live these Holy Scriptures from the inside out…

I’m reading two books on the Bible. One by Brian Brock on Singing the Ethos of God, is really hard work. Parts of it are a dense and detailed exposition of Augustine and Luther on the Psalms. The whole book is an attempt to find a way of using the Bible in Christian Ethics without ‘using’ the Bible as support for ethical positions arrived at independently of the will and nature of the God encountered in the Bible. To live within the ethos of God, for the presence of God to be the environment we breathe, the affective centre of our lives, the emotional and spiritual expression of doxology and gratitude, is very different from a utilitarian handling of Scripture as a collection of principles, values, virtues or any other set of abstract extrapolations to be taken off the shelf as need requires. Brock is arguing for a much more interactive, dynamic and theologically responsive and responsible use of the Bible. So his book is important, carefully argued, at times lucidly persuasive – but overall I’ve found it hard to follow, and wonder if that’s because it’s too long – some of the exposition of Augustine’s exposition of the Psalms makes its point – but takes too long to do it.

By contrast Eugene Peterson’s Eat this Book, is an uncomplicated appeal for christians to stop playing around with the Bible and eat it – let its words be embodied in blood cells, nerve endings, joints and sinew, muscle and bone. Peterson targets the self sovereignty of contemporary Evangelical Bible readers, who use the Bible for their own spiritual projects, their personal doctrinal choices, to win arguments, settle ethical controversies. This is vintage Peterson as encountered in some of his earliest (and best) work.

One quotation from each of these authors shows why I’ll persevere with reading both.

…for love to be rightly directed we need "God with us". Humans are in need of consolation, not because they have difficult experiences, but because they have lost God and thus no longer know how to love aright. Doxology is the point where the lost meet God…because doxology cries for and dares to enter God’s presence. The Psalms are God’s way of opening doxology to us, and thus they play a crucial role in Christian ethics: they are God’s offer of himself to us, and the promise and the form for our renewal. The new humanity has been renewed in order that they may be entirely given over to good works. (Brock, page 167.)

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We are in the odd and embarrassing position of being a church in which many among us believe ardently in the authority of the Bible but, instead of submitting to it, use it, apply it, take charge of it endlessly, using our own experience as the authority for how and where and when we will use it. 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.(Peterson, page 59).

Andy (Goodliff) promised to blog on Brock later – I’ll be interested to see if my making heavy weather of chunks of it were due to my reading most of it while on holiday, or a sign of intellectual atrophy, or just the cost of trying to understand someone who is trying to say something significantly new. Either way reading the two books together makes for an interesting trialogue.