I think I heard about this one from Lisa Hensley and the blurb + Lore Wilbert's praise for Eugene Peterson in general were enough for me to pick it up. And I'm so glad I did. So many wise insights and reflections on Scripture.
What we need is "reading formatively, reading to live."
"If you're after devotionally cozy Bible reading, you have to pick and choose a good bit. There are such huge chunks of it that either put you to sleep or keep you awake nights, but there are little crib sheets available at most Bible bookstores that tell you what parts of the Bible to read when you want to be comforted or consoled, or whatever your present disposition requires. I don't want to be too hard on any one of these groups of Bible readers, especially since I've spent considerable time in each group myself, but I do want to call attention to the conspicuous fact that in whatever group you find yourself, you will be using the Bible for your purposes, and those purposes will not necessarily require anything of you relationally. It is entirely possible to come to the Bible in total sincerity, responding to the intellectual challenge it gives, or for the moral guidance it offers, or for the spiritual uplift it provides, and not in any way have to deal with a personally revealing God who has personal designs on you. Or to put it in the terms in which we started out, it is possible to read the Bible form a number of different angles and for various purposes without dealing with God as God has revealed himself, without setting ourselves under the authority of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who is alive and present in everything we are and do. To put it bluntly, not everyone who gets interested in the Bible and even gets excited about the Bible wants to get involved with God. But God is what the book is about."
"The form in which language comes to us is as important as its content. If we mistake the form we will almost surely respond wrongly to its content. If we mistake a recipe for vegetable stew for a set of clues for finding buried treasure, no matter how carefully we read it, we will end up as poor as ever and hungry besides."
"Exegesis is foundational to Christian spirituality. Foundations disappear from view as the building is constructed, but if builders don't build a solid foundation, their building doesn't last long. Because we speak our language so casually, it is easy to fall into the habit of treating it casually. But language is persistently difficult to understand. We spend our early lives learning the language, and just when we think we have it mastered, our spouse says, 'You don't understand a thing I'm saying, do you?' WE teach our children to talk, and just about the time we think they might be getting it, they stop talking to us, and when we overhear them talking to their friends we find we can't understand more than one our of every 8 or 9 words they say. A close relationship doesn't guarantee understanding. A long affection doesn't guarantee understanding. In fact, the closer we are to another and the closer the more intimate our relations, the more care we must exercise to hear accurately, to understand thoroughly, to answer appropriately. Which is to say, the more spiritual we become, the more care we must give to exegesis. The more mature we become in the Christian faith, the more exegetically rigorous we must become. This is not a task from which we graduate. These words given to us in our Scripture are constantly getting overlaid with personal preferences, cultural assumptions, sin distortions, and ignorant guesses that pollute the text."
"Exegesis is nothing more than a careful and loving reading in our mother tongue. Greek and Hebrew are well worth learning, but if you haven't had the privilege, settle for English. Once we learn to love this text and bring a disciplined intelligence to it, we won't be too far behind the best Greek and Hebrew scholars...Exegesis is the furthest thing from pedantry. Exegesis is an act of love. It loves the one who speaks the words enough to want to get the words right. It respects the words enough to use every means we have to get the words right. Exegesis is loving God enough to stop and listen carefully to what he says."
"I'm not the only one to notice that we are in the odd and embarrassing position of being a church in which many among us believe ardently in the authority of the Bible, but instead of submitting to it, use it to ply it, take charge of it endlessly, using our own experience as the authority for how, and where, and when we will use it. One of the most urgent tasks facing the Christian community today is to counter this self-sovereignty by re-asserting what it means to live these holy Scriptures from the inside-out instead of using them for our sever and devout, but still self-sovereign, purposes."
"Every expectation that we bring to this book is inadequate. This is a unique book, this text that reveals the sovereign God in being and action. It does not seek to please us. We enter this text to meet God as he reveals himself. Not to look for truth or history or morals that we can use for ourselves. What he insists on supremely is that we do not read the Bible in order to get God into our lives, get him to participate in our lives. WE open this book and find that page after page it takes us off our guard, surprises, draws us into its reality, draw us into participating with God on His terms."
"I don't want to master the text, I want to submit to it."
From the Q&A portion of the audio, responding to the question of how to get unbelievers or new believers to see themselves in God's story: "I'm teaching people to see themselves in God's story by first listening to their story, and showing them that they have a story!"
"Words are inherently ambiguous. They are never exact. The character of the person speaking influences how we interpret them. The attentiveness or intelligence of the listener affects how they are understood. Place and weather and circumstances all play a part in both the speaking and the hearing. The more we are in context when language is used, the more likely we are to get it."
"Contemplation is not another thing added onto our reading and meditating and praying, but the coming together of God's revelation and our response."
Taking God's word seriously doesn't equal taking it literally. There is so much metaphor in the Bible! "A metaphor is literally a lie... for example, 'God is a rock.'"
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