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I.
Modern Reformation January/February 2023 Vol. 32, No. 1
RETRIEVE 08 REFORMATION RESOURCES | On Justifying Faith | by Franciscus Junius; translated by Joshua Schendel
12 REFORMATION OUTTAKES | Martin Bucer, Fireside Reformer | by Zachary Purvis
16 ESSAY | Reading the Song of Songs as Allegory with the Protestant Reformers | by Erin Risch Zoutendam
II.
CONVERSE 28 INTERVIEW | Christian Education as Soulcraft | Blake Adams with Kyle Hughes
34 ESSAY | Opening the Heart with Holy Scripture | by Michael McClymond
44 GLOBAL THEOLOGICAL FORUM | Both Educated and Godly: Varughese John on Discipling Students in India III. PERSUADE 50 BIBLE STUDY | Something Beautiful: On Christians Suffering Well | by J. D. “Skip” Dusenbury
05 FROM THE EDITOR | by Brannon Ellis POETRY 46 A Pilgrim’s View | by Gregory Edward Reynolds 47 In the Manger | by Jonathan Landry Cruse 68 BACK PAGE | “Live Your Truth”: How Hedonism Leads to Chaos | by Michael Horton
56 ESSAY | The Burden of Theological Contemplation | by Charles Kim Jr. IV. ENGAGE 64 WINTER 2022/SPRING 2023 BOOK PREVIEW | by Noah Frens
Endsheet illustration by Raxenne Maniquiz
Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton | Editorial Director Eric Landry | Executive Editor Brannon Ellis | Managing Editor Patricia Anders | Poetry Editor Jonathan Landry Cruse | Production Assistant Anna Heitmann | Copy Editor Kate Walker | Proofreader Ann Smith | Creative Direction and Design Metaleap Creative Modern Reformation © 2023. All rights reserved. ISSN-1076-7169 | Modern Reformation (Subscriptions) 13230 Evening Creek Dr S Ste 220-222, San Diego, CA 92128 (877) 876-2026 | info@modernreformation.org | modernreformation.org | Subscription Information: US 1 YR $48. Canada add $10 per year for postage. Overseas add $9 per year for postage. Modern Reformation is a publication of Sola Media
No other magazine brings together confessional Lutheran, Anglican, Reformed, and Baptist representatives to discuss the significant biblical and cultural issues of our day. We’re committed to helping you hone your theological thinking and share your insights effectively with others. Your support allows Modern Reformation to keep this conversation going strong.
REMEMBER BEING introduced to the articulate and passionate gospel work of Modern Reformation and White Horse Inn while at college. It was a formative time for my faith, which I had only recently begun to take seriously. Michael Horton and crew helped me discover the beautiful truth of the reformational gospel—so much so that I wanted to keep digging deeper, resolving to go on to seminary and then to PhD studies in theology. But a funny thing happened as my studies took my family across the States and then across the Atlantic: the better I got at theology, the more I felt my inadequacy. Even now, the more I think I understand about God, the less I am convinced that I live up to what I know.
Why is so much of the Christian life lived between the twin poles of delight and despair? Caught in the middle, how do we cling to Christ and rely on his Spirit, trusting him to accomplish in us the slow and steady work of spiritual formation?
In this issue on the Christian spiritual life, our contributors help us wrestle with such questions. Some of that wrestling is indirect, such as Erin Risch Zoutendam’s historical exploration of the Reformers’ willingness to follow traditional allegorical readings of the Song of Songs. Her article invites us to connect the dots between the Reformers’ practice and our own common reluctance to embrace the Song’s richly figurative language for celebrating the spiritual love between our Bridegroom and his church. Other writers in this issue wrestle with contemporary spiritual life more directly, like Blake Adams, who interviews Kyle Hughes about the centrality of Christian education for spiritual formation.
MR is a magazine not for theology consumers but for theology practitioners, lay or professional.
ILike good surgeons, lawyers, electricians, or entrepreneurs, good theologians learn in order to do. We already have an abundance of doctrinal information for the tasks at hand, don’t we? Yet we desire theological insight and gospel encouragement to use our gifts as good stewards of God’s varied grace (1 Pet. 4:10).
As you read through this issue on the spiritual life, join me in committing to gaining humility and wisdom more than information and discernment rather than data. And be encouraged as I am that your identity as a Christian or even as a theologian is found in Jesus rather than in the imbalance between your theology and your spirituality. Indeed, focusing on him is the only way we’ll ever begin to tip those scales.
I never imagined that twenty years after being introduced to MR, I’d have the privilege of participating in its labors, which have borne much fruit in my own life and in so many others. May these labors and their fruits continue to increase by God’s grace.
I.
Learning from the wisdom of the past
The following is a translation of Franciscus Junius’s (1545–1602) De Fide Iustificante, a set of twelve theses over which Junius presided while they were publicly defended at Leiden University sometime in the 1590s. The text of this disputation is taken from Francisci Iunii Opuscula theologica selecta, ed. Abraham Kuyper (Amsterdam: Fred. Muller, 1882), 1:207–8. Kuyper’s text is a reprint of Franciscus Junius, Opera theologica, duobus tomis, ordine commodissimo, nempe Exegetico primo, Elenctica altero, comprehensa . . . 2 vols. (Geneva: Societas Caldoriana, 1607).
BECAUSE WE HAVE up to this point discussed the humiliation and exaltation of Christ, the merit of Christ, and the benefits thereof toward us, an account of the order of our salvation is also required, so that we ought to treat of that faith by which we lay hold of Christ and all his benefits.1
1. Because in Sacred Writ the notion of faith is taken homonymously, 2 before we speak of it, we must remove the ambiguity. For Sacred Scripture places faith before us in a twofold manner: the first, which [the Scriptures] call justifying faith, is steady and constant; the second, which they do not call justifying faith, is unsteady and temporary. Concerning the former, we maintain that it alone is properly and truly called faith (for that faith which is temporary and fades away is, in fact, no faith). Further, true faith is either of adults or it is of infants.
2. The faith of adults is not only knowledge [notitia] and assent [assensus] to the teaching of the prophets and apostles handed down to us, but also an assured and firm trust [fiducia] and apprehension, which has been truly founded on the gracious promise of Christ, revealed to our minds by the Holy Spirit, and sealed in our hearts.
3. That faith is not merely a bare knowledge but also an assured trust is shown by the etymology3 of the term itself. For it is derived from this . . . fiat quod dictum est [“let it be done what was promised”].4 This is not dissimilar from the meaning of the Hebrew term Aemunah from Aman, 5 which signifies that which is dependable. In the Greek, πίστις and πεποίθησις refer to that of which we are persuaded, that which we believe.
4. The subject, or the matter in which [materia in qua], of this faith is mind, will, and the human heart, in which it sits not only as resting, but also—and chiefly— as delighting, flowing from an assured and full persuasion. For the Holy Spirit also enlightens the mind so that the word is understood, and he moves the will so that it both agrees with the understood word and is conformed to it, as well so that the heart firmly rests in it.
5. The form of this faith is the discerning apprehension of Christ with all the benefits necessary to salvation, and the particular application of the grace of the remission of sins in him.
6. The efficient cause of this faith is, first and principally, the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12:9; 2 Cor. 4:6; Gal. 5:22; Eph. 2:8). The Holy Spirit, by a special movement beyond the natural order, begets faith in all and only the elect and continually nourishes and warms it (Matt. 13:11–12; John 10:26; Acts 13:48; Rom. 8:30; 2 Thess. 3:2). Further, the proper and ordinary instrument used by the Holy Spirit by which this faith is begotten and nourished in us is the preaching of the gospel (Rom. 1:16; 10:12; 1 Cor. 4:15; 15:2) and the use of the sacraments: For the Holy Spirit works through these, and without them he will not ordinarily generate justifying faith in adults.
7. The object, or the matter concerning which [materia circa quam], is—with respect to its genus—the entire word of God declared through the prophets and the apostles: nor is faith able to be separated from the word any more than a ray is able to be separated from the sun whence it originates. Thus the word is not without reason said to be the fount and foundation of faith, so that if faith diverts from it, faith is wrecked. Furthermore—as regards its species—the object of faith is the goodness, mercy, and promise of God founded upon our Mediator and Lord, the Christ and declared to us in the gospel (Rom. 4:16). This object of our faith—with respect either to its genus or to its species—is placed before us, indeed, as that which is not seen, for faith observes those things which are not seen (Heb. 11:1).
8. The end of this faith is twofold: the ultimate end is the glory of God, which consists in this: that we take in the full value of the worth of God. The proximate end is, indeed, our salvation, which is not able to be secured without faith. It is necessary, then, that whosoever will be saved must first obtain to this testimony: that they are pleasing to God. And because it is not possible for anyone to please him without faith (as the apostle says, Heb. 11:6), we properly reason that it is no less true that everyone hoping for eternal life has need of faith than it is true that fruit has need of the living root of the tree.
9. Finally, the effects of faith, which are secured by it, are: Regeneration and Sanctification (Acts 13:39; Rom. 3:28; 10:10—as following peace with God— Isa. 32:17; Rom. 5:1). We know that we have this faith: 1. from the testimony of the Holy
Spirit (Rom. 8:15; 16:26; Gal. 4:6; 2 Tim. 1:12; 1 John 5:10); 2. from the light of faith, though with doubt—for it is the nature of our faith that it always struggles with a certain degree of doubt. Take, for example, David, who was not always in an assured state of mind, as innumerable of his prophetic outcries reveal (Ps. 27:14; 31:23; 42:6; 43:5; 77:10; 116:7); 3. from the effects and fruits of faith (Gal. 5:24), which effects, it must be noted, do not inform this faith, as the most inept sophists dream, but rather they are the evidences of faith.6
10. Joined as a companion to this undivided faith is hope (Heb.11:1), which is nothing other than a constant expectation of the full fruition of the promises given by God, which faith has believed. The joining of these saving graces is fitting because each is born by God unto the eternal reality promised to us. There is a distinction between them, however, as faith apprehends what is present, whereas hope what is future. Faith, therefore, is fundamental, on which hope leans. Hope is the support by which faith is fed and sustained.
11. As for what remains, a few related points need still to be observed: 1. This faith, which we have said is required to be in all the elect, is one (Eph. 4:5), not multiple, being in its species neither numbered (Hab. 2:4; Matt. 9:22) nor degreed (Matt. 6:30; 8:10; 13:23: 14:31; 15:28; Rom. 4:20; 14:1; 2 Cor. 10:13), which is the reason the Apostle calls it precious (2 Pet. 1:1).7 2. This faith, even at its height in this life, is always imperfect yet nevertheless true. For, so long as we are here, we know only in part (1 Cor. 13:12). Even so, insofar as the electing God has begun a work in his own, so far they have that work unto its victorious completion. By the term “imperfection” we do not intend that figment of the Schoolmen, 8
1. This introduction points the reader to the several sets of theses immediately prior to this one in the published manuscript.
2. Ὁμωνύμως, meaning “of the same name” but with the implication that the same name may point to, or signify, different things, creating the possibility of ambiguities.
3. Eτυμον, meaning “according to its origin” or “according to its true sense.”
4. Here Junius cites Cicero, De Oficiis, bk. 1, and De Rupublica, bk. 4. In 1.23 of De Officiis, Cicero says that the Stoics claimed that the etymology of the term fides comes from fio, “to happen, come about,” insofar as fiat is the fulfillment of “what was promised” (quod dictum est). In 4.7 of De Republica, Cicero remarks that fides seems to indicate that trust comes about “because what was said has been done.” Cicero, though, acknowledged that such an etymology was thought by many
even in his own day to be far-fetched. Etymological arguments in antiquity were not always drawn from the study of the evolution of a language, but they were used for the rhetorical and pedagogical purposes of persuading an audience of a particular position and helping them to remember it.
5. Junius here provides the Latin transliteration of the Hebrew terms, which I have kept as original.
6. τεκμήρια fidei.
7. Ἰσότιμον. In 2 Peter 1:1, the apostle Peter addresses his letter “To those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours” (NIV).
8. The “Schoolmen” refers to the medieval Scholastic theologians. Most often, when used as a term of derision by Reformed and Lutheran theologians of the late sixteenth
which is, as they called it, “implicit faith.” For it cannot be said of the one who believes implicitly what he does not understand that he has faith; for faith is not an ignorance but an explicit knowledge—not a full knowledge like that of God’s,9 but centered upon the divine goodness and mercy. 3. It ought to be observed that this faith, although not completely stable, is nevertheless always joined with the gift of final perseverance, which is faith’s abiding possession because the gifts of God are irrevocable (Rom. 11:29).
12. These things said concern adult faith. But we would say the same of elect infants according to a seed (as John calls it, 1 John 3:9) or a principle habit.10 For surely the covenant applies to elect infants of the faithful (Acts 2:39; 3:25), and the kingdom of heaven is promised to them (Matt. 19:14). Hence, they are born anew, for it is clear that the way into the celestial life is by this rebirth alone (John 3:3) and by having faith, without which no one is able to please God (Heb. 11:6). Anyone who wishes to may look again at the teaching of Christ (Matt. 18:6): “Whoever offends anyone of the least of these who believes in me, it would be better for him that a millstone be fastened around his neck, and he be plunged into the depths of the sea.” 11 This faith, however, is (as we have said) a seminal habit that is aroused immediately by the Holy Spirit by means of the gracious promises in the word. The Holy Spirit, taking hold of his own, moves in them afresh, little by little, and moves their inclinations bit by bit, exciting faith in them and advancing it to maturity, so that they live in God and serve by the Spirit.
“Surely the covenant applies to elect infants of the faithful (Acts 2:39; 3:25), and the kingdom of heaven is promised to them (Matt. 19:14). Hence, they are born anew, for it is clear that the way into the celestial life is by this rebirth alone (John 3:3) and by having faith, without which no one is able to please God (Heb. 11:6).”
and seventeenth centuries, it referred to particular schools of thought within the medieval Scholastic tradition and was not a blanket condemnation of medieval Scholasticism as such. It was up to the reader to be familiar enough with the various schools of thought to be able to discern which in particular was being criticized.
9. The Latin reads “non Dei modo,” that is, “not in the mode of God.” Junius’s point here is to qualify what he means by “explicit knowledge.” He does not mean that faith attains to the extent or manner of God’s utter knowledge, but that our faith does have a content, given to us by God in his goodness and mercy and explicitly known by us—that is, we are consciously aware of that content.
10. Returning to the division between the true faith of adults and the true faith of infants that he observed in Thesis 1, Junius
here notes that all that has been said of the true faith of adults applies to the true faith of infants as well, but that infants have this true faith in a different way. He illustrates with the biblical language of a “seed” (semen) and with the technical Scholastic notion of a “principle habit” (principium habitus). Basically, the notion is this: a seed planted in the soil is not yet the plant, but—conditions admitting—it will certainly develop into the plant. And so it is not improper to say that the plant is there, just in seed form. So also, Junius is arguing, true faith is there in the elect infant even if only in seed form.
11. Junius here cites Theodore Beza’s Latin translation of Matthew 18:6. Beza published a Latin translation of the New Testament in 1556 and then in 1565 a critical edition of the Greek New Testament with parallel Latin translations, one from the Vulgate and the other his own.
stoves? In 1550, Alsatian Reformer Martin Bucer prepared a gift for the Protestant King of England, Edward VI: his monumental book De regno Christi or Kingdom of Christ. Bucer had much for which to be thankful. He had been exiled from Strasbourg the year before, when various rites and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church were reimposed by force on many central European Protestants under what became known as the “Augsburg Interim.” England offered him not only sanctuary but also the prestigious position of Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. When Bucer experienced ill health from the damp English winter, Edward VI gave him money so that he could manufacture a special stove to heat his residence.1 This last royal kindness served as the final trigger for Bucer’s sending the book when he did, though it was not quite finished.
Bucer spared no expense in producing the beautiful presentation copy. The two volumes were exquisitely bound and ornately inscribed with biblical quotations in the languages of scholars—Latin, Greek, Hebrew. Each quotation was printed in gold through techniques then unknown in England and carefully chosen to reinforce Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer’s identification of young King Edward VI as a “new Josiah.”2 In fact, Bucer spent so much on the text’s production—and on another stove for his home—that he was unable to pay the secretary who had copied De regno Christi for him and had to ask a Cambridge colleague for a loan to buy his secretary a coat.3
The book did not become the charter of the Reformation in England as Bucer had hoped, and it was only posthumously published in 1557. Like all his works, he wrote it hurriedly—both as a retrospective of his career and an attempt to help the church in England define itself. The first part of it described what he believed the kingdom of Christ looks like in biblical, theological, practical, and historical terms. The second part proposed how the English king could establish total reform of church and society. To modern readers, there are oddities: for example, one-fourth of the book is devoted to the institution of marriage. Yet Bucer left an extraordinary impress on Protestant Christianity.
In 1518, Bucer had heard Martin Luther’s famous Heidelberg Disputation as a young friar in the Dominican monastery. Eventually, he himself became the major Reformer in the strategic city of Strasbourg. Particularly intriguing is how
the Reformation caught fire there, at least in part. In Wittenberg, Luther had attacked the medieval sacrament of penance. In Zurich, Huldrych Zwingli had confronted the medieval Lenten fast. In Strasbourg, Bucer and preachers Matthäus Zell and Wolfgang Capito opposed the medieval prohibition on clerical marriage. In each case, the Reformers returned to the sufficiency and authority of Scripture as the only rule for faith and life.
From Strasbourg, Bucer demonstrated his unmatched skill as an administrator. He built and thrived on networks of personal contacts from every corner of Europe to push and prod reform. As the great “theologian of dialogue,” he was instrumental in bringing together Luther and Zwingli to discuss their differences at the Marburg Colloquy in 1529, encouraged Anabaptists to return to the magisterial Reformation, and was no less active in significant meetings between Protestants and Roman Catholics in the German towns of Worms and Regensburg.4 He wrote remarkably influential commentaries on the Psalms and Romans, a wise treatise on pastoral ministry, Concerning the True Care of Souls, and more.
He was also prone to ramble. Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor in Zurich, once quipped that Bucer’s letters were too long even to skim. 5 At Luther’s dinner table, when someone read a text cowritten by Bucer and Philip Melanchthon but withheld the names of the authors, Luther interrupted, “I detect that babbler Bucer.”6 Even John Calvin formulated his literary ideal of “lucid brevity” largely in opposition to the Strasbourg Reformer’s wordiness and complained that Bucer was “over active.”7 Clearly, not every attempt at conversation was successful. One can almost hear an audible sigh even in Bucer’s own report of his long-term efforts to talk through disagreements over the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper: “I rolled Sisyphus’s stone.”8
Though Bucer briefly found safety as a refugee in England, he was also isolated. In an attempt to support him, Calvin poignantly wrote:
The Spirit of God, like a most brilliant torch, or rather like the sun itself, shines in full splendor, not only to guide the course of your life, even to its final goal, but also to conduct you to a blessed immortality. Draw then from this source, wherever you may wander, and as soon as he finds you a settled abode, you ought to make that your place of rest.9
Such words—from one exile to another—carried real weight. Even more, Calvin had long hailed Bucer as his father in the faith, despite their clashes. When Calvin had ministered in Strasbourg between 1538 and 1541, Bucer had been his mentor. Calvin lived first in Bucer’s house and then nearby, close enough to share a garden, where they passed many evenings deep in conversation. When Calvin subsequently returned to Geneva, his fourfold office of ministry, the liturgy, and church discipline all reflected Bucer’s teaching. He adopted Bucer’s understanding of the early church as a model for the organization of the church in the sixteenth century, and he often commended Bucer as one of the most brilliant readers of Scripture.10 When Bucer died in 1551, Guillaume Farel wrote to Calvin:
11
I have received pious Bucer’s last letter. What a heart! What a man has gone! We must rejoice in our sorrow that a man so fond of us has journeyed to God. I have no doubt that after his journey he commended us to God. How rightly he thought of you and how justly he loved you!
Although few today know the name Bucer, nearly everybody in the first part of the sixteenth century knew him as one of the most active and influential churchmen in Europe—the master, perhaps, of his own kind of fireside chat.
Zachary Purvis (DPhil, University of Oxford) is lecturer of church history at Edinburgh Theological Seminary.
1. Martin Bucer, De regno Christi: Libri Duo 1550, ed. François Wendel (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955), xxix, 1–2.
2. Benjamin Pohl and Leah Tether, “Books Fit for a King: The Presentation Copies of Martin Bucer’s De regno Christi” (London: British Library, Royal MS. 8 B. VII); Johannes Sturm, De periodis (Cambridge: Trinity College, II.12.21; London; British Library, C.24.e.5); Electronic British Library Journal (2015), art. 7, 1–35; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London: Penguin, 1999), ch. 2.
3. Bucer to John Cheke, October 21, 1550, in J. A. Giles, ed., The Whole Works of Roger Ascham, vol. 1/2 (London: 1864), 215.
4. Martin Greschat, Martin Bucer: A Reformer and His Times, trans. Stephen E. Buckwalter (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 252.
5. Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 105.
6. Greschat, Martin Bucer, 199.
7. John Calvin to Guillaume Farel, September 24, 1557, in Ioannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. G. Baum, E. Cunitz, and E. Reuss, vol. 16 (Brunswick: Schwetschke, 1877), 638–39.
8. Bucer to Peter Martyr Vermigli, June 20, 1549, in Martini Buceri Scripta anglicana fere omnia, ed. Conrad Hubert (Basel: 1577), 547.
9. Calvin to Bucer, February 1549, in Letters of Jean Calvin, ed. Jules Bonnet, trans. David Constanble, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1855–1857), 2:198–99.
10. See, e.g., Calvin to Heinrich Bullinger, March 12, 1539, in Letters, 1:114; Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, trans. James Anderson, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: 1845), xxxv; Calvin, Romans and Thessalonians, ed. David W. Torrance and T. F. Torrance, vol. 8 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960), 2.
11. Farel to Calvin, May 25, 1551, in Preserved Smith, “Some Old Unpublished Letters,” Harvard Theological Review 12 (1919): 212.
THERE IS VERY LITTLE in the history of Christianity about which one may find unbroken consensus. And yet for at least fifteen hundred years, Christians agreed almost without exception that the Song of Songs spoke principally not of love between human beings but of the relationship between God and God’s people. At first blush, such a reading seems strained to some modern readers; nowhere, after all, does the book mention God by name. The book appears to be a rather straightforward set of love songs between two human beings and thus a celebration of human love, desire, and sexuality.
It is tempting for modern readers to dismiss the older, allegorical way of interpreting the Song as old-fashioned and even prudish. Protestant readers may feel a special reluctance toward reading the Song as an allegory of divine love, given Protestantism’s historical commitment to the literal sense of the Scripture. But early generations of Protestant Reformers felt no such hesitations. They warmly embraced the enigmatic allegories of the Song. The Song, according to Reformers, was indispensable when it came to strengthening Christian faith in the reality of Christ’s love for humanity and no less valuable in stirring up love toward Christ in return. 1 A comparison of modern attitudes toward the Song with historical attitudes raises questions about what is lost when the allegorical interpretation is left behind. ***
Contemporary readers have tended to assume that earlier generations of Christians read the Song as a celebration of divine love because they were skittish about human sexuality. Compelled by their prudishness, these earlier interpreters supposedly resorted to allegorical interpretations in order to make the Song speak of much more appropriate subject matter. According to Marvin Pope’s Anchor Bible commentary on the Song, for example, centuries of interpreters simply refused to see the patently obvious subject matter of the Song: human physical love. Pope’s assertion is not only that the Song is about human sexuality or desire, but that it is plainly or obviously so:
The barrier has been a psychological aversion to the obvious, somewhat like the Emperor’s New Clothes. The trouble has been that interpreters who dared acknowledge the plain sense of the Song were assailed as enemies of truth and decency. The allegorical charade thus persisted for centuries with only sporadic protests.2
“Considered in light of the canon of Christian Scriptures and as one strand in a tapestry of metaphors, allusions, and intertextual references, a reading of the Song that stresses divine love seems not only plausible but just.”
However, the idea that the Song is a celebration of human sexuality is relatively novel. Indeed, for centuries Christian readers were explicitly warned away from this reading. Most scholars locate the beginning of the modern way of reading the Song with Johann Gottfried von Herder, a German poet, theologian, and critic. In 1778, Herder argued that the Song was a collection of human love poetry, a view that grew in popularity through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, until it gained consensus among biblical interpreters.
Biblical scholars continue to debate the contours of the Song’s genre and what the text may have originally been intended to convey. It is, as Pope aptly says in the same commentary quoted above, “a vexed question.”3 A few scholars continue to argue that the text was from the beginning intended to signify the love of God for God’s people, while most draw attention to the similarities between the Song and other ancient genres, whether drama, cultic marriage text, or ancient Near Eastern love poetry.4 What can be said confidently, however, is that the Song was included—and preserved—in the Christian canon because of the belief that it spoke not principally of human love but of divine love, or, more broadly, of the nature of God’s ongoing relationship with God’s people.
The assumption that the Song speaks principally—and self-evidently—of human love holds only if the Song is considered in isolation, as a book unto itself. On the other hand, considered in light of the canon of Christian Scriptures and as one strand in a tapestry of metaphors, allusions, and intertextual references, a reading of the Song that stresses divine love seems not only plausible but just.
The Scriptures frequently use the metaphor of the bride and the bridegroom to limn the relationship between God and God’s people. These references begin in the Hebrew Bible, with passages in the Psalms and Prophets that compare God’s covenant with Israel to the covenant between a bride and bridegroom.5 They continue in the Gospels with references to Christ as a bridegroom.6 The Pauline Epistles use the relationship of the husband and wife to make sense of the relationship between Christ and the church, and vice versa. 7 The references continue into Revelation, with the marriage supper of the Lamb and Jerusalem as bride of the Lamb.8 Indeed, the Scriptures culminate with a vision in which John sees “the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev. 21:2 NRSV).
By the principle of analogia scripturae (Scripture interpreting Scripture), or even the principles of interpretation taught in any first-year literature class, it is no great interpretive leap for Christian readers to imagine that, in light of the biblical canon, the bride of the Song is also the bride of the Lamb—that is, the people of God, both individually and corporately. ***
While in many contemporary churches the Song is primarily a text to be quoted at wedding services, in the Middle Ages perhaps no other book besides the
Psalms had as profound an influence on Christian spirituality. One medieval commentator, William of Saint-Thierry, expressed medieval Christians’ esteem for the book when he wrote that the Song surpassed “all the ancient songs of the patriarchs and prophets.”9
Medieval allegorical interpretations of the Song fell into three interrelated categories: the bride as a figure of the church, the bride as a figure of each individual Christian soul, and the bride as a figure of the Virgin Mary. These interpretations inspired new ways of talking about God, new theologies and spiritualities, and new genres of spiritual literature. Medieval mystics were especially drawn to the Song. The thirteenth-century mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg left behind a spiritual work in which the soul and God sing songs of love to each other. The soul says to God, “Ah, Lord, love me fiercely and love me often and long.” God says back to the soul, “That I love you often comes from my nature, because I am love itself.”10 Mystics like Mechthild found in the Song biblical precedent for a dialogue of mutual love between the soul and God, in which it is not just the soul who expresses her love to God but also God who says to the soul, “I love you back.”
Medieval Christians tended to write their commentaries on the Song toward the end of their life, seemingly saving the task for the period of greatest spiritual and literary maturity.11 Perhaps the best-known medieval commentator on the Song is Bernard of Clairvaux, the Cistercian abbot, mystic, and reformer who wrote eighty-six sermons on the Song, arriving at only the third chapter before his death in 1153. The project was taken up by other Cistercian theologians: Gilbert of Hoyland added another forty-seven sermons to Bernard’s, reaching the fifth chapter before he died in 1171. John of Ford had the happy task of completing the project without dying first: he reached the end, adding 120 sermons.
Not all interpreters were as interested in what the Song had to say about the Christian’s spirituality or interiority. The Song was also read as an allegory of the history of the church, as well as used to support various programs of political, monastic, and ecclesial reform. Early medieval exegetes especially “nearly always had a strong interest in monastic or church reform and in the purity of the heavenly bride.”12
Medieval interpretations of the Song thus took up themes that ranged from the theological and devotional to the ecclesial and political. One nineteenth-century scholar objected that through allegory the Song could be made to “say anything,” and while that objection is not a just one, it is true that medieval interpretations of the Song often reflected the spiritual themes that were most dear to its readers.13
While it comes as no surprise that medieval Christians were drawn to allegory, modern readers may be surprised to learn that Protestant interpreters were equally drawn to allegorical interpretations of the Song. The magisterial Reformers were known for a turn toward the plain sense of Scripture. They also desired to correct what they saw as misguided and overwrought allegories of the Scriptures. Yet Protestant interpreters continued to produce allegorical interpretations of the Song.14 They did not see their reasoning as discordant with their hermeneutical principles: to allegorize a passage that was meant to be read literally was obviously an error, but some biblical passages were themselves allegories and were therefore meant to be read as allegories. The Song was one of those passages.
One way to see how Protestant Reformers approached the Song is by looking at how they prepared the biblical text for publication. In 1538, Pierre Robert Olivétan published an edition of the three books of Solomon (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs), translated from Hebrew into French.15 Olivétan was a biblical scholar whose work drew from the work of the great humanist biblical scholar Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples. (Olivétan was also the first to translate the Hebrew and Greek text of the Bible into French, a translation that had been published in 1535 with an introduction written by Calvin himself, who was a relative of Olivétan’s.) Olivétan’s Books of Solomon contained not just a translation of the books but also a series of interpretive aids designed to help readers understand these enigmatic books for themselves.
From the title page for the Song of Songs, readers are guided toward an allegorical interpretation. A decorative banner atop the title reads, “My beloved (the Lord) is mine, and I am his.” The parenthetical gloss leaves no doubt about the identity of the bridegroom. Below the title appears a quotation from Mark 12:30–31 and Deuteronomy 6:4–5: “Hear, Israel, the Lord our God is one God. And you will love your Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your understanding and with all your strength.” Here, by using Scripture to interpret Scripture, readers are led to understand that the book they are about the read concerns divine, not human, love.
Lest these hints be lost on readers, the next page contains the heading “About the spiritual love between God and his faithful people, discussed in this divine Song.” Then follows a list of verses from both testaments, showing the variety and frequency of bridal metaphors found in the Christian Scriptures: “God is love and whoever remains in love remains in God, and God in him” (1 John 4:16); “I will betroth you to myself forever” (Hos. 2:19); “As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will God rejoice over you” (Isa. 62:5); and so forth. When readers arrive at the French translation of the text of the Song of Songs, they are guided by marginal glosses: the title is glossed with the note, “A mystical dialogue of spiritual and divine love between the Lord as bridegroom and the church as bride”; the verse “Draw me, we will run after you” (Song of Songs 1:4) is glossed,
“God draws us to faith”; and the daughters of Jerusalem are identified as “lovers of God.” Everywhere the reader is led to believe that the Song speaks naturally, biblically, and beautifully about the love between God and God’s people.
Broadly speaking, the Protestant Reformers shared in the consensus that the Song was an allegory of divine love. Two exceptions are of interest. The first is Martin Luther. Luther had an appreciation for the bridal metaphor and made use of it, for example, in On the Freedom of a Christian to signify the relationship between Christ and the Christian soul. (This is the famous “happy exchange” in which, having been united in marriage, Christ accepts the sin, death, and condemnation of the human soul and exchanges them for his own grace and salvation.) Yet Luther’s lectures on the Song of Songs, published in 1539, were decidedly idiosyncratic. Luther agreed that the bridegroom was God and that the bride was God’s people. But he rejected older interpretations of the book, advancing instead a highly original interpretation of his own. Luther took the subject of the Song to be the nature of happy and peaceful governments that keep the Word of God and whose citizens respect divinely ordained political powers. Although Luther’s interpretation was novel, he did not depart from the consensus view that the Song spoke in figurative terms about the relation between God and God’s people. (As far as I am aware, only one later interpreter followed Luther’s path, the German Reformer Johannes Brenz; otherwise, Luther’s interpretation failed to have any significant influence on later exegesis.)
The second exception, which truly does underscore the rule, concerns a much more dramatic departure from traditional interpretations of the Song and can be found in the famous conflict between Calvin and the French Reformer Sebastian Castellio. Castellio, who had been appointed to lead the Collège de Rive in 1542, was searching for new employment as a pastor, but Calvin opposed him over his views about the Song, as well as his views on Christ’s descent into hell. According to documents of the time—documents that admittedly tell only one side of the story—Castellio judged the Song to be “a lascivious and obscene song in which Solomon described his immodest loves.”16 Against Castellio, Calvin maintained that it was the unbroken consensus of the church that the Song was canonical and ought to be read as a holy text. Calvin’s view was representative of the broad agreement among the Reformers: the Song was canonical and holy, and it used figurative or allegorical terms to speak of God’s relationship to God’s people.
Rather than being embarrassed by the allegorical nature of the Song of Songs, Protestants embraced it. In 1587, John Harmar, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, called the Song of Songs “the most heavenly and excellent ditty, concluded in terms and phrases of speech altogether enigmatic and allegorical, and containing the great mystery, as the Apostle calls it, of our salvation, the mystical union of Christ with the faithful, his members.” 17 Despite the difficulty of the Song’s enigmatic images, Harmar was confident that a sound interpretation of the text would give comfort and consolation to every Christian, peace and tranquility to afflicted minds and consciences, and joy to the hearts of the believing. For Harmar, the Song was a declaration of “the ground of our holy assurance of the
than being embarrassed by the allegorical nature of the Song of Songs, Protestants embraced it.”
“Rather
favor and love of God towards us.”18 It spoke in poetic and allegorical terms of the greatest mysteries of salvation.
According to Theodore Beza, the French Reformer who was Calvin’s friend and successor in Geneva, the Song’s poetic images help readers understand the incomprehensible. God’s character, God’s love, the mysteries of salvation—no human mind can encompass these in their entirety. But the human mind could begin to grasp these realities by means of the suggestive power of images and poetic similitudes. Beza explained,
The Holy Spirit wishing to represent to us what is in itself incomprehensible to us, namely, the most intimate spiritual bond of Jesus Christ with the faithful soul . . . could not choose a more suitable similitude, nor a more vivid pattern and model, of this union.19
For Beza, the Song’s allegories were not a stumbling block or a point of embarrassment for Protestants; rather, they were part of the way that God accommodates himself to his people, revealing himself in manners suited to their intellectual, psychological, and spiritual capacities. To speak of God as a bridegroom who willingly enters into a union with his bride is somehow to say or suggest something about God that couldn’t be expressed otherwise.
The idea that images, metaphors, and biblical allegories might communicate divine realities as well as literal speech comes as a surprise to those who are used to thinking of literal, predicative speech as closest to truth. 20 For those used to placing value on the literal truth, the idea of nonliteral truth seems like a paradox. But such is the power of metaphors, images, and poetry: the moment a rich or evocative image is used, a nexus of associated properties, concepts, and images is summoned as well, offering the possibility that a strong image may communicate reality more faithfully than a literal predication.
Most Christians have an experiential knowledge of the power. When Christians pray Our Father, they use a divinely revealed image (father, fatherhood) that names God. This image not only communicates particular characteristics of God—provision, protection, love—but it also produces particular attitudes and forms of attention in the one who prays. When one prays Our Father, one prays with a different set of emotions and thoughts than if one were to begin the prayer Your Honor. To address God as Our Father is both to say something true and to do something important. ***
Protestant Reformers’ attachment to the Song as an allegory of divine love invites us to ask what is at stake in the image of God as bridegroom—what concepts, attitudes, and forms of attention does it summon? To begin to answer this question, we turn again to Beza.
His sermons on the Song of Songs, published in 1586, cover the first three chapters of the Song of Songs and span over six hundred pages in the original French. Many of those pages were preoccupied with polemic aimed at Roman Catholics, and modern readers and scholars have not generally flocked to the work in great numbers. But the early sermons especially reveal something about how the bridal metaphor of the Song might inform the Christian’s understanding of God and his relationship with his people.
In his first sermon, Beza asks what exactly a marriage is and why it is a particularly fitting image (“similitude”) for God’s relationship to his people. Beza compares marriage to other forms of human contractual relationships. He observes that other contracts exist for the sake of acquiring goods and possessions, and in such contracts each party is ready to disadvantage the other if necessary. On the contrary, in marriage the parties are bound in an indissoluble and mutual obligation in which neither seeks to disadvantage the other, since they have become as one. 21 It is this reciprocal and lasting nature of the bond of marriage that makes it a fitting image of God’s covenant with his people.
Beza thus helps to show that when Christians “think with” the metaphor of God as bridegroom, it conditions their thinking in the same way that calling God Father conditions Christian thought and prayer. This is the power of a strong image: it spills over into other categories, shaping the way one thinks of God in all sorts of ways. A father is supposed to love, protect, and provide for his children; to say that God is father is to say that God’s actions are bent toward those ends. What then does it mean to say that God is a bridegroom?
We can see what a difference it makes to think of God as bridegroom by comparing Beza’s sermons on the Song of Songs to one of his other works. In 1555, Beza published his Tabula praedestinationis (Table of Predestination), a polemical tract that includes an (in)famous diagram of the order of salvation that many readers have found off-putting. The work has fed the belief that Beza’s understanding of salvation was coldly logical and overly deterministic, a malformed scholasticization of Calvin’s doctrine. Although recent Beza scholarship has moved in a much more nuanced direction, even those who are sympathetic to Beza and his teachings on predestination may find in the Tabula a rather stern and unforgiving presentation of familiar doctrines.
Beza presents some of these same doctrines in his sermons on the Song, but there the doctrines are conditioned by the image of God as bridegroom. In the second sermon, Beza “thinks with” the image of God as bridegroom to reflect on the doctrine of election. Taking up the opening verse of the Song—“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” Beza considers what this passage reveals about the union between God and human beings. He cautions his readers that although the bride is the first to speak in the Song, the desire for union does not originate with her: “It is the Bridegroom who spoke to her first, and who disposed her inwardly to seek him.” 22 Here, the portrait of predestination is not one of a stern God in heaven arbitrarily dividing human beings into saved and damned but of a Lover who approaches his beloved and wins her over. This
is how God acts with us—not like an angry judge or a remote deity, but like a lover. Beza continues teasing out the details of the image, asking why the Song says “kisses of the mouth” when all kisses are from the mouth. He concludes that it is a reference to preaching, which is carried out by means of the mouth and is “the ordinary means by which God joins himself to his church, and his church to him.” 23 Here again, thinking with the bridal metaphor offers a new way to see a familiar reality. Preaching in Beza’s depiction is a kiss from God, a moment of union between God and God’s people, when the love between them is made known.
Next, Beza considers the “kisses” themselves. According to Beza, a kiss is an indication of union, an indication that one is ready to give one’s entire soul to another. 24 There is no moment in salvation more indicative of this kind of union than the incarnation, when God joined himself to humanity in Christ. “For truly it can and must be said that the Son of God kissed us—indeed, more than kissed—when he so closely joined himself to our nature.” 25 The incarnation, a divine-human kiss, is a moment in which a Lover gives all that is his to his beloved.
The picture of election in these two sermons on the Song of Songs is profoundly shaped by the bridal metaphor. There is no hint of determinism, no idea of God as a cosmic “sorting hat.” Rather, Beza’s God is a suitor, a lover who has chosen a bride and wants to bind himself to her and so live with her forever as one.
1. I draw this particular language from Lucas Osiander the Elder, Esdras, Nehemias, Esther, Iob, Psalterium, Proverbia Salomonis, Ecclesiastes, et Canticum Canticorum... (Tübingen: G. Gruppenbach, 1576), 1246.
2. Marvin H. Pope, Song of Songs: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 7C (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), 17.
3. Pope, Song of Songs, 34.
4. Arthur Holder, “Christian Reception of the Song of Songs Since 1800,” in A Companion to the Song of Songs in the History of Spirituality, ed. Timothy H. Robinson (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 359–60.
5. Cf. Ps. 45; Isa. 49:18; 54:4–8, 62:4–5; Jer. 2:2; Ezek. 16; Hos. 1–3.
6. Cf. Matt. 9:15; 25:1–13; Mark 2:19–20; Luke 5:34–35; John 3:29.
7. Cf. 2 Cor. 11:2; Eph. 5:21–33.
8. Cf. Rev. 19:7–9; 21:2, 9; 22:17.
9. William of Saint-Thierry, Exposé sur le Cantique des Cantiques, ed. J.-M. Déchanet, Sources Chrétiennes 82 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1962), Pro. 6. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
10. Mechthild of Magdeburg, Das fließende Licht der Gottheit, 1.23–24. The translation is my own, but an English translation can be found in Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Frank Tobin (New York: Paulist Press, 1998).
11. Max Engammare, Qu’il me baise des baisiers de sa bouche. Le Cantique des Cantiques à la Renaissance. Étude et bibliographie, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 277 (Geneva: Libraire Droz, 1993), 154.
12. Hannah W. Matis, “The Song of Songs in the Early Middle Ages: From Gregory the Great to the Gregorian Reform,” in A Companion to the Song of Songs in the History of Spirituality, ed. Timothy H. Robinson (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 71. Matis has explored these dimensions in greater depth in a very learned monograph; see Hannah W. Matis, The Song of Songs in the Early Middle Ages, Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 191 (Leiden: Brill, 2019).
13. Frederic W. Farrar, History of Interpretation: Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year MDCCCLXXXV on the Foundation of the Late Rev. John Bampton (London: Macmillan, 1886), 32.
14. The two works that principally inform the following passage
There is a reason that reading the Song as an allegory of divine love was so cherished for hundreds of years. “Thinking with” the image of God as a bridegroom grounds all of God’s actions toward human beings in love, in divine desire for humanity. Luther thought of the gospel in precisely such terms when he wrote that the gospel is “a word of salvation, a word of grace, a word of comfort, a word of joy, a voice of the bridegroom and the bride, a good word, a word of peace.”26 When the Song is read only as a text about human love, something is lost. A way of thinking about God and of interpreting God’s actions toward human beings is lost.
Far from rejecting or being embarrassed by allegorical readings of the Song of Songs, early Protestant interpreters embraced them. They found something of irreplaceable value in the Song, and they used the image of God as bridegroom to ponder their doctrines and to teach them. It was of the utmost importance that Scripture should include a dialogue in which God and the church expressed their mutual love, desire, and enjoyment. In the Scriptures, God is father, judge, shepherd, and king—but he is also a bridegroom who comes to his beloved, delighting in her, and moving heaven and earth so that he can be with her forever.
Erin Risch Zoutendam (PhD candidate, Duke University) is a church historian whose research considers the way biblical hermeneutics shaped mystical and devotional texts in the later Middle Ages and the early modern period.
are Engammare, Qu’il me baise; and George L. Scheper, “Reformation Attitudes toward Allegory and the Song of Songs,” PMLA 89, no. 3 (May 1974): 551–62. Another study that may interest readers of this journal can be found in Timothy H. Robinson, “The Banquet of Love: The Song of Songs in Reformed Sacramental Piety: 1586–1729,” in A Companion to the Song of Songs in the History of Spirituality, ed. Timothy H. Robinson (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 327–57.
15. Pierre Robert Olivétan, Les Livres de Salomoh. Lés Proverbes, L’Ecclesiastes, Le Cantique dés cantiques. Translatez d’Ebrieu en Francoys (Geneva: Jehan Girard, 1538).
16. CO 11.675.
17. John Harmar, “The Epistle Dedicatory,” in Master Bezaes Sermons Upon the Three First Chapters of the Canticle of Canticles (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1587), ii. I have lightly modernized the spelling and language of Harmar’s work to make it more comprehensible for a modern audience.
18. Harmar, “The Epistle Dedicatory,” ii.
19. Theodore Beza, Sermons sur les trois premiers chapitres du Cantique des Cantiques, de Salomon (Geneva: Jehan le Preux, 1586), 10. The translations from French are my own,
but an early modern English translation can be found in John Harmar, trans., Master Bezaes Sermons Upon the Three First Chapters of the Canticle of Canticles (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1587), available at https://archive.org/details/ masterserm00bzet/page/n7/mode/2upc.
20. This passage, and indeed the essay more broadly, are profoundly indebted to Janet Martin Soskice’s Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985).
21. Beza, Cant., 8–9.
22. Beza, Cant., 29.
23. Beza, Cant., 35.
24. Beza, Cant., 33–34.
25. Beza, Cant., 37.
26. Martin Luther, Explanations of the Ninety-Five Theses, trans. Carl W. Folkemer, LW 31:231/WA 1:616.21–23 (emphasis added).
Exploring perspectives from the present
Kyle R. Hughes (BSFS, Georgetown University; ThM, Dallas Theological Seminary; PhD, Radboud University Nijmegen) is an assisting deacon and director of catechesis at Christ the King Anglican Church (ACNA) and the inaugural Lower School Principal of The Stonehaven School in Marietta, Georgia. An experienced educator and accomplished researcher, he is the author of Teaching for Spiritual Formation: A Patristic Approach to Christian Education in a Convulsed Age (Cascade, 2022).
In your book, you connect the category of Christian education with that of Christian formation by characterizing the Christian school as, unusually, a monastery. Would you flesh out this analogy?
According to Benedict of Nursia, the father of Western monasticism, the monastery was to be “a school for the Lord’s service.” His Rule is, in fact, a pedagogical manual and one of the favorite pedagogical manuals in the history of the West. Benedict desired his monastery to be a school for the Lord’s service. Now, this might require reframing our understanding of education a bit, because a Benedictine monastery doesn’t look like your average K–12 school. In Desiring the Kingdom , James K. A. Smith says that an education is “a constellation of practices, rituals, and routines that inculcates a particular vision of the good life by inscribing or infusing that vision in the heart (the gut) by means of material embodied practices.” With this definition of education, I can more easily make the connection to what Benedict was trying to do with his monks. So we can take what Benedict has to say about (for example) community life, discipline, time, and space, and think about how these should look in the context of Christian schooling.
A school is something different from a church or a monastery, but all three share the same goal of Christian formation. For that reason, I think it is fair to analogize the school to the monastery insofar as the monastery is a compelling model of a place that cultivates a Christian view of the good life.
Asceticism is a key word in your study, which could be off-putting to some Christians. It conjures up images of emaciated mystics and notions such as suspicion of the body, society, and creation. How do you define this word, and what is its connection to education?
Yes, I acknowledge in the book that this word can be a stumbling block for some, especially in the Protestant world. Simply put, Christian asceticism refers to the practices of self-discipline and self-denial by which one seeks to advance in the spiritual life. After all, Jesus says, “when you fast,” not “if ” (Matt. 6:16). Jesus fasts and expects his followers will as well. We can go to Paul and talk about his imagery of buffeting the body, and so on. Some degree of asceticism, which demands that we engage in practices of self-discipline, seems to be assumed by Christians in the New Testament.
To be sure, in Christian history we find evidence of a gnostic-seeming asceticism that appears to reject the goodness of the material creation. But we don’t need to reject the idea of asceticism in its entirety. In The Monkhood of All Believers, Greg Peters writes, “Asceticism, that most monastic of practices, is expected of all Christian believers by virtue of our baptism and is characterized by balance and moderation.” Thus any approach to Christian education has to take seriously the role of the ascetical life in spiritual formation.
As an Anglican, I can go further to say that asceticism is in fact required by our baptismal vows: to renounce the devil and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God, the empty promises and deadly deceits of this world that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God, and the sinful desires of the flesh that draw us from the love of God. Asceticism is simply Christianity on the offensive: a Christianity that renounces something. We do these ascetical practices, then, not because we have this gnostic belief that the world is bad or anything like that, but because we take seriously what Scripture tells us about overcoming the temptations of the world, flesh, and devil.
This is probably a whole separate conversation, but it strikes me that asceticism is perhaps the best antidote to a consumerist, comfort-driven Christianity typical of much of the American church.
You rely heavily on patristic writers to fund your thinking—specifically, Gregory the Great, John Chrysostom, Basil of Caesarea, Benedict of Nursia, and Cyril of Jerusalem. Why consult the fathers on the matter of education? What do they know that we don’t? Is your work entirely a project of retrieval, or are there departures you’d make from the fathers on certain matters?
Growing up evangelical, I had no sense of connection with the church’s past. Now I see church history as a spiritual treasure box that is, in fact, my inheritance. The fathers lived in a very different world from us, and yet so much of what they have to offer is timeless. These elements of continuity and discontinuity lead me to describe my project as one in which the fathers can expand our imaginations for Christian teaching and learning.
What they had that we don’t is a clearer picture that we are saved by Christ for something. I think so much of American evangelicalism is based on trying to help get people saved, but there is no question of, “I’m saved, but for what?” The fathers were better at unpacking the implications and the telos of our salvation for both this life and the next.
“Simply put, Christian asceticism refers to the practices of self-discipline and self-denial by which one seeks to advance in the spiritual life.”
So when discussing education and our desire to make disciples, we need to move past thinking that we can simply tick the box next to the question “Is this child saved?” and take up a much richer, harder question: “How can I help this particular child, wherever he is at, on his spiritual journey? How can I move him in a Godward direction?” And that is a question applicable to all my students, wherever they are spiritually.
The fathers gave us an imagination for formation, such as how we are formed by sensory inputs and how a Christian teacher can best use secular literature and ideas to shape a child’s soul. But there’s also going to be discontinuity. Women, for example, would not have been involved in most of the educational settings of the ancient world. The fathers were also more into discipline like shaming and corporal punishment with which we have difficulty. Although some things change, so much stays the same.
According to the church fathers, what is the goal of a Christian education? What did they understand about the objectives of education that differed from their non-Christian peers or differed from us?
Like other classical educators, the fathers believed the goal of education was the formation of a certain kind of human being, to cultivate virtue and excellence. In this context, then, the fathers simply centered their understanding of true virtue and excellence on the person of Jesus Christ, such that a Christian education was really about the work of making disciples whose lives would increasingly resemble Christ. This contrasts with even modern Christian approaches to education that may prioritize vocational training or college preparation. Thus if the goal of education is the cultivation of virtue, and all virtues are contained in the person of Christ, then the goal is to become like Christ.
Throughout your book, and especially in the second chapter, you place a special burden on teachers. You call them to exemplify the sort of Christian they expect their pedagogy to produce. Relatedly, the fathers believed that only someone with a long and deep experience in prayer and spiritual discipline was qualified to teach others. Such a person must be more than a teacher— more of an exemplar. However, prayer life is notoriously difficult to measure. How do you advise Christian institutions of learning to prioritize this in their hiring process?
Excellent question. Honestly, it feels like we have to start with something as basic as church attendance. That’s the first (but maybe not the final) step. The pandemic really got a lot of people out of the rhythm of church attendance and membership. But it’s time to call people back to participating in Christ’s church, his body.
Of course, the inner spiritual life is difficult to measure, and hiring is hard right now. If your school is waiting to hire Benedict of Nursia, you’ll be waiting a long time! But at my school, our expectation is that every staff member is an active member at their church. Schools aren’t ultimately going to be the places
that train their people how to pray. They won’t have pastoral oversight and discipline. Teachers need to get this from their churches. Sure, we could quibble about which church they’re attending and if it’s really accomplishing these things. But being an active member of a local church is a baseline. Does that get you a Saint Benedict in every classroom? No, but it’s a practical place to start.
My thinking in this regard has been shaped by Aaron Renn’s Three Worlds of Evangelicalism. He helps trace patterns of how Christians have engaged and been received in the public square. Most notably, Renn identified a shift that took place around 2014 from what he calls the “neutral world” to what he terms the “negative world.” Where the former was characterized by a lingering receptivity to Christian beliefs and morality, the latter is strikingly hostile to traditional Christianity. Today we see, for example, a genuine social cost to those who would seek to follow Christ.
The college-preparatory school model of Christian education strikes me as flowing out of neutral-world presuppositions. Maybe in that way, it is akin to the theology of the attractional model of evangelicalism. This perspective presupposes a world that is malleable, open to being transformed for Christ, as is characteristic of a neutral-world emphasis on cultural engagement that takes a largely positive view of the surrounding culture. It downplays controversial issues in favor of finding areas of common ground. This approach, however, is only going to become less successful in a negative-world environment. The inability of Christians in influential positions of power to transform their spheres of influence, much less to resist the formative pressures therein, suggests that the period of hoping a winsome Christian witness will win over society has passed (assuming it ever truly existed in the first place).
There is, however, a deeper pathology at work in the model of the Christian college-preparatory school that will only be exacerbated in the negative world: its telos leaves it vulnerable to the pressures of broader society and college admissions offices. A parent paying tens of thousands of dollars in tuition every year at such a school has every right to expect results in terms of college admissions, high-paying careers, and all the markers of success in the world. As such, the neutral-world Christian college-preparatory school implies that you can, it turns out, serve both God and Mammon. You can, in fact, have it all. I think this line of thinking is deeply detrimental to our attempts to form students into Christ’s likeness.
What do most Christian institutions and educators of Christian faith get wrong about Christian education?
How students are viewed. It’s surprising to me how many Christian teachers don’t seem to take the consequences of the Fall seriously. Instead, there is a tacit acceptance of an Enlightenment view of students as basically good, or at least blank slates, that seems to obviate the need for spiritual formation.
“I believe that a classical Christian education provides a way of avoiding the deformative pressures of the college-preparatory model without slipping into a fundamentalist, anti-intellectual, world-denying posture.”
We had a highly respected consultant come to one of my previous schools, and his whole pitch came out of Progressive Philosophy 101: children are basically good, and our job as tutors is to help them set their own course. It was couched in Christian language, of course: as image-bearers, we want children to be who they are meant to be in Jesus Christ. You can baptize it in Christianese, but if you don’t begin with the assumption that the child needs to be formed into something other than what he currently is or wants to be, then why engage in this business of spiritual formation? Students need to be redeemed and transformed, and our pedagogy needs to account for this. A school can have the opposite problem, theoretically—where kids can do nothing right—but that’s a different conversation for a different set of schools.
Teachers today must adapt to a rapidly changing context. They often feel like they’re treading water, endlessly experimenting with new things. What is your advice to those Christian educators who feel this way?
Start with one thing that you can realistically do. I take pains throughout the book to say that you can’t do everything. My advice to the tutor is you can start somewhere. My chapter on engaging the senses for spiritual formation, for example, can be overwhelming if you try and account for what your students are taking in through their eyes, their ears, what they hear, what they smell, and so on. So maybe this semester, or this quarter, just think about how you are engaging one of those senses. Contemplate: How do I engage and protect my students’ gift of sight? This might result in making changes in room decor, where students are seated, where they are positioned to look when they zone out, and so on. Any progress with any number of kids is a win. And I would add, how much better would it be if you weren’t alone, if you were doing this with other teachers at your school? Spiritual formation in a school setting must be a cooperative work.
Over the past few decades, the classical education model has made great strides. It presumes a fundamental coherence between all disciplines, resulting in a holistic approach to curriculum and pedagogy. There seems to me to be an analogy here between a classical education and your holistic vision of the student. While you don’t frame your book as a case for classical learning, do you think classicism is particularly well suited to this vision of Christian formation?
Yes and, in fact, I am an administrator and teacher at a classical Christian school that is trying to implement precisely such a vision. To return to the discussion of Christian education in the negative world, I believe that a classical Christian education provides a way of avoiding the deformative pressures of the college-preparatory model without slipping into a fundamentalist, anti-intellectual, world-denying posture. The way forward, like in so many things, lies in the past and in a return to an understanding of education as soulcraft. Insofar as the classical Christian school movement aims to do this by cultivating truth, goodness, and beauty, and by preserving and transmitting the Great
Tradition that is our common heritage, I expect that these schools will be better positioned to resist the tides of liquid (post)modernity—to play on a phrase from Zygmunt Bauman—than the Christian college-preparatory schools I referenced earlier. And, perhaps, it may be precisely graduates of these classical schools who will be best poised to rebuild our colleges, workplaces, and communities when our national collective fever breaks and the work of rebuilding begins anew.
Blake Adams (MA, Wheaton College) is an associate at the Church of the Resurrection (ACNA), where he serves as Lead Sacristan. He is the founder and main writer of “Read Religiously,” a retrieval project that aims to give obscure Christian classics a wider readership. Blake specializes in early Christian history, exegesis, and ascetical theology. Follow him on Twitter @BlaketheObscure.
“
PPLY YOURSELF DAY AND NIGHT to reading the Scriptures. Sleep should overtake you while your book is in your hand, and the sacred page will welcome your nodding head like a pillow.” —Jerome ***
The canonical Christian Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments, is not only the most widely read book in the world today—the perennial bestseller, day in and day out, though not included in most bestseller listings— but it is also the most extensively interpreted book in the world. Some authors suggested—as a thought experiment—that a physicist, a Marxist, a psychoanalyst, and a theologian might come together and discuss the opening chapters of the book of Genesis. In something of an understatement, they noted that “we would not be surprised to find widespread disagreement among these interpreters about the best reading of Genesis.” They add that “once we acknowledge the plurality of interpretive interests, we need not treat alternative interpretations as failed attempts to discover the meaning of a text.” 1 There are indeed many approaches to reading the Bible, and it would be a form of intellectual imperialism to claim that only one of these approaches is valid. Though this chapter will highlight some weaknesses of modern biblical scholarship, with its so-called historical-critical method, the intent here is not to deny the value of this approach. Rather the point is to argue that the modern, academic approach is just one way of reading the Bible, that the ancient practice of lectio also has value, and that this traditional approach has fully proven its worth to Christian believers.
Lectio approaches the Bible differently than most biblical scholars do, because lectio has a different purpose in mind. Its ultimate goal is not to obtain information about the language, history, customs, etc., of the biblical era, but rather to experience communion with the God of the Bible. A first key assumption in lectio is that God the holy Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit— indwells the biblical text. This means that immersion into the Bible is immersion into the God of the Bible. Reading the Bible is a sacramental act, in that the visible words on the page offer access to the invisible presence of God in and through the text. According to Exodus 17, the ancient Israelites had no water while they were in the desert, and Moses at God’s direction brought forth water for them out of the rock. The apostle Paul commented that the Israelites “all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them,
and the Rock was Christ” (1 Cor. 10:4). But how so? How could Moses or the Israelites have had any relationship to Jesus, born more than a thousand years later? Once one grasps the apostle’s theological and metaphysical assumptions, what might seem nonsensical from a purely historical point of view becomes understandable. For the apostle, Christ was already present to Moses and the Israelites—indeed, eternally present in the world that God had created—and Christ manifested himself in innumerable though hidden ways prior to Christ’s earthly incarnation in Jesus. Christ is himself the substance of scripture and the content of God’s redemptive plan.2
The earliest author to articulate this point fully regarding Christ and scripture—and thus a founding figure in the lectio tradition—was Origen of Alexandria. In his Treatise on the Passover, Origen wrote that “[Christ’s] flesh and blood . . . are the divine Scriptures, eating which, we have Christ; the words becoming his bones, the flesh becoming the meaning from the texts, following which meaning, as it were, we see in a mirror dimly the things which are to come.”3 There is therefore a real presence of Christ in the written scriptures no less than in the Eucharist and in the believing community. According to Origen, these three realities are all in some sense “the body of Christ”—the church, the Eucharist, and the Bible.4 Origen stated: “You are . . . to understand the scriptures in this way: as the one, perfect body of the Word.”5
A number of consequences follow from recognizing God’s presence in the written scripture. It follows from this it is possible to read scripture in a unified or unitary way. For scripture, as Origen wrote, is “one body of truth” and “one perfect and harmonious instrument of God.”6 This of course does not mean that every portion of scripture will speak with equal clarity concerning Christ or the message of salvation in Christ. Yet when scripture is, so to speak, properly chewed and digested—using our spiritual teeth and mouths and stomachs to consume it—then each individual book, chapter, and verse will yield a meaning consistent with the meanings we find elsewhere in scripture. If the primary point of modern biblical scholarship is to pry everything apart, and carefully to examine the separate pieces, then the aim of Origen and the early Christian authors was to seek and to find unity among the different parts of scripture.
The affirmation of Christ’s real presence in scripture also led the ancients to read scripture in an intensive way. They assumed that nothing in the text was there by happenstance. This led readers to probe exhaustively and to search for hidden meaning in the details. John 21:11 states that Peter once caught 153 fish, and one might fill an entire book with the ancient and medieval interpretations as to why this number of fish is mentioned! Origen held that spiritual mysteries were concealed in every bit of the biblical text: “I, believing in the words of my Lord Jesus Christ, think that even an ‘iota or dot’ is full of mystery and do not think that any of these‚ ‘will pass away until all is accomplished’ [Mt. 5:18].”7 For Origen, the longer one spends with the text of scripture, the more one discovers there, to
the point that one might become frightened at the sheer immensity of revealed meaning: “The more we read on, the higher rises the mountain of mysteries. And as someone who sets out to sea in a small boat is less afraid as long as the land is near, but . . . is seized with fear and terror for entrusting a slender craft to such great waves; the same seems to happen to us who . . . dare to enter into so vast a sea of mysteries.”8
The ancients not only read scripture in a unified and an intensive way but also read scripture in a prayerful way. Origen insisted that a true spiritual understanding of scripture’s meaning could only come through God’s inner illumination: “No one can really understand the words of Daniel except the Holy Spirit which was in Daniel.” 9 This principle was later turned into a medieval maxim, stated by William of St. Thierry and others, to the effect that “the scriptures crave to be read in the spirit with which they were written.” 10 Theologically speaking, the assumption is that just as God’s grace is necessary for sinful people to understand who Christ is, and to respond to Christ in faith, so grace is also necessary for them to understand and to respond to the message of scripture. Origen stated that “human nature of itself does not have the wherewithal to search for God and attain clear knowledge of him without help from the object of its search who then lets himself be found.”11 The lectio tradition involves an ethos of prayerful and persistent knocking at the door of scripture, asking God to open doors of understanding, and to reveal himself to the inquirer in ever-new ways. Origen wrote: “Devote yourself above all to knowledge of the holy scripture . . . with faith and God-pleasing readiness. . . . And it is not enough to knock and seek, for what is most necessary for understanding the things of God is prayer.”12
As the Latin word lectio refers to the ancient scripture-reading practice, another borrowed Latin word—namely theologia—describes the ancient attitude toward Christian learning. Just as lectio differs from “reading” in the contemporary sense, so too theologia differs from “theology” in present-day usage. When the word “theology” is used today, it refers to written texts in printed or digital format, or to an academic discipline—something that a college or seminary student might major in, and take examinations on, as they might major in history or economics. In contrast, theologia denoted an inner disposition—something inscribed on the soul and not on a page. Along these lines, the fourth-century author Evagrius defined the word theologian in terms of prayer: “If you are a theologian, you will pray truly; and if you pray truly, you are a theologian.” 13 In the contemporary context, this statement makes no sense. A “theologian” today is someone with academic degrees and knowledge of a scholarly discipline. Such a “theologian” might be a prayerful and believing individual, and yet could also be an intelligent person who read and learned about Christian beliefs without ever embracing such beliefs.
The Dominican Yves Congar commented that theologia refers to “that illumination of the soul by the Holy Spirit” that results in its “godlike transformation.” Theologia is “that perfect knowledge of God which is identified with the summit
“If you are a theologian, you will pray truly; and if you pray truly, you are a theologian.”
—Evagrius
of prayer,” and that includes an “impulsion bolstered by grace to praise the sweetness and the glory of God in the communion of contemplation.” Theologia, wrote Diodochus of Photike, impels a person imbued with God’s grace to “praise the sweetness and the glory of God in the communion of contemplation.”14 Where there is no perception of God’s grace, glory, and sweetness, there is no theologia. For more than a millennium, the practice of lectio led into theologia, whereby God and spiritual things became sweet and delightful, as truth was inwardly inscribed on a believer’s soul.
***
How did the ancient practice of lectio, and the related notion of theologia, become marginalized?
A major shift away from lectio occurred in the thirteenth century, with the rise of the new universities in Western Europe and the rise of the so-called scholastic method of inquiry. The approach taken to the Bible in the monasteries had differed from that in the universities. In the monasteries, the emphasis lay not simply on the text, but on the personhood of the reader and the spiritual effect or benefit that he or she might derive from it. Monastic lectio was often irregular and spotty, since the reader’s goal was not to encompass or explain an entire portion or book of the Bible, but rather to extract insight and blessing from the text. In one notable example, the great monastic leader Bernard of Clairvaux preached no less than eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs over a period of eighteen years. Yet, after all this time, his commentary reached only the beginning of the third chapter. He had preached through the biblical book at the rate of two verses per year! The monastic historian Jean Leclerq commented: “The monastic lectio is oriented toward . . . wisdom and appreciation. . . . Lectio divina, which begins with grammar, terminates in compunction, in desire of heaven.” 15 Arnoul of Bohériss captured the monastic attitude when he advised: “When he reads [scripture], let him seek for savor, not science.”16
In contrast to this, the scholastic approach to the Bible examined the text in its entirety, analyzing the individual parts as well as the whole. It treated scripture objectively, by analyzing word use, comparing commentators, and raising controversial issues in the form of the quaestio. The quaestio method of reasoning arose when two authoritative texts appeared to be in contradiction. Opposing positions were laid out as an either/or question, or as a set of interrelated questions. Each question and sub-question would be argued for, or against, by appeal to earlier texts or opinions, and then be approved (sic) or denied (non). Gradually the university lectura (lecture) replaced the monastic lectio as the basic mode of teaching and learning in Christian Europe.
Through its relentless questioning and questing after the truth, the argumentative methods of the scholastics bore fruit, and they arrived at a deeper understanding of many subjects. During this era a foundation was quietly being laid
for the rise of modern science, in which an experimenter proposed a hypothesis on natural phenomena and sought to confirm or disconfirm it. Yet the argumentative approach to the Bible had its drawbacks. It carried European scholars ever further away from the monastic practice of lectio and the pursuit of theologia. Moreover, in the 1500s, arguments over biblical interpretation proliferated because of divisions between Catholics and Protestants, and the intra-Protestant conflicts among Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, and other groups that broke off over the course of centuries. With many opposing groups claiming to possess unique insight into the correct interpretation of the Bible, there was much theological argumentation about the Bible, and yet less spiritual appropriation of the Bible through lectio.
Following medieval scholasticism, and the Catholic-Protestant conflicts over the Bible, there was a third major blow against lectio that came with the rise of modern biblical scholarship. In his book The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (2010), Michael Legaspi examined the historical-critical methods of biblical study that arose in Germany during the 1700s and 1800s and noted the growing chasm between devout reading and critical approaches to the Bible. Academic biblical study, he writes, “has produced . . . an astonishing amount of useful information. It has become clear, though, that academic criticism in its contemporary form cannot . . . [say] what this information is actually for.” The vast proliferation of data regarding the Bible, and the shifting scholarly hypotheses regarding the stages in which the biblical books may have been written, show no clear relationship to lectio or theologia . While academic study of the Bible often challenges or weakens belief in the Bible, devout reading “edifies and directs it.”17
From the early 1500s onward, the Jesuits popularized the so-called Ignatian method of meditation, involving the reverent visualization of biblical scenes. Ignatius Loyola “emphasized the prior assignment of ‘subjects’ and ‘points’ for studied reflection as well as a concluding resolution by the practitioner to act on the basis of what had been learned.” The Jesuit “techniques of ‘spiritual reading’ or ‘meditation’” were nonetheless “less flexible than the more freewheeling lectio divina of old.” As a result, “what had previously been an exercise in prayer facilitated by biblical texts now became a series of carefully-focused mental exercises intended to . . . emphasize neglected virtue.” From the sixteenth century up to the early twentieth century, much of monastic meditation, and the instruction in manuals of spiritual formation, was devoted to meditative “exercises” rather than to an open-ended reflection on the biblical texts.18
Despite the hindrances to lectio that appeared in the modern period, devout reading and meditation on the text of scripture never really died out. Sometimes it flourished outside of the monasteries, and among believers who had no direct
link to the ancient church and who did not refer to their practices as lectio. The Protestant New Englander Jonathan Edwards described his youthful spiritual experiences in this way: “My mind was greatly fixed on divine things; I was almost perpetually in the contemplation of them . . . year after year. And [I] used to spend abundance of my time, in walking alone in the woods, and solitary places, for meditation, soliloquy and prayer, and converse with God.”19 Edwards devoted his solitude to reflecting on the Bible. He commented that “I have sometimes had an affecting sense of the excellency of the word of God, as a word of life; as the light of life; a sweet, excellent, life-giving word: accompanied with a thirsting after that word, that it might dwell richly in my heart.”20
Edwards added that “sometimes only mentioning a single word, causes my heart to burn within me: or only seeing the name of Christ, or the name of some attribute of God.”21 These comments suggest a practice of lectio shifting in the direction of prayer, meditation, or contemplation—that is, an instance of the classical pattern of monastic reading, prayer, and contemplation.
Another Protestant proponent of something like lectio was Reuben (R. A.) Torrey, who served as president of the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and was a well-known revival preacher in his day. In a book published in 1900, How to Pray, Torrey distinguished the devout reading of the Bible from purely academic study by saying: “Mere intellectual study of the Word of God is not enough; there must be meditation upon it. The Word of God must be revolved over and over and over in the mind, with a constant looking to God by His Spirit to make that Word a living thing in the heart.”22
Lectio reemerged during the middle part of the twentieth century, in part because of a return to the reading of early church authors in the Catholic movement known as ressourcement (“return to the sources”) . Such scholars as Jean Daniélou and Henri de Lubac rejected scholastic manuals of theology, to read instead the original texts of the Greek and Latin fathers, and in the process they came to realize that ancient approaches to the Bible were strikingly different from modern methods. This renewed Catholic interest in lectio began to be more widely diffused into mainline Protestant contexts in the 1970s, and then among evangelical and Pentecostal Christians from the 1980s onward.
A newer approach that brings together scripture reading with prayer is called “listening prayer.” One recent author says that this approach “requires that we ask God questions and wait for him to respond. . . . It’s far more art than science, and practice does help. . . . We need to get in the habit of asking God more questions and then expecting his response.”23 The idea of not only reading scripture and praying to God, but also of “hearing God” or “hearing from God,” may be an indication of the growing influence of Pentecostal and charismatic spiritualities. Works in this broad genre include LeAnne Payne’s Listening Prayer (1994), Dallas Willard’s Hearing God (2012), and Mark Virkler’s Hearing God through Biblical Meditation (2016). Such books as Enzo Bianchi’s Praying the Word (1998) and Eugene Peterson’s Eat This Book (2006) remain more closer tethered to the lectio tradition, in stressing the biblical text rather than the perceived voice of God.24
Much can be learned about meditation by paying close attention to what the Bible itself has to say on the subject. The Latin terms meditari and meditatio translate the Hebrew word hagah, “to contemplate, to talk, to mumble.” Hagah refers not merely to a mental process, but also to an audible phenomenon—a murmuring or muttering of words under one’s breath or sotto voce. In one biblical text the Hebrew word refers to the cooing of a dove (Isa. 38:14). This is not of course the usual mental image of a meditating monk, kneeling in a chapel in absolute silence. One notices too that the biblical instruction given to Joshua implies a spoken and audible word: “This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth; you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to act in accordance with all that is written in it. For then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall be successful” (Josh. 1:8). The text does not say that the book should not depart from Joshua’s “mind,” but not from his “mouth.” In other words, Joshua was constantly to be speaking God’s word aloud to himself or to others. The book of Deuteronomy gave such instruction not only to Israel’s leader, but to the whole nation, who were to “recite them [i.e., the biblical words] to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise” (Deut. 6:7). The Israelites were to be gossiping the good news of God wherever they went and during their daily chores. The “meditation” on God’s written word in Psalm 1 and other texts thus denotes “the half-audible murmur of a person who is praying.”25 Such meditative recitation was multidimensional. It involved not only seeing written words on a page, but also the speaking of those words, and the hearing the words thus spoken. It involved a thinking mind, a feeling heart, a speaking mouth, and a listening ear. No wonder that the written scroll of God’s word is presented in scripture to the prophet as something to chew and swallow (Ezek. 3:1–4; Rev. 10:8–11). The command to “eat this scroll” indicates that God’s word must be consumed and digested to yield its full effect and benefit.
Meditation in scripture is connected to specific times—occurring “in the night” (Ps. 63:7; 77:7), and yet stretching through “day and night” (Josh. 1:8; Ps. 1:2). The subject or content of meditation may be God himself (Ps. 63:7), the works of God’s hands in nature (Ps. 143:5), God’s deeds in history (Ps. 77:13; 143:5), God’s justice (Ps. 35:28; 71:24), or God’s miracles (Ps. 105:2; 119:27; 145:5). As noted already, the written scripture or some portion thereof is often a focus of meditation (Josh. 1:8; Ps. 1:2; Ps. 119:15, 23, 48, 78, 97, 148). A number of psalms link meditation with remembrance (Ps. 63:7; 77:4, 7,1 2; 143:5). In Psalm 77, there is a shift from lamentation (vv. 1–10), toward the praise of God (vv. 12–21), through the remembrance of, and meditation on, God’s past deeds (vv. 12–13). In Psalm 143, the psalmist’s meditations on God’s former deeds and God’s creation of the world bring a transition from lamentation (vv. 2–4), to pleading with God (vv. 6–10), and finally to a confession of confidence in God (vv. 10–12). Psalm 1,
“It involved not only seeing written words on a page, but also the speaking of those words, and the hearing the words thus spoken. It involved a thinking mind, a feeling heart, a speaking mouth, and a listening ear.”
writes Kathrin Liess, is “a beatitude of the praying person who constantly ‘mumblingly’ recites . . . the Torah and internalizes it so much that their life’s journey succeeds.” Psalm 1 is a preamble to the entire book of Psalms and has “programmatic significance for the book of Psalms as a whole, since this introductory Psalm instructs the reader to read the Psalms from a ‘meditative’ perspective.” In this way the Psalms are “a ‘book of meditation,’ to be meditated upon and read in a specific way called lectio continua in the monastic tradition.”
Lectio brings faithful readers into an awareness of the “now-ness” of God and God’s Word. Whether gradually or suddenly, in a shock of recognition, one sees that the biblical words do not pertain merely to a time and place there-and-then, but also to the here-and-now, and to one’s own life situation. The Gospel of Luke records that when Jesus came to preach in his hometown of Nazareth, he chose a passage from the book of Isaiah on the preaching of good news to the poor, and he surprised his hearers by saying: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). God’s word is “fulfilled,” Jesus says, “today.” Those who are gripped by the force of God’s word are faced with a choice: they may say no as well as yes to what they hear. The Old Testament warns: “Today, if you hear his voice,
1. Stephen E. Fowl and L. Gregory Jones, Reading in Communion: Scripture and Ethics in Christian Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 15–16.
2. For more on this point, see Hans Boersma, Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017).
3. Origen, On the Passover , 33.20–21; cited in Raymond Studzinski, Reading to Live: The Evolving Practice of Lectio Divina (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009), 30.
4. See Studzinski, Reading to Live, 3, 30, where Hans Urs von Balthasar is shown to have mediated this insight from Origen.
5. Origen, commentary fragment; as cited in Hans Urs Von Balthasar, trans., Origen: Spirit and Fire; A Thematic Anthology of His Writings, trans. Robert J. Daly (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1984), 88.
6. Balthasar, trans. and ed., Origen, 88.
7. Balthasar, trans. and ed., Origen, 89.
8. Balthasar, trans. and ed., Origen, 90.
9. Balthasar, trans. and ed., Origen, 97.
10. Martin F. Connell, Luke Dysinger, et al., “Lectio Divina,” in Christine Helmer et al., eds., Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception; Volume 15 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2017), cols. 1214–18, citing col. 1216.
11. Balthasar, trans. and ed., Origen, 84–85.
12. Balthasar, trans. and ed., Origen, 94.
13. Evagrius of Pontus, Chapters on Prayer, 60; in Robert E. Sinkewicz, trans., Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 199.
14. Yves M.-J. Congar, History of Theology, trans. Hunter Guthrie (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1968), 31–32.
15. Jean Leclerq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York:
do not harden your hearts” (Ps. 97:7–8). The word today once again is a reminder that God’s word causes the hearer to experience its power and pertinence in the present. Jesus’ words have lost none of their force since he spoke them, and so Jesus is a contemporary to everyone who is alive today. His call to “follow me,” and his summons for hearers of the word to become disciples of the word, is not limited to his own time but applies to all persons of all times and all places. It is the task of lectio divina to bring to the awareness of the person the “here-ness” and “now-ness” of God’s Word.
Michael McClymond (PhD, University of Chicago) is professor of modern Christianity at Saint Louis University.
Material in this article is adapted from the forthcoming book by Michael McClymond, Martyrs, Monks, and Mystics: An Introduction to Christian Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2023). Copyright 2023 Paulist Press.
Fordham University Press, 1996), 72.
16. Leclerq, The Love of Learning, 73.
17. Michael C. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 169.
18. Luke Dysinger, in Connell, Dysinger, et al., “Lectio Divina,” col. 1219.
19. Jonathan Edwards, “Personal Narrative,” in George Claghorn, ed., The Works of Jonathan Edwards; Volume 16: Letters and Personal Writings (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 790–804, citing 794–95.
20. Edwards, “Personal Narrative,” 801.
21. Edwards, “Personal Narrative,” 800.
22. R. A. Torrey, How to Pray (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1900), 72–73.
23. Seth Barnes, The Art of Listening Prayer: Finding God’s Voice Amidst Life’s Noise (Gainesville, GA: Praxis Press, 2005), 32.
24. LeAnne Payne, Listening Prayer (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1994); Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God , updated by Jan Johnson (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012); and Mark Virkler, Hearing God through Biblical Meditation (Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image, 2016); Enzo Bianchi, Praying the Word: An Introduction to Lectio Divina (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1998); Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2006).
25. Kathrin Liess, “Meditate, Meditation,” in Christine Helmer et al., eds., Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception; Volume 18 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2020), cols. 421–23, citing 422.
Dr. Varughese John is the Dean of Students and Head of the Department of Theology and History at the South Asia Institute of Advanced Christian Studies (SAIACS) in Bangalore, India. He has been a frequent contributor to and participant in Sola Media’s Theo Global initiatives since 2015.
Dr. John, what insights about spiritual life and Christian maturity can you share from your experience with students at SAIACS?
In the early days, the student body was primarily comprised of seasoned missionaries and pastors taking a break to study for a season. But over the years, class composition has become a mixed group of mature and young students. The average age of students applying to SAIACS has decreased, with many coming straight out of undergraduate programs. This means that the ideal graduate profile of the school has shifted to intentionally include spiritual and ministerial formation along with academic excellence. In pursuing this balance, we are guided by a conviction B. B. Warfield expressed in The Religious Life of Theological Students when reflecting on the religious life of theological students:
Learning, though indispensable, is not the most indispensable thing for a minister. Before and above being learned, a minister must be godly. Nothing could be more fatal, however, than to set these two things over against one another. . . . Why should you turn from God when you turn to your books, or feel that you must turn from your books in order to turn to God?
How are SAIACS students led in both academic and spiritual formation?
SAIACS curriculum is aimed at the formation of students toward holistic development.
Engaging the Head. Loving the Lord with our minds is what academic life at SAIACS seeks to achieve. Academic rigor requires engaging divergent views that could make evangelicals uncomfortable. Yet good scholarship is not only aware of other views on a topic but is also capable of engaging them without compromising the evangelical faith.
Engaging the Heart. A statement ascribed to Bishop Handley Moule cautions us, “Beware of an untheological devotion and of an undevotional theology.” We
at SAIACS are careful that our academic life does not err toward “undevotional theology.” Seminaries are known to address the head, cultivating deep understanding. Yet seminaries ought to be a place where students can cultivate deep affections, too, given how central our motives are in serving God.
Engaging the Hands. Integral to our curriculum is also the enabling of skill. Preparation for Christian ministry does not automatically result from attending neatly structured classes with clearly laid out lesson plans. Skill in ministry requires the intentional orientation of students to the “messiness” of ministry. Our students are required to belong to and engage in various local churches and nongovernmental organizations (like homes for the elderly or orphanages) for the purpose of ministerial formation. They go out in small groups to serve in these existing ministries in and around SAIACS.
What are some of the practical ways SAIACS leads its students in engaging in this holistic approach to spiritual development?
I will highlight four key ways: Faculty Mentors. Each SAIACS student is assigned a year-round faculty/staff mentor to walk with them on their spiritual journey. The purpose of mentoring is to help and assist in the spiritual growth of students during the course of everyday life. Mentors help with work-life balance; they offer a listening ear to questions that students wrestle with; and they provide prayer support and encouragement in the face of problems, physical ailments, or spiritual struggle.
Worshiping Together. In addition to students’ relationships with faculty mentors, they have opportunities for spiritual formation through regular chapel meetings. Attendance is mandatory for faculty, staff, and students at SAIACS. The sermons are often challenging—some quite boring as well!—but their goal is to inspire and enable the students to persevere in their calling. The sermons often touch directly upon spiritual growth through the exposition of a passage from Scripture. For instance, the message preached from the chapel pulpit just this morning warned the community of the twin dangers of legalism and libertarianism. The community was encouraged to look to Jesus, our model and our hope. Sports and Spirituality. Team sports are an integral feature of SAIACS life. Matches between student teams (called “cell groups”) not only bring intense competitive spirit onto the playground but also make visible each student’s true character. This provides frequent opportunities for cell-group mentors to cultivate attitudes of mind and heart that help build community and cooperation and address those that do not.
Prayer Initiatives. The SAIACS community is committed to prayer. We have just completed forty days of prayer, in which each member of the community set apart time to pray and intercede for one another. In praying this way, we acknowledge that we are sustained by the mercies of God and constantly rely on him for our needs.
The foreground tree battles To survive against the sea, Encroaching on the town you see As every pilgrim rattles,
Laboring through still water And rough road, seeking The endangered town, reeking Of the possibility of slaughter
Under the relentless tumult Of the dark North Sea rage— They seek a delivering sage By whom they might exult
In the power of the sky, Where heaven rises above The waters of the sea in love To those on earth who die.
That tree is our mortality; The steeple in the distance Is the sign of our resistance— Pointing up to make us free.
See, resting softly, in Bethlehem’s manger There is a Savior, as God had long-sworn. Mighty Messiah, to keep us from danger, Now, come in weakness, is finally born.
King in the manger, without any splendor, Gave up the riches and yielded the crown. These are the least that the King will surrender: Rescuing rebels, He’ll lay His life down.
Priest in the manger, who now sympathizes, Wearing our nature and marked by disgrace. O what a myst’ry that every saint prizes: Why would this Priest come to die in our place?
God in the manger, who somehow is sleeping, Lulled by the singing of angels above, Holds all the world with His unfailing keeping, Holds all my heart with His unfailing love.
Thinking theologically about all things
BEAUTIFUL . WE HEAR THE WORD SO FREQUENTLY that we give it little thought, applying it to everything from a Rembrandt masterpiece to a child’s first scribbles. Yet beauty is so profound that, alongside goodness and truth, it is widely regarded as one of the great transcendentals, and an entire branch of philosophy—aesthetics—is devoted to its study. But for all its profundity, the old adage is also true that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” So when beauty’s Creator says “That’s beautiful!” we can be sure it is true.
That’s what happened during the last week of Jesus’ life when Mary1 broke a flask of expensive perfume to anoint him, enduring his disciples’ berating as a result. Christ not only commended her costly, loving sacrifice—“She has done a beautiful thing to me”—but he also defended her against her detractors and even rewarded her: “Leave her alone . . . she has done what she could. . . . Wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her” (Mark 14:6–9). 2 Jesus’ kind affirmation of beauty provides a note of sweetness in this desperate and awkward scene. But coming as it does with a prophecy of the cross ahead—“she has anointed my body beforehand for burial”—Jesus’ affirmation also raises questions concerning the relationship of beauty and suffering.
For reflective persons, whether believing or unbelieving, suffering raises many questions. There are the “why” questions. Why is there suffering in the world at all? Why is every human life tinged, if not stained, with pain? Is there something in the fabric of creation or human nature that causes this? And if there is a God who is good and powerful, then why does he allow it? There are also the “how” questions. How should we respond to suffering? Does it make any difference if we praise God or curse him? If we abuse others or bless them? If we dull our pain by alcohol, drug abuse, or pornography, or try to escape it through suicide? To frame these questions in explicitly Christian terms, is there a godly way to suffer? And finally, there are the “hope” questions: Can suffering be redeemed? Can it be transformed into something useful or beneficial? Can it be ended or escaped
forever? Where can Christians find the wisdom, strength, and other resources we need to suffer well—even beautifully?
***
Suffering is inevitably part of every Christian’s experience. Physically or emotionally—mildly or acutely, chronically or temporarily—sooner or later, everyone suffers, including Christians. In its consistent wedding of “sin and misery,” 3 the Westminster Standards reflect Scripture’s teaching that since man’s fall into sin, the entire cosmos has been under a curse, which is the source of every kind of suffering. And given the realities of our union with Christ and our present hostile environment, Christians sometimes suffer especially. Furthermore, given the fact that the Lord we follow was a “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,” of all people Christians should expect suffering to be part of our experience in this world. Indeed, suffering is essential to the gospel. Suffering is not essential to the gospel in the sense that believers’ sufferings save them or contribute to their salvation in any way. We are saved by Christ’s sufferings for us and receive that salvation through union with him by faith. So Christ’s sufferings are absolutely essential to the gospel. Indeed, by underscoring the great realities of sin, curse, and judgment, the phenomenon of suffering highlights our need for this gospel of the Suffering Servant, first revealed by God himself at the time of the fall and subsequently by other Old Testament writers.4 But suffering is also essential to the gospel in another sense. Suffering is a necessary expression of Christ’s work for us and in us as we suffer in this world for his name’s sake. As Scripture reveals, our once-for-all deliverance unfolds in stages, and suffering will be part of life in this fallen world until Christ returns to make all things new. Indeed, Christ himself clearly taught that all who trust and follow him would suffer in this life.5 Scripture also teaches that God orders these sufferings for his glory and his people’s good,6 and that Christ is abundantly sufficient for his people. He can wonderfully enable us to overcome our tribulations and bear fruit for his glory. And having sustained and blessed us in our tribulations, he will eventually deliver and reward us. But until then, suffering will be part of every Christian’s experience in this life.7
Until relatively recently, this “vale of tears” mindset was common among Christians. Reflecting the Scriptures’ practical realism and their own experience, Christian leaders and thinkers through the centuries have frequently addressed suffering in their preaching, teaching, and writings. But with ignorance and unbelief growing in the church and society, and the consequent undermining of the Christian worldview, this is no longer the case. Due to the “Prosper-
“Suffering is a necessary expression of Christ’s work for us and in us as we suffer in this world for his name’s sake.”
ity Gospel,”8 the “Therapeutic Gospel,”9 “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,”10 and a general decline in biblical teaching, knowledge, and faith, contemporary believers are often surprised, discouraged, and defeated by suffering, rather than seeing it as part of their Christian calling as a God-given opportunity.11 ***
But suffering is not simply relevant; it is also profoundly important because it involves great opportunity and responsibility. For the Christian, suffering is not pointless because it can be undertaken for three great ends, ends that can make it “beautiful” in the Lord’s eyes and in others’ too. For now, we shall consider the first and greatest way in which the suffering of Christians can be “beautiful.” Dr. Jonathan King’s recent book, The Beauty of the Lord: Theology as Aesthetics, can be helpful as we do so. Dr. King argues that “beauty” is not just God’s creation but also one of his attributes, revealed in a special way in the person and work of Christ, and what King calls the “theodrama” of creation, redemption, and consummation.12 One of King’s key concepts in defining beauty based on Scripture and the works of God is that of “fittingness”13 —i.e., the special suitability or appropriateness of something is what makes it beautiful. Every thought, word, and deed of Christ was always perfectly fitting and appropriate and therefore even on the cross beautiful. As his followers, Christians are called to suffer but to do so in a way that includes or reflects his beauty. ***
The Westminster Catechisms rightly assert that “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.”14 Our Lord underscored that priority in his own life and prayers and in his model prayer for us,15 and his apostles reiterate that principle in their epistles.16 But how does that apply to suffering?
Although we can add nothing to God’s essential glory, in another sense, we can “increase” his glory by perceiving it with our minds and declaring it by our words and actions. The Psalms often call on us to do this:
Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together! (Ps. 34:3)
The promoting of God’s glory is always “fitting” and therefore always beautiful, including when we are suffering. In fact, since our natural response is to avoid or reduce pain, and to complain when we cannot do so, we could argue that Christians’ promoting God’s glory is especially beautiful when they suffer.
Since there are few contexts, if any, in which it is more difficult to praise God than when we are in pain, this very difficulty lends it power. That’s why the Huguenots so affected their spectators, dismayed their persecutors, and glorified God by singing as they were burnt to death. Similarly, when Christians trust, praise, and rejoice “in the fire” of their varied sufferings, they powerfully promote God’s glory. Our faith, worship, joy, and service in the midst of suffering are not merely supernatural, they are beautiful as they bear powerful testimony to the unseen realities not just of God’s existence but of his power, wisdom, goodness, and other attributes.
As Christians, we should consider every ounce of pain as stewardship, as an opportunity to fulfill our highest calling by showing forth and magnifying the character of our God and his gospel, and its hardship makes it not only powerful but beautiful. It was so in the case of history’s greatest sufferer, and it can be so in the lives of his followers.
Important as it is to glorify the Lord in our suffering, however, we can do something more: We can please him. This does not mean that God takes pleasure in his children’s pain—quite the contrary. When the Lord revealed his character to Moses by proclaiming his name on Mount Sinai, the first attribute he revealed was his “mercy” or “compassion” (Exod. 34:6). And in the life of Jesus—those who saw him saw the Father—compassion was a profound constant: witness, for example, the Pharisees’ allegations of Jesus’ frequent “Sabbath-breaking” because he healed sufferers on that day.17
But while the Lord takes no pleasure in their pain, he does take pleasure in his children. We see repeatedly in Scripture that the Lord both notices and responds to his people’s actions, and his response is often described as pleasure, even delight,18 especially, for example, when they trust him (Heb. 11:5–6). Their faith is all the more pleasing to him when exercised in the midst of suffering, when it is naturally so tempting to doubt and disbelieve. Jesus, the perfect sufferer, epitomized this throughout his life and especially at the cross. When the first martyr, Stephen, followed him in this path, just before he died, he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:56). The fact that Jesus was standing was a gesture of special honor and even pleasure at the achievement of his “good and faithful servant.” This pleasure reflects God’s personal nature, indeed the wonder and glory of three persons, who delight not just in their own fellowship—“This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”—but in that of their redeemed people.19 This also explains the frequent exhortations that we should please him and the prayers that his children might do so. 20 Like Mary’s costly sacrifice in Mark 14, our expressions of faith and love in the midst of pain can be beautiful and pleasing to the Lord.
“For Christians, we should consider every ounce of pain as stewardship, as an opportunity to fulfill our highest calling by showing forth and magnifying the character of our God and his gospel, and its hardship makes it not only powerful but beautiful.”
Of course, we cannot do this in our own power. Our righteous deeds are as filthy rags in God’s sight, and we are naturally dead in sin and hostile in mind to him and his law. But in Christ, we are not only accepted but renewed so as to love and to want to please our Father, our Savior and our Comforter—and we can! Part of the gospel’s glory is that Christ’s Spirit and resurrection life increasingly enable us to fulfill the law by loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind—and love delights to please its object. By our godly response to suffering, we can bring honor and glory to God—along with pleasure and delight!
Although glorifying and pleasing God is the first and most important way that Christians suffer well, it is not the only one. Lord willing, future columns in this magazine will consider additional ways that our suffering can be beautiful—e.g., as we grow in grace ourselves and minister to others in and through it. We will also look at some of the things we need in order to do this and how the Lord supplies them. This is not to downplay in any way the terrible pain and ugliness that believers face in this world. Even for Christians—sometimes especially for them—life can be brutal and nasty to the point of excruciating. Despite our suffering, we want to magnify the wisdom, goodness, and power of the God who can transmute our pain and ugliness into beauty. Are you in agony? Do you want to make your suffering beautiful to the Lord and to others around you? Then offer it to him as Mary did with her precious perfume. Ask him, by his grace, to please and glorify himself in it, and then trust him to do so. He did it supremely at the cross, and he is able and willing to do it with our “crosses” as well.
J. D. “Skip” Dusenbury (DMin, Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia) is a retired pastor.
1. I agree with those commentators who believe that Mark 14:16–19 and John 12:1–8 describe the same event, and John identifies the woman as Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus.
2. Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture references are from the English Standard Version (ESV).
3. Westminster Confession of Faith 6.6; Westminster Larger Catechism 23,27; Westminster Shorter Catechism 17, 19.
4. Gen. 3:15; Ps. 22; Isa. 53, etc.
5. Matt. 10:38–39; Luke 9:23; 14:25–27; John 12:25–26; 15:18–20; 16:2.
6. Gen. 50:20; Jer. 29:11; Rom. 8:28–29.
7. Rom. 8:17; 2 Cor. 1:5; Phil. 3:10; 1 Pet. 5:9–10.
8. David W. Jones and Russell S. Woodbridge, Health, Wealth, and Happiness: How the Prosperity Gospel Overshadows the Gospel of Christ (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2017), 39–92.
9. David Powlison, “The Therapeutic Gospel,” Nine Marks, February 25, 2010, accessed August 13, 2021, https:// www.9marks.org/article/therapeutic-gospel/.
10. The term was coined by Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton in Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005) See also Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Albert Mohler, “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism—the New American Religion,” Albert Mohler, April 11, 2005, accessed on September 13, 2021, https://albertmohler.com/2005/04/11/ moralistic-therapeutic-deism-the-new-american-religion-2.
11. Paul David Tripp, Suffering: Eternity Makes a Difference (Phillipsburg: P&R, 2001), 1–2.
12. Jonathan King, The Beauty of the Lord: Theology as Aesthetics (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018).
13. King, The Beauty of the Lord, 9–15.
14. Westminster Larger Catechism 1; Westminster Shorter Catechism 1.
15. John 12:27–28; 17:1,4; Matt. 6:9.
16. Rom. 16:36; 1 Cor. 6:20; 10:31; Col. 3:23; 1 Pet. 4:10.
17. Mark 3:1–6; Luke 13:14; John 5:10, 16; 9:16.
18. Pss. 11:7; 37:23; 147:11; Prov. 11:20; 15:8–9; Isa. 56:4.
19. Isa. 63:9; Zech. 2:8; Acts 9:4; 1 Cor. 1:9; Heb. 4:15–16; 1 John 1:3.
20. Rom. 8:8–9; Eph. 5:10; Col. 1:10; 3:20; 1 Thess. 2:4; 4:1; Heb. 13:16; 1 John 3:22.
IN MATTHEW 11 : 28 – 30 , Jesus offers this invitation to any who would respond to his call:
“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest [ ἀναπα ύ σω / reficiam ]. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls [ἀνάπαυσιν/ requiem]. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
A warm and welcoming invitation to be sure. Who among us would not want rest for our weary souls? It would be difficult not to cite the most famous of Augustinian quotes here: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” It is worth noting that in the Latin (as well as in the Greek of Matt. 11), Augustine’s verb choice includes the prepositional prefix “re” (ἀνα), giving rise to an interpretation that our rest is a return to our origin in God. This rest that we seek is not in some new place, but a homecoming. Like Odysseus during his twenty-year sojourn, longing to return home to his wife, son, and canine companion, the deep desire of all humans is to come home to the divine bosom from whence all life and therefore goodness come.
Jesus, however, does not explicitly indicate what his yoke is. He notes of course that it is easy and its burden is light, but the metaphor stops there. We don’t learn any further what it is that will be required of us or why his burden is lighter than the one we currently bear. When I hear only verses 28–30, I want to say to Jesus, “Sure, that sounds good, but what are you actually offering?” For those who desire rest for their weary soul in this life, it is worth considering how we might acquire it and be relieved of our burdens.
To answer the question of what Jesus is offering to us, we must consider the direction of the text that leads to Jesus presenting this invitation. In a book broadly on the Christian life, Rowan Williams presents a compelling way to bridge the gap between traditional biblical studies that look behind the text and a more theological reading that connects the Scriptures to the living church:
A [theological] reading in which the present community is made contemporary with the world in front of the text, is bound to give priority to the question that the text specifically puts and to ask how the movement, the transition, worked for within the text is to be realized in the contemporary reading community.1
As with any writing of Williams, he chooses his words carefully and unpacking it can be difficult. I want to highlight, though, how he imagines that a theological reading of Scripture must take its aim from the text as it is written, specifically
its own “movement” or “direction,” before being “realized” or “received” by the eucharistic community. We will attempt something similar below: first listening to the force of the text as it is written, and then exploring what it means for us in conversation with St. Augustine of Hippo.
If we want to find out how we can receive this rest and what Jesus might be offering, we need to situate ourselves and our reading within the horizon of the text. If you have followed me this far, then you are likely doing this naturally by assuming that Jesus is speaking directly to you. That said, many in the biblical studies guild get caught up in trying to uncover the world behind the text. That is, what was a “yoke” in the ancient world? Or who was Matthew’s intended audience? Although none of these, on their own, are bad questions, they can undercut the deeper theological considerations to which I believe Jesus calls his followers. Jesus calls us to himself through these words. What we look for in our interpretations and the meaning of the text is the one Christ. This is an anagogical reading. That is one that leads us up into the divine. Think again of Christ’s call, “Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden.” We are called to Christ the Word in the words of the Scriptures. We must keep this in mind as we expand our investigation to the prior context of Jesus’ summons in Matthew 11. Our question about what makes the burden of Jesus light leads us to consider the flow of the passage and some helpful considerations about what one possible true reading of the passage could be. Before his invitation, Jesus prays, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children.” We have an interplay between hiddenness and revelation. Those who presume to have knowledge and trust in their own wisdom cannot perceive the truths Jesus is about to communicate. Instead, Jesus tells us that the Father has revealed them to little children. We might expect what follows to be an uncomplicated truth. Already Jesus has us, his readers, outmaneuvered. Do we take ourselves to be wise? Could his truths be hidden from us because we think we already have understanding?
Personally, I have always been drawn to Augustine, in part because I identify with the judgments that he makes about himself. I too have exhibited his arrogance because I believed that only I knew the original intention of the author because I knew the languages and had been to seminary. Recall how early in his life, Augustine judged the Scriptures as too childish and uncivilized to contain the deep truths of God.2 Only he knew how to read them well, and they were not worth reading.
As he began to grow in his understanding of the Christian God, he found—in the God made known in Jesus Christ—a humble God.
I began to look for a way to grope towards enough solidity to enjoy you, but I did not find it until I received the mediator between God and humanity. This was the man Christ Jesus. . . . For the Word made flesh so that your Wisdom, through whom you created all things, could start to produce the spiritual milk for our infancy. I was not holding fast to Jesus as my God; I was not humble enough to cleave to him who is humble, and I did not realize what lesson his infirmity was going to teach me.3
Notice the contrast between the early Augustine “groping” and grasping, trying to do it on his own, versus when he learns to receive the weakness of the incarnate Word. Augustinian spirituality rests on the principle that we have to receive rather than strive or create for ourselves. This reception includes the truth that God reveals himself to the little ones. This was lacking in Augustine’s previous struggles. In vain, he mustered his own strength to get ahead in the world, thinking human wisdom was found only within works of the great philosophers. He had to learn to become humble to receive the grace of humility modeled for him in an all-powerful God who willingly became human and took on the forma servi (“the form of the servant”). Several times in Confessions 7, Augustine uses the form of the servant language from Philippians 2:7 to help him interpret Matthew 11:25–30.
We can now look again to catch a glimpse of the depth of knowledge Christ imparts to anyone who would become humble: “You have revealed these things to little ones [νηπίοις / parvulis].” Although “little ones” likely refers immediately to children, the text says Jesus calls them “little” rather than simply “children.” Adults are to become little before the wisdom of the humble God. To whom does God unveil himself? Or to whom does he offer a vision of the mysterious things he has hidden? The little ones.
What Jesus teaches in this passage, to anyone who would hear, is that we must stop our striving and receive what the Father gives. Augustine spent most of his young adult life doggedly perfecting his own intellectual abilities to try to attain a vision of God. As a brilliant philosopher and student of Plotinus, Augustine thought that only those with the intellect to work their way through the liberal arts and comprehend works like the Enneads could have a vision of God. What he found in his own faltering attempt at union with the divine through philosophy alone was that Plato and the Neoplatonists could lead him close to the happiness of divine union, but not all the way (Confessions 7). They did not have the saving power of Christ’s humility. Without humility, they could not comprehend that God is a humble God and came to earth in humility. The Neoplatonists understood so much about the world; but without the chief cornerstone, their knowledge was nearly worthless.
Jesus says that we must become like little ones in order to see God, and this means offering a vision of God that pleases him (εὐδοκία ἔμπροσθέν σου / placitum ante te). It was God’s good pleasure to first humble the proud and the learned before they could catch a glimpse of him. At least for Augustine, this was the case because it meant that a vision of God was not dependent on his intellectual capa-
“For many moderns, it seems ludicrous to think that comfort could come through theology.”
bilities. (Just because I went to seminary or have a PhD does not mean I am more capable of receiving deep truths conveyed by the Spirit speaking in Scripture!). Ultimately, Augustine says that a desire to see God is all that is necessary for the Christian. This desire is also our prayer. The answer for Augustine to the question of how we pray continually is that we continually desire God in all that we do. More to the point, any person—literate or illiterate, philosophically or theologically trained or not—could connect and participate with God in the Scriptures. In his youth, Augustine disdained his uneducated mother because he did not believe that she had wisdom. After he encounters Christ’s humility, however, his own union with God4 takes place in the midst of a conversation between one of the most educated men in antiquity and his illiterate mother. Both delighted in the presence of God through the all-encompassing way of humility in Jesus Christ. Now we can return to the question that first set us on this path. What is the easy yoke that Jesus offers and the burden that is light? What is this rest for our souls? Here is the answer: This rest he offers is the unveiling of God in Jesus Christ. Recall Jesus’ promise, “No one knows the Son, except the Father: neither does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal him” (Matt. 11:27). Jesus’ command “Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will refresh you” follows immediately after he says that the Son is willing to reveal the Father. The rest for our souls is a revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Although some may pursue exclusive attempts to intellectual visions, anyone can truly see God by faith.
We can say that this whole passage centers on the question of the role of the contemplative life in the path of faith. John Maccovius, a Protestant Scholastic theologian, writes, “Theology is a discipline, partly theoretical, and partly practical, teaching the way of living well and blessedly into eternity.”5 To some extent, Jesus’ promise about finding rest in seeing God matches exactly what we see in this definition by Maccovius. It is easy to think that the discipline of theology is impractical or ignores the concerns of the times, or that it is only the purview of the learned. When we must deal with the realities of a worldwide pandemic, an invasion of sovereign territory by a foreign dictator, or many other forms of hell on earth, it can be easy to think that theology should take a back seat.
But remember that C. S. Lewis’s justly famous Mere Christianity was originally written and recorded as radio broadcasts during the bombing of London in World War II. How is it that a text like Mere Christianity could be spoken as a comfort to people? Why would Lewis think that amid the terrible suffering and the atrocity of the destruction of a city, the people of England would want to think more about such things as the theological distinction between being “begotten” versus “made”? For many moderns, it seems ludicrous to think that comfort could come through theology.
What Lewis knew was exactly what Christ teaches in Matthew 11: Theological speculation is the highest calling of the human. I use “speculation” advisedly, coming from the Latin word for “to behold.” Theological speculation in this sense is the task of being trained to see God. When we cast our vision at the Highest
Good, as Augustine says, we can, momentarily, see the Light that shines in the darkness. We need the light of Christ, revealing God to us, to see the Goodness that is God in a world full of evil. In some sense, theological speculation is entirely practical. I think Maccovius is right to make a distinction between the practical and theoretical aspects of theology. Yet while they should be considered in their distinctiveness, we can also see them as two aspects of one singular discipline. We cannot have one without the other. In some sense, we are doing something practical in our speculation, and the practicing of our faith should lead us to a deeper speculation.
We now come full circle to Augustine’s most famous quotation about rest cited above. Augustine begins the conclusion of Confessions by saying,
O my God, my mercy, I invoke you in prayer, for you made me, and when I forgot you, you did not forget me. I invoke you to enter my soul, which you are making ready to receive you by means of the desire that you have breathed into it.6
All humans long for happiness, and as Christians we know that our happiness resides in the end for which we were created. As we little ones sit in humility at the humble feet of Jesus, may the Holy Spirit breathe into us a renewed desire for a vision of the God who provides rest for our world-weary souls.
Charles G. Kim Jr. holds a PhD in historical theology which focused on St. Augustine of Hippo’s theology of preaching. He hosts the podcast A History of Christian Theology and is Assistant Professor of Theology and Classical Languages at Saint Louis University.
1. Rowan Williams, Holy Living (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 37.
2. Confessions 3 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2012).
3. Confessions 7.18; trans. LCL 27:341.
4. See the Ostia Ascent of Confessions 9.
5. Johannes Maccovius, Loci Commuunes I (Franequeræ, Sumptibus Ioannis Arcerii, 1650); my translation.
6. Confessions 13.1; trans. LCL 27:337.
Connecting with our time and place
by Christopher Watkin
ZONDERVAN ACADEMIC | NOVEMBER 2022 | 672 PAGES (HARDCOVER) | $39.99
CRITICAL THEORY AND ITS RELATED SUBCATEGORIES , such as critical race theory, have dominated a lot of debate in contemporary American culture. As the title of this volume indicates, Christopher Watkin seeks to show how Christians can offer their own version of “critical theory” in order to engage with the contemporary culture. The title is likely not a mere marketing ploy. Watkin has written a number of works on French philosophical figures often attached to critical theory. He is a leading scholar on twentieth-century French philosophy, who has an uncanny ability to distill the seemingly incoherent and esoteric writings of a Michel Foucault or a Jacques Derrida into coherent and charitable ideas from which Christians can learn—all the while not falling into common caricatures of such figures. His recent volumes on Foucault, Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze in P&R’s Great Thinkers series are some of the clearest expositions of those authors available in print. What is particularly interesting about this volume is Watkin’s shift from being an expositor of other authors to focusing more on his own constructive take on cultural topics of the day, employing the Bible, theology, and philosophy. This monograph
should prove interesting for anyone interested in engaging contemporary cultural debates while eschewing caricature.
Christology and Metaphysics in the Seventeenth Century by Richard Cross
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS | DECEMBER 2020 | 368 PAGES (HARDCOVER) | $100.00
OVER THE PAST SEVERAL DECADES , Richard Cross has been one of the leading experts on medieval Christology and the doctrine of God, especially in the work of John Duns Scotus. Recently, Cross turned his attention to christological debates during the Reformation period. His previous work on the topic contextualized the sixteenth–century debates between Lutherans and Reformed over the Eucharist within longstanding medieval debates over the communicatio idiomatum. 1 This forthcoming work extends this narrative into the seventeenth century and broadens its scope by situating Lutheran and Reformed views within the context of contemporary Roman Catholic debates on Christology. As in the medieval church, post-Reformation Roman Catholics had several conflicting views on how to understand the union of the two natures in the one person of Christ. Early modern debates between Lutherans and Reformed were often mirrored in debates between Jesuits and Thomists of the period. And these early modern debates reflected two traditions of understanding Christology coming out of medieval theology: one from Thomas Aquinas and further nuanced in his later commentators, particularly Cardinal Cajetan; and another following Duns Scotus and his heirs. In this volume, Cross argues that Reformed theologians often
followed the Scotistic tradition and Lutherans followed the Thomistic tradition. This argument will likely be the most interesting, and contested, aspect of the work. While much of the older scholarship on Calvin and the Reformed tradition argued for a Scotistic influence on much of their theology, this view has come under quite a bit of criticism in recent decades.
critical of one another—such as Herman Dooyeweerd, G. C. Berkouwer, and Cornelius Van Til— within this tradition. The Neo-Calvinist tradition is much more nuanced and variegated than sometimes portrayed, and I am looking forward to how the authors navigate the wide-ranging figures that make up the tradition.
by N. Gray Sutanto and Cory C.
Brock
LEXHAM ACADEMIC | 2023 | 320 PAGES (HARDCOVER) | $36.99
SINCE THE TRANSLATION AND PUBLICATION of Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics nearly two decades ago, there has been a significant interaction with, and reappraisal of, Bavinck and the Dutch Neo-Calvinist movement he helped establish. Sutanto and Brock, following their doctoral supervisor, James Eglinton, have been central figures in this reappraisal of Bavinck. Their forthcoming volume is an introduction to the theological legacy of Neo-Calvinism. The authors note that there have been other introductions to the Neo-Calvinist movement over the years,2 but these works have been largely about the NeoCalvinist heritage in politics or philosophy and not as much about its theological heritage. I am interested in how approaching Neo-Calvinism through the lens of theology shapes, alters, or nuances how the tradition is understood. Similarly, I am interested to see how the fact that both authors are Bavinck scholars, as opposed to Abraham Kuyper scholars, shapes their understanding of the tradition and how they situate later Neo-Calvinists who were sometimes
Intelligibility of Nature: A William A. Wallace Reader byWilliam A. Wallace, edited by John P. Hittinger, Michael W. Tkacz, and Daniel Wagner
CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA PRESS | FEBRUARY 2023 | 316 PAGES (PAPERBACK) | $39.95
THE LATE DOMINICAN WILLIAM WALLACE is likely an unknown figure for most of us, but he was in many ways at the forefront of certain trends that have become much more mainstream in the contemporary history and philosophy of science. He is probably best known for numerous works offering a contextual reading of Galileo in light of the various late medieval and early modern intellectual trends of which he was a part—rather than trying to situate Galileo in a narrative of conflict between science and religion, as popularized in the nineteenth century. Wallace’s nuanced reading of Galileo has become much more common today. Wallace was similarly ahead of his time in his attempt to apply the philosophy of Aristotle (as mediated through Thomas Aquinas) to contemporary questions and problems in science. He contended that modern science has in no way made an Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of nature obsolete. Rather, the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas can shed more light on contemporary findings in science than many other
perspectives on the philosophy of nature.3 This volume is a collection of Wallace’s essays on the philosophy and history of science. Anyone interested in an Aristotelian-Thomistic engagement with contemporary science, as well as the history of science, should find this work of interest.
Noah J. Frens (PhD, Vanderbilt University) is a postdoctoral student in the History Department at Vanderbilt University.
The Old Testament and God: Old Testament Origins and the Question of God By Craig G. Bartholomew BAKER ACADEMIC | NOVEMBER 2022 | 608 PAGES (HARDCOVER) | $54.95
Dante the Theologian By Denys Turner CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS | DECEMBER 2022 | 275 PAGES (HARDCOVER) | $39.99
Social Conservatism for the Common Good: A Protestant Engagement with Robert P. George Edited by Andrew T. Walker CROSSWAY | FEBRUARY 2023 | 352 PAGES (HARDCOVER) | $37.99
The Library of Paradise: A History of Contemplative Reading in the Monasteries of the Church of the East By David A. Michelson OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS | JANUARY 2023 | 368 PAGES (HARDCOVER) | $100.00
1. Richard Cross, Communicatio Idiomatum: Reformation Christological Debates (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
2. The most recent work of a similar nature to this one is probably Craig Bartholomew, Contours of the Kuyperian Tradition: A Systematic Introduction (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017).
3. For a recent example of a work making similar arguments, see William M. R. Simpson, Robert C. Koons, and Nicholas J. Teh, eds., Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science (New York: Routledge, 2018).
Since Modern Reformation appreciates a full theological conversation, we’d like to hear your thoughts about what you’re reading in the magazine. So please write to us at letters@modernreformation.org. Due to limited space, please keep your letter under 400 words (letters may be edited for length and clarity). Letters will be published two issues later. We look forward to hearing from you!
“ YOU SHALL BE LIKE GOD , knowing good and evil,” the serpent told Eve. Our contemporary culture loves to give us similar advice. Who can be sure what God really said? Better to choose your own identity, express your own personality, construct your own social media profile. Decide what’s right for you, what brings you happiness, peace of mind, security—a sense of flourishing. No one can judge you. “You will not ‘surely die.’” Such warnings are just the toxic voice of external authority trying to suppress your own inner voice. You be you. Live your truth. This advice is not only wrong but cruel. No one speaks of “my truth” and “your truth” when it comes to matters of fact. We accept authority and objectivity on such matters. It would be cruel—even criminal malpractice—if one’s physician distorted or denied the evidence for a life-threatening diagnosis because it was considered toxic or disempowering to the patient. But the problem is that most people in our culture—and judging by surveys, many of us Christians—do not live as if the claims of Christ are matters of fact rather than simply personal value judgments. The heart is where my truth comes from. Consequently, my truth is that I am a decent person, deserving of good things in life, and I have every right to be deeply frustrated when those good things don’t come my way. There is nothing more offensive to our pampered Western selves than to be told, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9).
Hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure above all, does not have to be expressed merely in grotesque antinomianism. It is motivating us whenever we think that the chief end of humans is to be happy. Even secular studies like The Trouble with Passion (University of California Press, 2021) by sociologist Erin Cech demonstrate the downside of the follow-your-passion message, showing that the pursuit of happiness as an end in itself leads inevitably to depression, anxiety, and anger.
The truth is that our hearts, as Augustine famously said, were made for rest in God. He is the only one worthy of our passion, and when we rest in him, he gives us callings to serve our neighbors, where we find genuine purpose and meaning— and yes, pleasure.
Our own “truth” leads to delusion, conflict, and despair in this life and destruction in the next. What we really need is the truth. We need the One who said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” Let’s live as if we really believe that it is the truth that sets us free.
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