade cubicle and sternly warned not to come out until you were ready? Probably not, unless Dickens’s Mr. M’Choakumchild was your primary school teacher. You learned to read the way you learned to speak—through parents who read to you and teachers who taught you to recognize letters and to string letters into words and words into sentences, paragraphs, Facebook posts, and, finally, books. You learned to read because you had models and mentors—people who showed you how to read by reading, people who peered over your shoulder to guide your reading, to correct misreading, and to commend your right readings.
We learn to read well in the same way. You don’t become an intelligent or insightful reader in an isolation chamber. Textbooks and rules can help, but books and rules have severe limitation (see below). Sometimes rulebooks are counter-productive since they can seduce us into thinking reading is a mechanical process: Stuff the right ingredients in one end, and sausage will come out the other.
Too many hermeneutics books try to teach by giving rules for reading. To read Scripture well, you need models and mentors. You need to watch or read or hear people reading well and learn to mimic them. You need a mature reader standing beside your shoulder to tell you what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong, until you learn to hear with his ears and see with his eyes.
Jesus, the Model Reader
Spiritual reading is reading guided by the Spirit of God. We discern the Author’s full intent by being filled with the Author Himself. When Christ the Word dwells in us, we receive the written word rightly. The Spirit is our Mentor. Above all, the Spirit teaches us to read by pointing us to the Model Reader, Jesus. Spiritual reading means reading as Jesus read.
As the Word anointed by the Spirit beyond measure, He is the Model Reader of the law. According to Jesus’ reading, the Torah is focused on justice, mercy, and truth (Matt 23:23). According to Jesus, keeping the law is identical to following Him (Matt 5—7). Jesus comes to “fulfill” the law (Matt 5:17-19) in the first instance by doing justice in His own life. Jesus shows what the First Word requires by loving and obeying His Father above all things, even at the cost of His life. He wars against hypocrites, against the practical idolatry prohibited in the Third Word. By healing on the Sabbath, He gives Sabbath to the weary and heavy-laden. He doesn’t merely refrain from killing but offers Himself up to murderers. He doesn’t merely refrain from theft but pays debts He doesn’t owe—our debts. He is the faithful witness even though His true witness leads to a Roman cross. His entire life is a “reading” of the Torah.
Jews categorize a large portion of the Hebrew Bible as “prophecy.” They view the books Christians usually call “historical books” as “former prophets,” while what we call “prophecy” they consider “latter prophets.” By His teaching and life, the Spirit-anointed Jesus is the Model Reader of prophecy just as He’s the Model Reader of the law.
Jesus is literally another “Joshua,” sharing the name of the conqueror of Canaan and carrying Joshua’s war against idols at a deeper level. Clothed with the Spirit, Jesus is another Gideon or Samson. He’s the “son of David,” a King greater than Solomon (Matt 12:42). His body is a temple, ruined like Solomon’s but rebuilt as in the days of Joshua and Zerubbabel (John 2:13-20). He fulfills Hosea 11:1 by escaping from a Pharaoh-like king of the Jews (Matt 2:14-15). He’s Isaiah’s Spirit-filled Servant (Luke 4:16-21), a greater Elijah who feeds outcast widows (Luke 4:25-26), and a greater Elisha who cleanses Gentile lepers (Luke 4:27). Jesus is the key to Israel’s history and prophecy.
Jesus sums it all up when He appears to the disciples after His resurrection. On the road to Emmaus, He’s appalled that the two disciples don’t understand that the Christ had to suffer and die and be raised. Beginning with Moses and moving through all the prophets, He tells them “in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself” (Luke 24:27; cf. 24:44-49).
Even after they walk with Jesus from Jerusalem to Emmaus, even after they feel their hearts burning in them, even after Jesus teaches them about the Christ from all the Scripture, the two disciples still don’t recognize Him. Jesus is the Model Reader, but even that isn’t enough. The disciples recognize Jesus is with them only when Jesus gives thanks and breaks bread. Then their eyes are open. Jesus the Model Reader is also Jesus the Host and table companion (Luke 24:30-31). Bible and liturgy can’t be separated.[2] Scripture needs to be before our eyes, ringing in our ears, and tasted on our tongues. Within the liturgy, Scripture trains our senses so we can receive the solid food of Scripture so we become ever more mature. We learn to read well when we break bread with the Master.
The Spirit As Reading Teacher
You might be looking for an out: “OK, Jesus is the Model Reader, but I can learn to read from Jesus without any help from any other human beings. I’ve got the Spirit and Jesus and the book. What else do I need?”
Protestants are apt to be seduced by this line of thought. We confess the “perspicuity” of Scripture, its clarity. We stress the priesthood of all believers and believe each believer has access to God. It seems reasonable to conclude that the Spirit gives us insight into the Word He inspired. Some Protestants conclude that each of us can sit in his cell and learn to read. Sure, when we learn the natural process of reading, we need teachers. But when it comes to supernatural, Spiritual reading, we can dispense with models, mentors and teachers.[3]
True, the Spirit is our teacher. He’s the Finger by which Jesus bores open our deaf ears so we can hear what He has to say (Mark 7:33). But it’s an error to conclude that the Spirit bypasses teachers, our bodies, and time. The Spirit guides us through means. We mature as we become more like our mentors and models.
It’s always been so. The ascended Jesus gives gifts to the church, including teachers and pastors (Eph 4:7-16). The Spirit of Jesus equips those who teach with the ability to edify the church in their teaching (Rom 12:3-8; 1 Cor 12:4-11). You can’t be in step with the Spirit if you reject the Spirit’s gifts. You can’t be a Spiritual reader without learning from Spirit-filled teachers (cf. Acts 8:1).
Jesus is the model Reader, but the New Testament is the work of many Spirit-filled model readers. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John paint the life of Jesus from the palette of the Old Testament. The Gospels teach how the events, characters, and institutions of Scripture come to fulfillment in the Christ.
Paul teaches that Jesus is the new Adam (Rom 5:12-21), the Spiritual son of Abraham (Gal 3:1-14; 4:21-31), the seed of David (Rom 1:1-4). The writer to the Hebrews says Jesus’ blood speaks a better word than the blood of Abel (Heb 12:24) and that Jesus is a priest after the order of Melchizedek, surpassing the order of Aaron (Heb 7). Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascent fulfill the sacrifices of the Mosaic order (Heb 9—10). And so on and on and still on. The apostles learned well from the Model Reader and teach the Scriptures just as He taught.
Jesus still models reading by giving us model readers. The Scriptures are clear, written for every follower of Jesus. That doesn’t mean they are equally clear to everyone. It doesn’t mean the Scriptures are clear in the absence of teachers to clarify. Scripture is clear because the Spirit guides our reading by giving us guides.
Protestants often transpose “priesthood of all believers” into a democratic tune or an egalitarian etude. Because we’re all priests, we think we all have equal skill in reading, teaching, grasping texts. That’s an error. Some men and women are more “naturally” gifted to understand texts. Some have devoted focused energy and enormous time to learning how to read well. Some have drunk the milk, trained their senses, and learned to eat solid food. Such mature readers are better readers than the rest of us. The best thing you can do is recognize their superiority and put yourself under their tutelage, imitating them as they imitate Christ.
Rules for Reading
Whenever someone starts talking about typology, or pointing to the significance of tiny details of the Bible, someone in the audience experiences a form of vertigo. “Where does it all stop? Where are the brakes? I’m hurtling down this road and I’m sure to crash into some heresy or end up who knows where? You seem to find things that aren’t there! Help! Give me some rules!”
One answer, entirely true, is to remind the fearful reader that the Spirit blows where He listeth. Another entirely true response is to repeat the moral (and hermeneutical) exhortation of Jesus, the Model Reader: “Have no fear. It is I!” To the charge that we’re liable to find things that aren’t in the text, the answer it simple: Of course we are. That’s the point of careful reading. A good reader is like someone with a well-tuned ear for music. A good listener hears the overtones and harmonies, the shifts in meter and instrumentation, that a casual or untrained listener misses. A good reader is not hearing things, any more than a good listener is hearing things in music. A good reader notices what’s on the page, and catches the overtones, connotations, import and implications of what’s written. A good reader is so attentive to the text that he notices the thousands of traces of things that are virtually there. He’s so attentive to what’s there that he notices the crucial bits that are not there.
Rules, controls, brakes, methodological curbs have a place, but it’s a limited one. As Jim Jordan has explained, the trajectory of humanity’s growth toward adulthood moves from priest to king to prophet.[4] During the Mosaic era, Israel is a priestly nation (Exod 19:6), with Aaron the High Priest as chief leader. The Mosaic order collapses at the end of the period of judges, and Samuel anoints Saul and David as kings. The priestly nation becomes a kingdom. The Davidic order also ends in disaster, when the Assyrians and Babylonians invade and conquer the divided kingdom. Prophets already appear in the time of kings, but they take on a higher profile just before, during, and after the exile. Israel is a microcosm of humanity, encapsulating the maturation of the race, until the Messiah arrives, who is priest, king, and prophet in one Man.
At many levels, our lives have the same shape. To play the cello, you first have to submit to strict disciplines (like a priest), focusing on how you bend your fingers, where to touch the strings, how to hold the bow. By practice, you gain mastery (king). Eventually, you forget your fingers and the bow because you now integrate and embody the disciplines. Bow and cello feel like extensions of your body. Now you can play. Once you’re a master, you can become a teacher (prophet), imposing disciplines on young students until they become kings of the strings. Through these stages, your senses are trained until you can tell the difference between excellence and incompetence. Through practice, you develop a touch for the instrument.
Golfers and knitters, poets and painters, businessman and accountants, mothers and midwives, pastors and politicians mature through a similar sequence. A well-formed life moves through these phases. Early on, we’re priestly servants, children under discipline, gaining skills, following instructions, obeying the rules. After the crisis of early adulthood, we emerge as kings, building a family, answering the call of a vocation, gaining influence, issuing rather than obeying commands, passing judgments. Many see their achievements collapse in mid-life, but they come to new life with deeper, calmer wisdom, the ancient wisdom of prophets, who live on to advise priests and kings. As you read your experience through the lens God’s Word, you get in touch with the world.
Think about rules for reading as an instruction manual for car repair. If you’re a beginner, you need the manual. You may have to follow the instructions quite strictly: Remove this bolt, replace this washer, turn the oil filter that direction, and never NEVER! remove this hose when the engine is hot. As long as you’re following the manual, you’re not a good mechanic. Good mechanics know engines. They can diagnose by listening to the clicks and clacks coming from under the hood. You become a good mechanic by apprenticeship to a car guy. He embodies the rules, and you infer the rules of the game from watching him work. Or, even better, you imitate the master mechanic until the feel for good practices seep into your body and bones.
Rulebooks can’t enforce the rules. They can’t alert you to violations. Experience alerts you to violations. The car will let you know. You’ll know you removed the wrong hose when some slick, boiling fluid starts spewing from the engine. You remember the rule: “Never NEVER! remove that hose when the engine is hot.” You can avoid mistakes and injury if you stick close to the master mechanic. He’ll tell you if you start to do something dumb.
Whether we’re repairing a car, playing an instrument, swinging a bat, tossing a free throw, or reading, the pattern is the same. A rulebook may contain standards of judgment, but a rulebook can’t judge. Mature people, with senses trained to discern good and evil, teach us what to do and what not to do. Other people provide the brakes and checks that keep our reading on track and keep us from driving over a cliff. As you practice and listen to your mentor, you’ll develop guidelines and rules of thumb. Rules for reading come after reading has begun. The goal isn’t to follow the rules. The goal is to read what’s in front of you. Good readers do it so effortlessly that it seems arbitrary or magical. That’s where you want to be, and you can’t get there if you’re always pumping the brakes.
Quenching the Spirit
For centuries, the church accepted Jesus and the apostles as model readers, learning to read the Scriptures, and everything else, by following their example and instruction. Teachers of the past weren’t always good readers. They got things wrong. But their “method” was sound because they read in the Spirit.
For the past several centuries, that “method” has been mocked, even by many Christians. Modern “scientific” hermeneutics promises to teach us to read more accurately. It teaches us to reject childish “allegorization” and to pay close attention to the grammar and historical context so we can discern the hard facts of the case. Modern hermeneutics trains us to take fright at the “eisegesis” of the church’s reading, its alleged habit of reading Jesus into the Bible instead of following the literal lineaments of the text.
Modern scholarship has made immeasurable contributions to our knowledge of the Bible. We know far more about the ancient contexts of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament than any previous age of church history. We have made great strides in grasping the languages of the ancient world. Archeological discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls have opened up forgotten features of the biblical world.
Plus, the church has always insisted on attention to the letter of Scripture, the grammar of the text, and its historical setting. Spiritual reading assumes the persons and events recorded in Scripture occurred in real time and space. Unless they are real, we are of all men most miserable. Modern scholars remind us to take the literal sense very seriously. To that degree, they, too, are gifts of the Spirit who model good reading. I take those warnings to heart and affirm the Reformers’ correct insistence on the priority of the letter. The Spiritual reading I model here doesn’t leave the letter behind. It plumbs the depths of the letter, which, we discover, opens out into glimpses of Jesus, frameworks for understanding the world. We seek to understand the text on the terms it sets for us. By the Spirit, the letter trains our senses to discern between good and evil.
At a fundamental level, though, modern biblical scholarship is a systematic, relentless, centuries-long experiment in quenching the Spirit. It replaces Jesus as Model Reader with a scientific, grammatical, or historical master. The Word is our food. It trains our senses and makes us mature. If we want to put away childish things and grow up, nothing is more crucial to the future of the church than repentance at this point. We must get back in step with the Spirit, learning to read well by imitating the model reading of Jesus and His apostles.
[1] Charles Taylor, The Language Animal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2016) 65-67.
[2] For more, see Theopolitan Liturgy, ch. 2.
[3] This is not, of course, the Reformers own vision. But in the name of the Reformers, many Christians have adopted it.
[4] James B. Jordan, From Bread To Wine (Monroe, LA: Athanasius Press, 2019).
How did you learn to speak? Did your parents lock you in isolation for a year or two until you gained linguistic competence? Were you alone as you prepared to unleash yourself on other speakers? Did your parents give you a handbook of speech, full of enumerated rules, and expect you to figure it out? If so, congratulations! You’re the first of your kind.
We may have a biological or genetic predisposition toward language. But we learn actual languages by being spoken to and by learning to speak back. We learn to speak in communion.[1] Our drive to speak arises from a desire for communion. Speech deepens and sustains communion. Conversation is the ground in which our created capacity for language becomes fruitful. As in God, Word and Breath are the bond of our communion.
How did you learn to read? Were you locked in your first-grade cubicle and sternly warned not to come out until you were ready? Probably not, unless Dickens’s Mr. M’Choakumchild was your primary school teacher. You learned to read the way you learned to speak—through parents who read to you and teachers who taught you to recognize letters and to string letters into words and words into sentences, paragraphs, Facebook posts, and, finally, books. You learned to read because you had models and mentors—people who showed you how to read by reading, people who peered over your shoulder to guide your reading, to correct misreading, and to commend your right readings.
We learn to read well in the same way. You don’t become an intelligent or insightful reader in an isolation chamber. Textbooks and rules can help, but books and rules have severe limitation (see below). Sometimes rulebooks are counter-productive since they can seduce us into thinking reading is a mechanical process: Stuff the right ingredients in one end, and sausage will come out the other.
Too many hermeneutics books try to teach by giving rules for reading. To read Scripture well, you need models and mentors. You need to watch or read or hear people reading well and learn to mimic them. You need a mature reader standing beside your shoulder to tell you what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong, until you learn to hear with his ears and see with his eyes.
Jesus, the Model Reader
Spiritual reading is reading guided by the Spirit of God. We discern the Author's full intent by being filled with the Author Himself. When Christ the Word dwells in us, we receive the written word rightly. The Spirit is our Mentor. Above all, the Spirit teaches us to read by pointing us to the Model Reader, Jesus. Spiritual reading means reading as Jesus read.
As the Word anointed by the Spirit beyond measure, He is the Model Reader of the law. According to Jesus’ reading, the Torah is focused on justice, mercy, and truth (Matt 23:23). According to Jesus, keeping the law is identical to following Him (Matt 5—7). Jesus comes to “fulfill” the law (Matt 5:17-19) in the first instance by doing justice in His own life. Jesus shows what the First Word requires by loving and obeying His Father above all things, even at the cost of His life. He wars against hypocrites, against the practical idolatry prohibited in the Third Word. By healing on the Sabbath, He gives Sabbath to the weary and heavy-laden. He doesn’t merely refrain from killing but offers Himself up to murderers. He doesn’t merely refrain from theft but pays debts He doesn’t owe—our debts. He is the faithful witness even though His true witness leads to a Roman cross. His entire life is a “reading” of the Torah.
Jews categorize a large portion of the Hebrew Bible as “prophecy.” They view the books Christians usually call “historical books” as “former prophets,” while what we call “prophecy” they consider “latter prophets.” By His teaching and life, the Spirit-anointed Jesus is the Model Reader of prophecy just as He’s the Model Reader of the law.
Jesus is literally another “Joshua,” sharing the name of the conqueror of Canaan and carrying Joshua’s war against idols at a deeper level. Clothed with the Spirit, Jesus is another Gideon or Samson. He’s the “son of David,” a King greater than Solomon (Matt 12:42). His body is a temple, ruined like Solomon’s but rebuilt as in the days of Joshua and Zerubbabel (John 2:13-20). He fulfills Hosea 11:1 by escaping from a Pharaoh-like king of the Jews (Matt 2:14-15). He’s Isaiah’s Spirit-filled Servant (Luke 4:16-21), a greater Elijah who feeds outcast widows (Luke 4:25-26), and a greater Elisha who cleanses Gentile lepers (Luke 4:27). Jesus is the key to Israel’s history and prophecy.
Jesus sums it all up when He appears to the disciples after His resurrection. On the road to Emmaus, He’s appalled that the two disciples don’t understand that the Christ had to suffer and die and be raised. Beginning with Moses and moving through all the prophets, He tells them “in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself” (Luke 24:27; cf. 24:44-49).
Even after they walk with Jesus from Jerusalem to Emmaus, even after they feel their hearts burning in them, even after Jesus teaches them about the Christ from all the Scripture, the two disciples still don’t recognize Him. Jesus is the Model Reader, but even that isn’t enough. The disciples recognize Jesus is with them only when Jesus gives thanks and breaks bread. Then their eyes are open. Jesus the Model Reader is also Jesus the Host and table companion (Luke 24:30-31). Bible and liturgy can’t be separated.[2] Scripture needs to be before our eyes, ringing in our ears, and tasted on our tongues. Within the liturgy, Scripture trains our senses so we can receive the solid food of Scripture so we become ever more mature. We learn to read well when we break bread with the Master.
The Spirit As Reading Teacher
You might be looking for an out: “OK, Jesus is the Model Reader, but I can learn to read from Jesus without any help from any other human beings. I’ve got the Spirit and Jesus and the book. What else do I need?”
Protestants are apt to be seduced by this line of thought. We confess the “perspicuity” of Scripture, its clarity. We stress the priesthood of all believers and believe each believer has access to God. It seems reasonable to conclude that the Spirit gives us insight into the Word He inspired. Some Protestants conclude that each of us can sit in his cell and learn to read. Sure, when we learn the natural process of reading, we need teachers. But when it comes to supernatural, Spiritual reading, we can dispense with models, mentors and teachers.[3]
True, the Spirit is our teacher. He’s the Finger by which Jesus bores open our deaf ears so we can hear what He has to say (Mark 7:33). But it’s an error to conclude that the Spirit bypasses teachers, our bodies, and time. The Spirit guides us through means. We mature as we become more like our mentors and models.
It’s always been so. The ascended Jesus gives gifts to the church, including teachers and pastors (Eph 4:7-16). The Spirit of Jesus equips those who teach with the ability to edify the church in their teaching (Rom 12:3-8; 1 Cor 12:4-11). You can’t be in step with the Spirit if you reject the Spirit’s gifts. You can’t be a Spiritual reader without learning from Spirit-filled teachers (cf. Acts 8:1).
Jesus is the model Reader, but the New Testament is the work of many Spirit-filled model readers. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John paint the life of Jesus from the palette of the Old Testament. The Gospels teach how the events, characters, and institutions of Scripture come to fulfillment in the Christ.
Paul teaches that Jesus is the new Adam (Rom 5:12-21), the Spiritual son of Abraham (Gal 3:1-14; 4:21-31), the seed of David (Rom 1:1-4). The writer to the Hebrews says Jesus’ blood speaks a better word than the blood of Abel (Heb 12:24) and that Jesus is a priest after the order of Melchizedek, surpassing the order of Aaron (Heb 7). Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascent fulfill the sacrifices of the Mosaic order (Heb 9—10). And so on and on and still on. The apostles learned well from the Model Reader and teach the Scriptures just as He taught.
Jesus still models reading by giving us model readers. The Scriptures are clear, written for every follower of Jesus. That doesn’t mean they are equally clear to everyone. It doesn’t mean the Scriptures are clear in the absence of teachers to clarify. Scripture is clear because the Spirit guides our reading by giving us guides.
Protestants often transpose “priesthood of all believers” into a democratic tune or an egalitarian etude. Because we’re all priests, we think we all have equal skill in reading, teaching, grasping texts. That’s an error. Some men and women are more “naturally” gifted to understand texts. Some have devoted focused energy and enormous time to learning how to read well. Some have drunk the milk, trained their senses, and learned to eat solid food. Such mature readers are better readers than the rest of us. The best thing you can do is recognize their superiority and put yourself under their tutelage, imitating them as they imitate Christ.
Rules for Reading
Whenever someone starts talking about typology, or pointing to the significance of tiny details of the Bible, someone in the audience experiences a form of vertigo. “Where does it all stop? Where are the brakes? I’m hurtling down this road and I’m sure to crash into some heresy or end up who knows where? You seem to find things that aren’t there! Help! Give me some rules!”
One answer, entirely true, is to remind the fearful reader that the Spirit blows where He listeth. Another entirely true response is to repeat the moral (and hermeneutical) exhortation of Jesus, the Model Reader: “Have no fear. It is I!” To the charge that we’re liable to find things that aren’t in the text, the answer it simple: Of course we are. That’s the point of careful reading. A good reader is like someone with a well-tuned ear for music. A good listener hears the overtones and harmonies, the shifts in meter and instrumentation, that a casual or untrained listener misses. A good reader is not hearing things, any more than a good listener is hearing things in music. A good reader notices what’s on the page, and catches the overtones, connotations, import and implications of what’s written. A good reader is so attentive to the text that he notices the thousands of traces of things that are virtually there. He’s so attentive to what’s there that he notices the crucial bits that are not there.
Rules, controls, brakes, methodological curbs have a place, but it’s a limited one. As Jim Jordan has explained, the trajectory of humanity’s growth toward adulthood moves from priest to king to prophet.[4] During the Mosaic era, Israel is a priestly nation (Exod 19:6), with Aaron the High Priest as chief leader. The Mosaic order collapses at the end of the period of judges, and Samuel anoints Saul and David as kings. The priestly nation becomes a kingdom. The Davidic order also ends in disaster, when the Assyrians and Babylonians invade and conquer the divided kingdom. Prophets already appear in the time of kings, but they take on a higher profile just before, during, and after the exile. Israel is a microcosm of humanity, encapsulating the maturation of the race, until the Messiah arrives, who is priest, king, and prophet in one Man.
At many levels, our lives have the same shape. To play the cello, you first have to submit to strict disciplines (like a priest), focusing on how you bend your fingers, where to touch the strings, how to hold the bow. By practice, you gain mastery (king). Eventually, you forget your fingers and the bow because you now integrate and embody the disciplines. Bow and cello feel like extensions of your body. Now you can play. Once you’re a master, you can become a teacher (prophet), imposing disciplines on young students until they become kings of the strings. Through these stages, your senses are trained until you can tell the difference between excellence and incompetence. Through practice, you develop a touch for the instrument.
Golfers and knitters, poets and painters, businessman and accountants, mothers and midwives, pastors and politicians mature through a similar sequence. A well-formed life moves through these phases. Early on, we’re priestly servants, children under discipline, gaining skills, following instructions, obeying the rules. After the crisis of early adulthood, we emerge as kings, building a family, answering the call of a vocation, gaining influence, issuing rather than obeying commands, passing judgments. Many see their achievements collapse in mid-life, but they come to new life with deeper, calmer wisdom, the ancient wisdom of prophets, who live on to advise priests and kings. As you read your experience through the lens God’s Word, you get in touch with the world.
Think about rules for reading as an instruction manual for car repair. If you’re a beginner, you need the manual. You may have to follow the instructions quite strictly: Remove this bolt, replace this washer, turn the oil filter that direction, and never NEVER! remove this hose when the engine is hot. As long as you’re following the manual, you’re not a good mechanic. Good mechanics know engines. They can diagnose by listening to the clicks and clacks coming from under the hood. You become a good mechanic by apprenticeship to a car guy. He embodies the rules, and you infer the rules of the game from watching him work. Or, even better, you imitate the master mechanic until the feel for good practices seep into your body and bones.
Rulebooks can’t enforce the rules. They can’t alert you to violations. Experience alerts you to violations. The car will let you know. You’ll know you removed the wrong hose when some slick, boiling fluid starts spewing from the engine. You remember the rule: “Never NEVER! remove that hose when the engine is hot.” You can avoid mistakes and injury if you stick close to the master mechanic. He’ll tell you if you start to do something dumb.
Whether we’re repairing a car, playing an instrument, swinging a bat, tossing a free throw, or reading, the pattern is the same. A rulebook may contain standards of judgment, but a rulebook can’t judge. Mature people, with senses trained to discern good and evil, teach us what to do and what not to do. Other people provide the brakes and checks that keep our reading on track and keep us from driving over a cliff. As you practice and listen to your mentor, you’ll develop guidelines and rules of thumb. Rules for reading come after reading has begun. The goal isn’t to follow the rules. The goal is to read what’s in front of you. Good readers do it so effortlessly that it seems arbitrary or magical. That’s where you want to be, and you can’t get there if you’re always pumping the brakes.
Quenching the Spirit
For centuries, the church accepted Jesus and the apostles as model readers, learning to read the Scriptures, and everything else, by following their example and instruction. Teachers of the past weren’t always good readers. They got things wrong. But their “method” was sound because they read in the Spirit.
For the past several centuries, that “method” has been mocked, even by many Christians. Modern “scientific” hermeneutics promises to teach us to read more accurately. It teaches us to reject childish “allegorization” and to pay close attention to the grammar and historical context so we can discern the hard facts of the case. Modern hermeneutics trains us to take fright at the “eisegesis” of the church’s reading, its alleged habit of reading Jesus into the Bible instead of following the literal lineaments of the text.
Modern scholarship has made immeasurable contributions to our knowledge of the Bible. We know far more about the ancient contexts of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament than any previous age of church history. We have made great strides in grasping the languages of the ancient world. Archeological discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls have opened up forgotten features of the biblical world.
Plus, the church has always insisted on attention to the letter of Scripture, the grammar of the text, and its historical setting. Spiritual reading assumes the persons and events recorded in Scripture occurred in real time and space. Unless they are real, we are of all men most miserable. Modern scholars remind us to take the literal sense very seriously. To that degree, they, too, are gifts of the Spirit who model good reading. I take those warnings to heart and affirm the Reformers’ correct insistence on the priority of the letter. The Spiritual reading I model here doesn’t leave the letter behind. It plumbs the depths of the letter, which, we discover, opens out into glimpses of Jesus, frameworks for understanding the world. We seek to understand the text on the terms it sets for us. By the Spirit, the letter trains our senses to discern between good and evil.
At a fundamental level, though, modern biblical scholarship is a systematic, relentless, centuries-long experiment in quenching the Spirit. It replaces Jesus as Model Reader with a scientific, grammatical, or historical master. The Word is our food. It trains our senses and makes us mature. If we want to put away childish things and grow up, nothing is more crucial to the future of the church than repentance at this point. We must get back in step with the Spirit, learning to read well by imitating the model reading of Jesus and His apostles.
[1] Charles Taylor, The Language Animal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2016) 65-67.
[2] For more, see Theopolitan Liturgy, ch. 2.
[3] This is not, of course, the Reformers own vision. But in the name of the Reformers, many Christians have adopted it.
[4] James B. Jordan, From Bread To Wine (Monroe, LA: Athanasius Press, 2019).
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