Hearing God While Reading the Bible

Today during Ed’s funeral, we learned that the greatest single word of assurance for him came from John 14:1-3, specifically: “I go to prepare a place for you. . . .” When God spoke directly, personally to Ed as long ago he read those words, he heard God saying: "I go to prepare a place for you.” Ed had felt alone in the world prior to that life-changing moment; there was no place where he felt that he fit. But when the risen Jesus spoke clearly to him of “ a place for you,” he knew that there was a place already prepared for him, just him, a place waiting that no one else could occupy. After that word from God, any time he felt a question about his standing with God, he went back to that personal word from God. But we know the setting in which these words were spoken by the historical Jesus. Knowing that he was facing death, knowing that his close disciples felt as if they were about to be abandoned, Jesus assured them that they should not be disturbed, because although he was about to die, he was going to prepare a place for them, so that at the appropriate time they could join him in a prepared place. These words were addressed directly to the few special disciples. They were not addressed to the multitudes. These words weren’t given as a generic message of comfort and hope. How can we appropriate these words, believing that God speaks them personally to an individual in the 21st Century? Can biblical hermeneutics answer out question? Hermeneutics is all about interpretation: methods, principles, practice. It intends to help us understand the true meaning of a written passage. At the heart of hermeneutics is the concept of exegesis, which is the effort to extract from the text only what is in the text. Exegesis is to be contrasted with eisegesis, which is the practice of reading our own ideas into the text. Careful use of the principles of exegesis give us an objective, we might even say scientific, understanding of what a text is saying in truth. Eisegesis is a subjective reading that can read almost anything into a text; it has no objective constraints. Standard practice in schools of theological training stresses exegesis as the only dependable pathway to biblical truth. Eisegesis is frowned on. For long years I lived under the control of these ideas. However, I’ve come to realize that exegesis alone is not sufficient, perhaps not even necessary to hear God speak through the written holy script. Exegesis, in all its dimensions, de-finites meaning only in the literal sense of definition, that is, it sets the boundaries of meaning, and that is all it can do. It indicates where the fences are. A fence, a wall, a border, knows not the content, intent, or portent of what it confines. Sometimes exegesis cannot completely fence in meaning. Sometimes meaning jumps fences, breaks them down, slips through the border guards. Sometimes the borders are permeable or semipermeable. At other times the fences have gates, built-in gates through which meaning finds or achieves greater freedom. “The letter kills; the spirit frees.” Nor do any principles of interpretation dictate or clearly delineate meaning. Certainly hermeneutical principles cannot provide objective, indisputable, comprehensive understanding, much less insight or direct communication. Hermeneutics exists only as a faithful servant to be called only occasionally, as needed. None of this is to denigrate exegetical, hermeneutical principles and methods. However, occasionally the need arises to remind servants of their station, to put them back in their place. Servants are not masters. Consciously or not, deliberately or not, one theme of history is that servants tend to forget who they are, or reject their status and usurp the authority of their mistress or master (Mark 12:1-12). Principles of interpretation, the work of exegesis, the learning of the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic languages and perhaps other Semitic languages are all of value. To repeat, the vocabulary, etymology, grammar, and syntax of a language guard against subjectivism, but the guard–like the servant–is not the Lord. I cannot overemphasize the respect I have for all these objective tools, but they must be kept firmly in their place. I remember the manager of a nationally prominent Angus Cattle Farm in Tulsa, Oklahoma back in the 1950s. He had brought his prize cattle to show–and win–in the International Livestock Show in Chicago. After getting the cattle and hired help (read, “servants”) settled in, he checked into a nice downtown hotel. The manager, Earl, was inconsiderate, wrong, and extremely rude to the bellhop who carried his luggage for him to his room. The bellhop, expecting a tip, extended his hand, palm up. Earl dismissed him abruptly with a curt: “I don’t shake hands with the help,” then turned to the task of unpacking and settling into his room. In recounting this occasion, I have not intended that we should adopt and project Earl’s attitude toward the “help.” I reviewed this scene as one way to emphasize that the “help,” the “servant,” always holds a place subordinate to a superior, and must maintain always the subservient place. Formal hermeneutics is subservient to the living Spirit who first inspired these words and would now speak to our own living spirit. I have great respect and appreciation for formal hermeneutics. It has been a needed guard and servant for me, a close companion for most of the past fifty years. Because of my training in a “modern” and conservative theological seminary. I too often allowed it to be the director–even the dictator–of my reading of the Bible. (Clearly, it would rule that Ed did not hear God speak to him in the words of John 14; those words were directed to Jesus’ apostles.) I refer to my “modern” theological training, for although pre-modern–patristic and scholastic–interpreters were not at all hermeneutically unsophisticated, their way of reading the text was quite different from the modern. In the late 20th Century, a postmodern generation also refuses to be fenced in by “formal” rules and boundaries. Postmodern searchers for a scriptural word from God search intently within and without the gate. They are realizing the limits of the exegetical limits on meaning and truth. This diatribe came about as in the wee hours of the morning I drank coffee, ate toast and eggs (from my little silver-laced bantam pullet). As I ate and wrote a letter to one of our daughters, I had The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language, open to the thirty-first chapter of Jeremiah. At about three o'clock I took a sip of coffee, looked over at the text of the message, and read: “‘There’s hope for your children.’ God’s decree.” I know the occasion of these words, to whom they were addressed, and know that God’s word is not in any one line, or one verse, but lies, rather, in the whole story of the Hebrew Exile. However. . . . When I read, “There’s hope for your children,” this troubled father of sometimes troubled daughters, grandchildren, and great-grand children heard the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, God’s powerful presence, speaking words of comfort to my own aching heart. To me, for me, in that moment, the Holy One of God’s covenant community spoke, saying: “There’s hope for your children,” and I gratefully acknowledged and praised God. A few years ago, the Benedictine oblate, Kathleen Norris acquainted me with the ancient idea of lectio divina, which is defined as: An ancient form of meditation on scripture where one reads "very slowly through a text until a word or phrase 'lights' up and attracts the reader. The text is then laid aside and the phrase is repeated in the heart...without analysis." It is: Reading or more exactly, listening to the book we believe to be divinely inspired. In this way we hear the word of God in the scriptures. It is the most ancient method of developing friendship with Christ by using scripture texts as topics of conversation with him. God spoke to his people in Exile, Jesus to his fearful disciples; Jesus to my friend, Ed; and the other morning, to me. Not, the Bible said, or the Bible means, or “we may understand this as God’s word to us.” No, God’s word, that is, God speaking directly, through the written word, Spirit to spirit, divine love to human cry. Lectio divina: words on a page suddenly light up and it is not just a book, not just an inspired text, rather, in that moment we are inspired–in-spirited by the Comforter Jesus promised.