Where Everybody's Crazy

I am very fortunate here to have a tutor who acts as an academic instructor, personal pastor, theological mentor and spiritual guide. I came to him the other day and talked about problems I was having with Bible reading - daily Bible readings, the Evangelical "quiet time", had become a chore to me and wasn't giving me the spiritual "connection" I was always told it should. In fact, I was even despairing of the suggestion that this kind of Bible reading ought to be a part of spirituality. The idea that the Bible was "personal", "written for me" and that I should try to find out "what God was saying to me" just seemed to be another expression of selfish Western individualism - if not a ritual with such spiritual expectation that it bordered on magic. The Bible wasn't written for me; it was written for the Church. If I accept this (and I do), how then should I actually relate to it?

I further despaired of the facile, mass-produced "devotional" literature, which tended to impose a huge amount of theology onto the Scriptures. If I believe that the Bible wasn't written for me, I have to believe it certainly wasn't written for Selwyn Hughes or Jonathan Bagster either. And probably not for Charles Spurgeon. (I'm unsure about Oswald Chambers. It might, actually, have been written for him.)

However, my tutor, a wise man, suggested that the problem was more that I had separated my spirituality from the rest of my life - the classical modernist dualism position. Oh, the irony. Why was I looking to the daily "quiet time" for spiritual input without engaging my theological brain, and why was I using my theological brain in lectures without expecting it to build me up spiritually as well? In technical terms, I had split off a devotional from an exegetical view of Scripture.

As for the devotional notes, he understood the problem with them. "The problem is that you've not been reading the right ones!" So saying, he opened the secret devotional cupboard, with all the books they don't tell you about in church; like More Light On The Path, which has a one-line devotional illustrated by passages in Hebrew and Greek (no translation and no exegesis - you do that yourself), Kasemann's commentary on Romans, Barth's Church Dogmatics... "No, wait," I said, realising that he'd gone too far, "That's theology, not devotional."

You could see the pity in his eyes. "No, Simon, that's worship". Suddenly I realised - if I'm going to be serious about this whole Scripture and Tradition thing, I have to realise that Tradition is still being compiled. Not only that, but that theology, as a discipline offered before the Church, was part of Tradition. Church Dogmatics is Tradition.

So, with a fresh enthusiasm for Bible reading and other people's exegesis, I checked out Church I/i and started reading it. I'm not cringing much but to be honest that's because I don't understand most of it. But I like it. I'm really looking forward to getting to the exegesis bits.