INTRO
Knowing the physics of flight -- how lift, drag, and thrust work to get a body off the ground -- is not the same as watching the ground drop below you as the clouds surround you.
Knowing what musical modes are and being able to tell someone John Coltrane used these in innovative ways to push free jazz forward is not the same as putting an intuition in your soul into notes in the air for anyone with ears to hear.
Knowing the Queens Gambit or what a force out is in baseball is not the same as besting a worthy opponent in Chess or feeling your legs take you somewhere your conscious mind may not even know you need to go so you can feel the ball hit your glove and throw where you should to get an out for your team.
And knowing that Jesus said do not worry, and love your enemies, is not the same as feeling the lightness of trust take root in your gut or feeling bitterness lose its grip on your chest.
Some things, you have to practice to understand.
So in this series, we hope to help you practice your faith so you can know salvation.
This time we look at what it would mean to go beyond having opinions about the Bible to actually practicing the Scriptures.
STORY
Picture two people, both up before dawn. And in that magic kind of silence that is the perfect soundtrack to the stillness before all the world wakes and gets to doing all they things the world will be doing, these two people are using the first gentle golden rays of light and those few moments of consciousness before everyone else in their household rises to get a few key skills deeper into their instincts.
One is at a drawing table in front of a window striving over and over to put onto paper that perfect roundness they can envision and appreciate but not quite draw,
inscribing circle after circle until their hands cramp. Then they stretch out their muscles, take a few breaths, then shift to working on their shading until the movement from light and dark they can effect with charcoal is as gentle or as stark as they want it to be.
The other person is out in the yard, placing their feet in strategic patterns inside and outside the squares of a speed ladder stretched across the ground.
Repeating the same moves again and again until the sweat beads and then runs down their face and their feet execute the patterns with greater precision and rapidity. Then they grab a soccer ball and work on keeping it in their air using only their feet until they can do that as well as I could with my hands.
Now imagine, the artist and soccer player did this, five mornings a week, for months, or even years. If they were to dedicate that kind of solitary time and effort to running those drills, their skill would likely become more than impressive.
But then, if the artist never created a single piece or art that consolidated the curves and lines and angles and shades they were now capable of pulling off into an image that presented a face or landscape or skyline or whatever, and if they never shared that piece with a community of people who could take in the art and discuss it and perhaps hopefully begin to see more truly something about their everyday world that they'd never before appreciated ...
And if the soccer player never took all that coordination and dexterity and stamina and instinctual vision for the physics of movement and offered those skills to a team, if they never entered into competition with worthy opponents ...
Then we'd feel about both the artist and the athlete, that even with all their engagement and discipline and skill, even with all that quantity, something vital was missing in the quality of their practice.
Now, let me make an analogy:
I want you to imagine someone sitting by a window, in that early morning same silence, in that same golden light awaking all the world's potential, with their scriptures open.
And let's imagine that 5 mornings out of the week, for months or years, this person comes to know the nuances of God's story and the complexities of the characters that get involved in God's mysterious workings of grace. And this devotee to Scripture learns about ancient cultures and languages and takes 15 minutes at the end of each session to ask for the Holy Spirit's guidance in discerning how this could apply to current situations. And they faithfully record key insights in their personal journals.
If they put this kind of solitary time and effort into engaging with God in the Scriptures, this person would likely develop some impressive insights and skills.
But if they never took that and offered those skills and perspectives to engaging moments when their neighbors were struggling to pay the bills, or comforting someone whose life just fell apart, or teaching someone to recognize and celebrate the beauty shooting through each moment of their existence.
And if this person never offered the fruits of all their engagement with scripture to a body of people learning to trust and witness to the reality of God's kingdom in this world,
... Then would we also feel, like the soccer player never playing soccer or like the artist never creating and sharing art, that something vital was missing in their practice? Really. Would we?
In this episode, we hope to convince you that we should feel that lack ... And not just to critique an overly private way of using Scripture, but to help us see, and appreciate, and desire, the larger beauty and good that comes from participating in the practice in its greater fullness.
See, the point of scripture is not for someone to sit alone at 5:30 in the morning and have great experiences. Those moments can be marvelous blessings that play an important role in something larger. But, like a bicycle kick in the final seconds of a soccer match, or a perfectly drawn circle on a canvas teaching us to see a landscape, our personal moment engaging Scripture find their real purpose and beauty precisely when they play their part in something larger.
Our personal reading, and study, and praying of scripture is training. It is not the final goal. It's a lot like working on our footwork or the dexterity of our hands, it's like any time we develop skills that help reconcile what we are capable of picturing in our minds with what we are able to do with our bodies. The point is to get something in the person that then allows that person to participate in something.
And for us, within the limits of our mortality, the practice of scripture happens most fully in worship. When people come together as a body, to hear the words of Scripture as the voice of Christ still speaking to us, extending to each of us the call to "follow me." And as a result of our responding to that call from Scripture, worship leads us to a point where we look across the body and blood at friends and at enemies and being invited to allow God to make us one. Then to have that unlikely but still unified body move out of worship, to live worshipfully, in proper response to God. That's practicing scripture.
So, to help our use of Scripture become training for that kind of participation in God's presence and work, in the conversation and the meditation that follow, we'll go deeper into the goods that come from this kind of engagement, and imagine the goals this use of Scripture can open for us.
DISCUSSION
Julius: Welcome back to “All Things.” This is Julius and Wil, your hosts for the season— and for every season that we can foresee in the future… Your default hosts when we don't have any, anyone more fun than us. I'm just kidding. But anyway, so we've set up how scripture, uh, is a communal practice.
And once again, we're using that word practice in a very particular way, of course, drawing from the work of the philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, but, um, that word practice as a way of describing an activity that we engage in that connects us to a tradition or a story greater than ourselves, and that is aimed towards some form of a quote unquote, “the good.” And if you need a refresher on any of this, or if this is new to you, this is your first episode listening in. We cover this concept in depth, in our “Habits to Practice” episode from this series.
So taking a deeper look into scripture, particularly as a practice, let's dive into some of the characteristics that make up a practice in this sense. First off, then, how can we begin to understand scripture through the lens of this differentiation, right, between external goods versus internal goods?
Wilson: All right. So like so many things when it comes to discerning the internal good, it can be tricky. And I think maybe this is a place where, you know, by our, what is this, our second topic on something explicit, but probably our third or fourth time going through looking at internal goods. Now it's a place where I think maybe we're ready to really see that, um… if we, if we just jump at it and try to kind of like, uh, reflexively name, the internal good, or, or, um, that, that comes from a practice, we're probably gonna initially name an external good because the internal goods come by way of like the story engaging, getting into it. And so realizing that— this is why it can be, uh, it, it tends to be a more, um, reliable path to start with…
Okay. Let's remind ourselves what external goods are. External goods are the things that can get attached to almost anything. Right? So external goods are the things that you can get lots of different ways, and it feels like we're manipulating or twisting the thing if we direct it towards this other external good, you know. And over and over and over again, we come back to like money, power and influence, pleasure. Right. So when it comes to scripture, Uh, and I'm sure there are versions of those things at play in it, but how specifically do we see those kinds of, um, things getting attached to our reading and our use of scripture, uh, as external goods.
So Julius, you know, being a Christian, being involved in, immersed in this, this whole thing for so long, what are some of the most common, external goods you've noticed that we could name, you know, by way of contrast on our way towards, uh, describing the internal goods—what are the external goods that you've seen get attached to scripture?
Julius: Yeah. Um, Starting with the external goods, the first one that came to mind right off the bat was, um. Well, there was this notion, it's a, it's kind of a fun little acronym that I always learned growing up about the Bible is the Bible stands for a “basic instructions before leaving earth.” Um…
Wilson: That’s not actually what the Bible stands for, but. It just.
Julius: It wasn't reverse engineered that word from the, from the acronym.
Yeah. And once again, I'll preface by saying, like, I'm not saying that one can not get wisdom and guidance by reading scripture. Um, but I think that a very simplistic approach towards a concept like that, um, maybe shifts our focus on the wrong thing, where we start to approach the text as a book of answers.
Like, uh— Wil, I'm gonna, I'm gonna steal your little example here, but I haven't seen this movie, but you were talking about the Simpsons Movie?
Wilson: Do it. It's it's a good one. Steal it.
Julius: Um, from my memory of Wil's memory of this movie of like, uh… was it the end of the world or something? Uh, it was like an apocalyptic thing?
Wilson: Yeah. At the beginning of the Simpsons movie, when we, uh, and it's been, I dunno how long since I've seen the movie, but I remember they're like flaming asteroids falling to earth and, you know, crevices of earthquakes and crevices are open to everyone's panicking and Homer, you know, does his characteristic squeal and runs straight to the church. Right.
And it's pretty obvious he hasn't been there in a long time, but runs straight to the church, and pulls a Bible out of the back of the pew, flips through it real quick, and he's like, “Ah, this book doesn't have any answers!”
Julius: Yeah, exactly. It's funny because the, I mean. The Bible doesn't read like an instruction manual at all.
Wilson: No.
Julius: The closest thing maybe is the book of Proverbs. But even then it's like,
Wilson: Yep.
Julius: it's, it's not, it's not cut and dry. Like, this is what you must. So that's, I feel like the two things that came to mind were, or that approach, right.
The basic instruction manual. And I also wrote down here magic eight ball, like. I mean, I remember coming to scripture so much growing up, like faced with some, um, I don't know, difficult situation coming to it, approaching it basically like magic eight ball of like, a, “What will I do with my life, Bible?”
And, and once again, like I'm like, I'm not saying that that's like completely wrong, but when we focus on that as the external good, um, I guess to name it, clearly, we start to, uh, approach scripture only as a means of, um— I'll name the external good here as accruing knowledge for the sake of control…
And I don't mean just the, like, controlling other humans or something, or like using it as a means of exercising control over other people—even though it has been twisted to do that... Um, here, what I'm talking about is the like… moments where we face uncertainty, maybe in our lives? And we want to have some knowledge of like, like the magic eight ball of, like, uh, what, like… “Will this work out?” Like, “What…can you tell me what to do?” Like facing the uncertain things in our lives, and then trying to meet it with some certainty, um, to combat the kind of fear that comes with that.
Julius: I guess one other external good. I can name is very similar to, um, what I named in the prior episode in practicing worship, where I think a lot of the times I would approach the practice of reading scripture—especially from the lens that scripture is only meant to be read individually, like in a, like a private study time— that the external good that I sought from it, like the carrot on the stick was to feel good. Either to feel good about myself, for doing my duty as a Christian, or to find some kind of passage that would make me feel better about myself.
Wilson: Right. When in reality, often the, the scripture will challenge, disrupt things. Uh we'll we'll put you, Yeah.
I don't remember how many times, uh, well, let me look back…When I was 14? I decided to start at the beginning and read the Bible all the way through and. I don't remember how many times in the first month or two of doing that I encountered stories that just made me sit back, especially as a young teen, and go, “What…? That’s in the Bible? What is...”
That's how— I mean, the first one is in early in Genesis when God makes a covenant with Abraham and the whole little ritual that is described there about like animals being cut in half and there's a darkness and things float through the pieces and like, it's just like, I remember thinking, “This is… if this were a movie, I would think this is awesome. But because this is the Bible, I feel like I just don't know what to do with it.” This “I'm not expecting this,” kind of thing.
And then you get to like Genesis 38. Which I'll I won't describe it, but if you're, if you're curious, just go crack, open a Bible and read Genesis 38 and see what you find there. Right. And there there's so many things that, that don't, I mean, it, it is not guaranteed. If you just crack this book open to Emory any page and start reading, you're going to get something that is just immediately, easily positive and encouraging. Nope. Ultimately, sure. This is leading somewhere good, but you know, I mean, it's like Psalm 23.
Sometimes God leads us through the valley of the, shadow of death. And the thing is the good news is God is leading us through that darkness. Not that we will get an ind around and we'll never have to walk through the valley of the shadow of death. And sometimes scripture becomes the thing— it’s the, the tangible instrument used by God to initiate that journey into something difficult and challenging.
I had a conversation with the principal of one of my kids' schools a couple of years ago. And, you know, she knew as a pastor and taught at a, at a private Christian university, and she said, “You know, I honestly, I don't like the Bible that much because it's not black and white enough for me.” And I thought that's one of the most insightful critiques. Because so many people will give this like, “Oh, I don't like the Bible. It's so black and white.” And I think, “You haven't read it, have you?” “You've heard people use it in certain ways, but you haven't, you haven't read it have you?”
And she said, “I'm a, I'm a very, like, straight up cut and dry person and so I, you know, I just struggled with the, the scriptures taking me to places of ambiguity and making me question things when here's, no, this is what I want…” that at that point, there, there was at least I felt like there was a greater than level of understanding and respect there, even though we disagreed about what to do with it, at least it was. Yeah. I think you have a clear read on what the thing is and what it could do.
So if, if these are some of the things that get attached to it, Right. Just having… “Give me an easy out,” uh, “Help me not face the consequences of a difficult situation,” um… “Help me not have to face difficult feelings or emotions or questions.” Right.
This sort of like if this is what the external goods are that we would attach to the scriptures, how does that help us set up a contrast to start to see what the internal goods are? So Julius what's been something that's that's most helpful. You've encountered that that begins to allow you to recognize and value some of the genuine internal goods too.
Julius: Yeah, I think as best as I can name it right now, what I'll keep coming back to is that the point of scripture, or like the internal good there is, um, to draw us into communion with God and, and that communion with God always, um, I guess, requires of us to be in right communion with others in the world around us. That, uh, I feel like the that's the internal good that comes with like, pretty much all of the things we were talking about is communion with God and one another through that.
Um, and I love how once again, referencing a prior episode that we did on a book called Simply Christian by NT Wright. One of the things that really stuck out to me, there was a chapter on scripture there. Um, but it was this concept that, um, approaching scripture, whether individually or especially communally provides a window where heaven and earth overlap—that is where, where, um, God's realm and the heavenly realms, and, like, our realm can overlap that the scripture is a place to meet God and to be shaped reshaped by God in that meeting.
Wilson: The last thing I'd say on internal goods is—I mean like so many things, right, we're gonna, we're gonna see as we move through these different Christian practices, um, how they, they work at different levels to do some, some very common things, right. Uh, for, for, on the personal level and on the corporate level.
And one of the things over and over and over again, we see, “Oh, here's, here's a different avenue or a different means of making us like Christ.” Right. Doing something to us for our transformation. Um, and so that's— just naming it at the front end and then I'll, I'll talk through the process here—the, in the internal good is making Christ-like people.
Right. The internal good of scripture is making Christ-like people. Okay. It's straight up, says this right in Timothy. Right. “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching correcting rebuking and training in righteousness.” It doesn't say it's useful for winning arguments. Right.
And you see this too. The, uh, there are places in like Acts where someone stands up and gives a defense of what's happening or explains what they're doing or preaches a sermon, and they use scripture, and you see that like scripture isn't this, it's not used in this like, “Oh, hey, here's this verse from the old Testament, so obviously we're right, right? We all agree now don't we?” they understand, like, this is one piece of a larger argument that makes something credible. Right. So it's not that scripture itself is this kind of thing that you can just put out there and any reasonable person will go, “Oh, well, since you've got averse to quote it that way, I now have to agree with your case.” Because they realized, “Well, no, this other person over here could read that same verse in a very different way.”
Um, and so what, what it says is not that it's useful for winning your arguments— it's useful for training in righteousness. If you're using it well, it's gonna make you like Jesus. And that is what becomes credible to other people. It's a, it's a Christ-like person in a Christ-like spirit that then reads this verse in a certain way that seems Christ-like. And that pulls it together in a way that harmonizes with God's world and God's reality. And then that's the way you, you would put forward your witness and hope that it would win hearts and minds.
So it's useful for training and righteousness. One of my favorite people here, just to give like something super concrete on like how this would look and using scripture, is St. Gregory of Nyssa. Um, and he's following a guy named Origen— and we have podcasts on both of these figures, if you want to search on origin and Gregory of Nyssa, um. But Gregory, he looks at, um, and so concretely, he's looking at the books Proverbs, um, Ecclesiastes, and song of Solomon. Um, and he, he looks at this and goes, okay— so, and what I'm referencing here is we talked about, oh, not all scripture is just this easy answer book, right?
There are places of it that are just confounding stories and images that like stir things up. Um, but then there are places though, where there is just really basic, like, concrete instruction, because we do need that too. It's not that the Bible doesn't have any of that. And he says like, “Hey, all of us need that sometime.”
Right. If you're looking kind of broad scale, like stages of development, right. We all start out there and we need that. Right. But it's also true that even as you progress and mature to different stages, there are still, you never leave that behind. There are still times where you're like, “This is actually what I really, really, I need some encouragement. I do need some guidance.”
He says there are places where you go… there are places that scripture does try to give exactly that. And he says like, Proverbs would be that place where you go and here's just… you get stuff like, just wisdom about friendship, and discerning things, right. “Hey, you know what,” uh, some Proverbs says things like, “Hey— constructive criticism from a friend is worth so much more than flattery and kisses from an enemy.”
Right. Just giving you some, “All right. It's tough, you know, and I didn't, I wasn't looking for that kind of feedback today, but there it is.” Whoa, whoa, what do I do with it? Can I dismiss it or do I, do I take it? Well, that is from a friend. It's someone who does know. Right. So Proverbs gives that just basic instruction, how to make it through.
And then he says, you move on to Ecclesiastes, and now you get like philosophy. That's that's the stuff where it's like “Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless. I've considered everything under the sun,” right? Now that's going to challenge you. It's going to challenge your thinking. It's going to take you to a deeper place, right?
And he says, there's a progression here. You give yourself a foundation, something to push off of. Now that you've got that let's challenge ourselves and you move on to this. And then he says, and then you go to Song of Solomon. And especially he says now, because at this point, It doesn't talk directly about Jesus, it was written before Christ came, and so if you're going to see Jesus in this, it's going to require a lot from you. It’s going to take discernment. It's going to take wisdom and you're going to have to move beyond. Cause as long as, I mean, I don't know if you, if you guys, if you haven't read this, this would be one of those places kind of like Genesis 38, go read Song of Songs or Song of Solomon.
It can be the, the translation can vary from Bible, the Bible, same book, either Song of Songs or Song of Solomon, same book. But you read that this is where you you'll read things about like breasts…
Julius: Right.
Wilson: And, and in, in a very sexualized. Right. And, and images and metaphors of like pomegranates and peaches, and you're like, “…I don't think you're talking about eating a pomegranate.”
Right. And you can sit there. And if you go at that, and this is where Gregory says, if you sit there and you just take this as like a, you know, literal on the surface instruction… you're going to be surprised to find this in the Bible. But he says, “Or you can go beyond.” You can, you can let the—and he says, and this is the real value. And he says, the way he puts it are, these are intentionally challenging, intentionally obscure texts. And that's their point because now the point is not just to give you something, the point is to do something to you. To require something of you. And now to see Christ in this, you're going to have to engage.
You're going to allow, you're going to have to allow yourself, the way you think, what you love, how you value these things— you're going to have to allow them to be reshaped and molded so that you can come to a place where now, even that is training you in righteous, understood as training and Christlikeness. And so that's the internal good. There is again, moving from, not just, “Here's something, here's some instruction I'm going to hand you,” to requiring something of you that makes you more like Jesus.
Julius: I love how you tied it all together with naming one of the internal goods of scripture is to form us into a type of person. And that type of person is, like, that is Christ-like. And that begins to tap into the. One of the other characteristics that defines a practice is this concept of virtues and how a practice both requires, and also cultivates virtues in the people who, who participate in this practice.
And so you've already named that, like, um… Christ-likeness broadly is one of those things is, is one of those things that's cultivated in us as we engage in the practice of scripture as a practice and as a communal practice, um. Are there any other virtues that, uh, you can name, uh, either that are required or cultivated from the practice of scripture?
Wilson: Yeah. Well, getting into that, I'll just restate again, how we're seeing something again, that, you know— we’ve said that part of what's so compelling to me, um, and compelling, and and makes it convincing, trustworthy? Is the internal consistency of the way MacIntyre talks about a practice. Because now in really beginning to look for internal goods and it getting to a place where we're at least like provisionally describing them, you know, talking about them well, enough to proceed on this, you also kind of organically start outlining and talking about the virtues that they grant and require.
So in saying like, “Okay, scripture, if the internal good is it makes us like Christ— well, let's look. Okay. Well, how would you do that with this odd, almost like surrealist horror scene from Genesis? And then this, this really erotic poem, ongoing sustained poem?”
Like how, if we’re gonna see that in a way that we really seeks this internal good, you also have to start talking about outlining the kind of virtues it would take to do that. And so like the one that we've already, I mean, it's, it's right there. And either the listeners probably already named it, they may not use the exact word, but you know, a synonym for what I'm about to say, or once we say it, you're like, “Oh yeah, we have been talking about that already.”
And that's just, it takes, it takes wisdom. It takes becoming the kind of person it takes virtue of not just requiring things, being handed to you, but become becoming the kind of person that you know, has the virtue that can take something and go, “But what is this?” You know, let me not just run with my first initial impression, but what's there that I haven't noticed yet?
And how can I see it? How can I interpret it? And then use it in such a way that would lead me to Christ-likeness. And that, that's discernment. Um, And the Bible itself, straight up talks about the need for this. It's funny. This is, this is why, uh, I love and kind of appreciate that we have satire like the Simpsons movie that would make fun of some of the things, because it helps us. Right.
And it's just, whether it's intentional or not, it's another voice drawing our attention to things that the scriptures themselves draw attention to. Because when it gets to a point where we use the Bible in a way that the Bible itself says, “Don't do this. I'm not this, this is not what I am, don't do this.”
And when we consider content consistently keep using it. If we're not listening to its own voice, then we need another voice. Like, you know, some satirical, Hollywood film D to make fun of it, to be another voice saying, “No, that's not what. it is.”
Um, and my, my go-to here. My favorite, one of these is when in, in one of Peter's letters, which is part of the New Testament. So in Second Peter, he talks about Paul's letters. Um, and so this is in the first century, the, the New Testament has not been canonized yet. And most folks, if you were to say the scriptures of the Bible, you would think, you know, the Hebrew Old—The Hebrew scriptures—or what Christians call the Old Testament.
But Peter is talking about the letters that Paul has written, you know…Peter's gone through, it's towards the end of his letter. He's talked to the church about several things, and then he notes. Now Paul has written to you— our brother Paul has written to you about these same things, according to the wisdom that he's been given.
Right? And th-this is, is where it gets… if you, if you take your time, and, and it's not even like read between the lines. It's really just take your time to listen. This is where it gets really intriguing and fun for me. So our brother Paul, he's written about these same things to you. According to the wisdom that's been given to him that passive is theologically rich, right?
This wisdom has been given to him. So it's, there's a sense of like, this has been given to him by God. That's a high claim, that passive, that passive verb is like, um, powerful. It's, uh, it carries a huge claim. That's what I was going for. The passive voice carries a huge claim. God has given this to you and he's talked to you about it. According to the way that he does.
That's a quote, right? Speaking of this, “as he does.” Right. So there's two things. Like it's not even like two sides of the, it's like just two dimensions of the same thing… “It's been given to him by God, but he talked about it the way he talks.”
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: And, and what does Peter think about how Paul talks? Quote: “There are some things in them that are hard to understand. Because that's how our brother Paul talks.” Right. So already like, look how, look how… hm.
I mean, we're talking about requiring discernment. What we're looking at here requires discernment, because Peter discerns God's gift, God's wisdom in this, in, in what? In how Paul talks. And Paul can be—he turns me around too, guys.
If you've read Paul's letters and you got confused, hey—you're in good company. It it, through Peter, the one upon the rock upon whom Jesus would build his church through him too. There are some things in there that are hard to undo. And so are right there already. It, you're seeing like scripture saying, “I require discernment. And that's actually what I would want to give you.” Um, I'm kind of personifying scripture. I'm speaking for scripture. If I could be so bold, but this is these, the scriptures here saying like, “I require discernment of you. And by requiring that of you, that's exactly what I want to give you. If you will use me. I want to require the virtue of discernment in you. And by requiring me, that's what I want to give you,”
Because then it goes on to say, this is still a Second Peter chapter three, verse 16— “There are some things in them that are hard to understand which the ignorant and the unstable,” you know, so “which the non-discerning twist to their own distress.” So scripture itself says without discernment, without stability, without like a dependence and in a dynamic engagement with Christ in the spirit, as you read these things, seeking discernment, without that, Hey, we know we're dangerous, you know, it's, it's no, it's no news to anybody that the Bible is a dangerous book.
We know this, it can be twisted to destruction or. Used with, with discernment, with that, that openness towards the actual goal of becoming like Christ can lead you to salvation— can lead you to, to receive the gift of God's wisdom.
Julius: Yeah. I think what I appreciate about you bringing up the virtue of discernment is that it…addresses some of the things that we talked about in the beginning of when we—when we can have a tendency to approach scripture as an instruction manual, or a magic eight ball, that the problem that we're trying to address is either uncertainty or the need for guidance in a hard situation, or really what we're looking at, like the question that we ask when we try to approach the Bible as a book of answers is, “How do we make our way through this world?”
And seeing discernment as a virtue is so much more substantial than approaching it from purely that external, like… “We need rules.” Like, “We need instructions.” But that there's something that, that has so much more depth as to, like… this scripture shapes us into the kind of people who can have the discernment, so that we’re the, we’re the kind of people who know then how to make our way about the world, as we are shaped by Christ.
MEDITATION
A practice, as we've been using the term, is not just a coherent and worthwhile activity. It is also a socially established and cooperative pursuit. So part of what helps us recognize it's character and value is recognizing the community that we enter as we engage the practice.
Think about what happens to the time spent alone in your driveway working on your jump shot, when you begin to picture Larry Bird consistently sinking Threes as you release the ball and hold your follow-though. Or what it does to the moment you leave the ground for a layup if you imagine Jordan gliding through the air.
Or what happens when you sit to study for an exam, and you also picture Isaac Newton sitting at his desk pouring over his own notes? Or Einstein catching thoughts by scribbling them on scraps of paper in his jacket pocket. Or Marie Curie exploring the decomposition of atomic matter and energy.
In preparing to engage in any practice - whether it be sports or science or business - it opens things up when you picture the community that you are training to join.
This goes for Faith and Scripture, too. In the opening of this episode, we showed you the Scriptures do not end with private devotions. Now we want to help you appreciate that Scripture doesn't begin there either.
If you were to sit, at any time of day, and open your own copy of the Bible, and begin to wonder about where it came from, would you be able to picture the community that came before you that helped put that book in your hands?
We might begin by thinking about authorship. So we can imagine great names like Sts. Matthew, Peter, and Paul. We can picture Mary sitting with the apostles and telling them the story about the time she and Joseph took Jesus, when their son was 12, to the Temple, and lost him.
But the thread of authorship takes us even deeper into a mysterious community than even Mary and the Apostles.
For example: St. Paul didn't write every word of the letters that bear his name. Several times he incorporated into his letters a few hymns that were being sung in the earliest Christian worship gatherings. One of these is found in Philippians 2:5-11.
As I read it, see yourself sitting in your favorite spot, during your best time of day, reading along. And superimposed onto this image, also picture the unknown believer who wrote it, and the outlines of the congregations that sang it centuries ago in living rooms and synagogues.
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death--
even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
Picture yourself reading the stories of Cain and Noah and Abraham, and wed to this the image of the families that gathered around a fire late in the evening and told those stories for generations before they were ever written down.
Picture yourself holding the book as a whole, and wondering who decided what books would be included. And integrated into that image, see yourself in the midst of all the women and men and children who left the temples of Apollo and Dionysus to hear a different story about a different God who saves the world not through warfare or wanton fertility that tries to outrun and cover over death, but by confidently embracing the world and entering into it's death to transform it with life.
Picture yourself hearing those words in worship and in response see yourself receiving with those ancient women and men, along with the words of the Bible, also the bread and wine. And see yourself as part of that company then taking that picture of God and the world and testing it in the way we trade goats and lay bricks and farm fields and and allocate funds and celebrate wins and endure suffering.
And if you can discern a thread between your personal spiritual drills, the church's worship, and the ongoing presence of Jesus in all those moments and activities spreading across centuries, as testified to in that monumental collection of writings, picture yourself saying with that congregation that spans ages, "Yes, let's call these 'Scriptures.'"