Harvest of Hope

A Contemplative Approach to Holy Scripture

Mark A. McIntosh, Frank T. Griswold

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781467463447
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Encountering the living Word in the words of the Bible  

When we read Scripture, we learn about God. When we  pray  the Scriptures, we experience the mystery of Jesus Christ and inhabit his life. 

In this book, Mark McIntosh and Frank Griswold bring to bear their decades of combined experience in both the church and the academy to introduce and explore the idea of praying the Scriptures. As McIntosh and Griswold demonstrate, this contemplative approach to the Bible integrates theology and spirituality and fosters genuine hope by bringing us into an encounter with the living Word. 

After first laying the foundation of what it means to pray the Scriptures, the authors guide the reader through vital biblical passages from different points in the church year, showing how the seasons of the liturgical calendar provide the soil in which the seeds of the Gospel can be nourished by the Holy Spirit, yielding in time a harvest of hope.

Reaping the Harvest

In Seeds of Faith, the first of this two-volume set, seeds were planted as readers explored the broad terrain of Christian beliefs and sensed the integrity of theology and spirituality at the heart of Christian faith. Each chapter unfolded a central aspect of Christian doctrine, opening each area of belief to prayer and the insights of Christian mystical theology as a way of planting faith within us. In the life of the world to come, Christians believe, we will no longer need faith because we shall see and enjoy the inexhaustible goodness of God. But in our present age, the theological virtue of faith is truly a precious gift: it flows from having enough sense and taste of God’s goodness that we can go on trusting and working with that goodness, even when we can no longer or not yet perceive it.

Seeds of Faith and Harvest of Hope are mutually reinforcing, providing parallel companions to Christian theology and the spiritual reading of Scripture that seek above all to foster genuine hope. Both books develop insights from the Christian mystical tradition, helping readers to reflect upon their own deepest questions in the light of grace. While this second volume does not presuppose that readers are already familiar with Seeds of Faith, it draws on the same understanding of the integrity of theology and spirituality.

As in the first volume, we note again an observation of the twelfth-century monk and theologian Aelred of Rievaulx, that God the Holy Spirit is present in the conversation of true friends. This volume is also something of a conversation between dear friends, into which we invite your spiritual companionship.

The first three chapters begin to reap the harvest of a contemplative approach to Holy Scripture, exploring what it means to pray the Scriptures and providing a theological understanding of biblical contemplation.

The chapters that follow offer prayerful companionship as we enter into the spiritual meaning of Scripture throughout the Christian church year. The church year, or liturgical year, as it is also called, with the ebb and flow of its seasons and days, provides soil in which the seeds of the gospel can be nourished over time by the Holy Spirit. Praying the Scriptures for each season allows us to ponder and appropriate what Saint Paul calls “the mystery of Christ.” We move through Advent to Christmas to Epiphany and then on to Lent, Easter, and Pentecost. We begin each chapter by considering the deep theological mystery unfolded during that season of the year. And then we draw upon those spiritual insights to help us enter into the rich wonder and meaning of some of the central biblical passages often read during that season. It will be helpful if you have a Bible handy to read the portion of Scripture we identify as the subject for each section within these chapters.

The church year falls into two cycles; the first may be termed Incarnation and the second Redemption. The Incarnation cycle focuses on the mystery of the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us. The Redemption cycle calls to mind the saving work of that same incarnate Word in the death and resurrection of Jesus and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples.

Each cycle is preceded by a season of preparation. In the first cycle, during the season of Advent we prepare for the incarnation as various aspects of Christ’s coming are set before us. The twelve days of Christmas, which span the time between Christmas Eve and the Feast of the Epiphany, mark the coming of the Word. Epiphany, together with the Baptism of Jesus, further unfolds the mystery of the incarnation as an act of divine self-disclosure and revelation.

The second cycle, Redemption, begins with another season of preparation: Lent. The forty days of Lent lead us to Holy Week and Easter with the solemn commemoration of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Because Christ’s resurrection is the determining reality for the life of the church, Easter Day is extended into a season of fifty days, which are treated as one continuous celebration. The Great Fifty Days, as the Easter season is called, culminates in Pentecost and the celebration of the extension of the resurrection into our lives through the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Epiphany and Pentecost are both succeeded by a series of Sundays, sometimes called “ordinary time,” in which the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are read (in many traditions) successively over a period of three years.

The progressive celebration of the life and deeds of Jesus in the seasons of the church year allows us to inhabit his life in such a way that it no longer remains external to us but becomes part of who we are.

1

Ways of Reading Scripture

MARK A. MCINTOSH

What happens when we step into the wonderfully diverse world of the Bible? The first part of this book considers how Christians encounter Christ, the living Word of God, through the words of Scripture. For most of the history of Christianity, this immersive and transformative experience of living and praying the Scriptures was the fundamental source of the church’s theological reflection. It is hard for us to imagine how different was this earlier approach to Scripture from what we commonly experience today. From the later Middle Ages onward, the use of the Bible was fundamentally altered in ways we barely realize now.

How Reading the Bible Changed over Time

Without oversimplifying this change too much, we might draw an analogy that clarifies these different approaches to Scripture. Imagine two people meeting one another in two very different ways: in the first example, one person gives the other a piece of paper with a few lines of personal information: “I have high blood pressure; my favorite color is blue; I’m nervous about air travel.” In a very different example, the two persons share a meal and then enjoy a long walk together, gradually getting to know each other and over the years becoming dear friends. The first example is analogous to modern approaches to understanding the Bible; the second example is more like the practice of Christians in earlier ages. By the later Middle Ages, Scripture was treated more and more, as in the first case of our analogy, as a trove of many pieces of information that skilled and highly trained experts could extract; the narrative shape and arc of the Bible were lost behind the welter of text mining, in which each verse of the Bible is understood as a separate piece of information, all verses carrying equal weight. This means, for example, that a verse about stoning someone who has become “unclean” would seemingly be as important and authoritative as a verse in which Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

In the modern period, then, experts of the new, critical sort mirrored the new biblical fundamentalists: both groups treated the Scriptures as a mine of data. For biblical critics, this was information about the history of the communities that produced the text, and for fundamentalists, it was information derived from an entirely literal reading of every verse—such that every verse must be received as inerrantly historical and as equally significant. Both of these modern approaches lost sight of the fact that the biblical language is often symbolic and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, communicates multiple levels of meaning. Moreover, both of these ways of treating Scripture are recent innovations in Christianity and differ profoundly from the way in which Christians related to Scripture prior to modernity.

Christ Meets Us through the Words of Scripture

Let us return to the second case of our analogy, in which two people enjoy a long and companionable time of deepening friendship. They do not simply exchange information but encounter each other deeply in ways that, over time, become transformative and life-giving. This second example is much more like the way Christians before our own era encountered Scripture; that is, in the church’s reading of the Bible, Christians encountered the living Word of God, whom they believed was incarnate as Jesus Christ—and who makes himself present among us through our contemplation of the words of Holy Scripture. In the first example of our analogy, someone simply reads off information from a text, but in the second example, it is the personal encounter and developing relationship that give rise to new understanding.

Notice two important implications of these different approaches to the Bible. The first example leaves us with many pieces of information, but we don’t really understand which are more important or how they all relate to each other, and that’s because we don’t know the person about whom we have received the information. But in the second example, as we get to know the person and become friends, we recognize the crucial turning points, the characteristic hopes and dreams and achievements that particularly mark the identity of our friend. And because of that personal relationship, we are able to think about all that we have begun to understand around the central characteristics of our friend.

In a similar way, Christians have discovered over the centuries that Christ the Word meets them through their spiritual reading of Scripture. And, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, Jesus shows us how to think about all the stories and poems and laws of the Bible, not as isolated pieces of information, but as things that relate to Jesus in different ways. We now recognize that it is Christ the Word who speaks to us through the law and the prophets, the stories and poetry, of the Bible. This means that for the followers of Jesus, his life, death, and resurrection is the crucial turning point in the story of the Bible, the light that illuminates the ultimate meaning of everything.

There is a second crucial implication of this earlier way of reading Scripture as a spiritual encounter with God in Christ: the new understanding that grows within us as we pray the Scriptures does not simply inform us about God or heavenly things. Rather, it changes us and helps us to become more like the One who speaks with us and befriends us. We can imagine the spiritual power of this earlier way of reading Scripture if we compare it to the experience of praying before an icon of Christ. Modern ways of reading Scripture treat the Bible as if it were a photograph that conveys information about its subject. An icon, by contrast, is not meant to be a more or less accurate portrait of its subject. It is not like a photograph from which we can derive some information without any personal involvement. Rather, an icon symbolically or sacramentally invites us to encounter in prayer the one the icon represents. If we recognize the biblical word as sacramental, as iconic rather than photographic, then we begin to realize that the reality and truth it conveys are not a static piece of information we can grasp but a living person we must encounter—who uses the iconic words of Scripture to draw us into a transforming relationship.

In chapter 2 Frank introduces us to this classic spiritual reading of the Bible, a form of prayer in which God the Holy Spirit brings to life within us the deep truth of God in Christ. In the light of what Frank has described, I will offer in chapter 3 a theology of biblical contemplation, that is, an attempt to understand this classic spiritual reading of Scripture by drawing on the theological ideas at the heart of Christian faith.

2

Praying the Scriptures

FRANK T. GRISWOLD

Stephen Mitchell, the contemporary poet and translator, in a poem describing the character of the eighteenth-century Jewish mystic, “The Baal Shem Tov,” says this about prayer: “Prayer was / a quality of attention. To make so much room for the given / that it can appear as gift.” As we reflect upon praying with Scripture, let us remind ourselves that our prayer involves our availability to the Holy Spirit, the “Spirit of the Son,” who prays continually within us, “bearing witness” with our spirits, and enabling us to inhabit and make Jesus’s prayer of loving availability our own, which is summed up in the word “Abba”—Father.

Are We Aware of Our Spiritual Disposition When We Approach Scripture?

Having been grounded in an awareness of our need to be available, we might ask ourselves some questions about praying with Scripture. Perhaps you have already asked these questions of yourself. Sit for a time with them. There are no right answers. You might learn some things about your own disposition of which you had been unaware. The questions will likely resonate differently with each of us, depending on how we are now called.

In what spirit am I available and attentive as I approach the text?

What prior thoughts or preconceptions about Scripture, or about a particular passage, do I bring with me?

Am I ready to make enough interior room for the “givenness” of this passage, that it may reveal itself on its own terms as gift?

What has drawn me to “search the Scriptures” on this particular occasion?

If I am to preach on this Scripture, might I be impatiently examining the appointed readings in the lectionary for next Sunday, hoping to be inspired?

Do I already know what I want to say, and perhaps seek confirmation in one or another of the assigned passages?

What does it say about my inner disposition if I am preparing for a Bible study, either as a leader or as a participant?

Am I engaged in formal study of a particular text or book in order to produce an essay or take an exam?

Am I looking for a passage that will answer a particular question in my life or help me to feel less desolate or beleaguered?

Have I been so long at preaching that I can easily wrestle a biblical text to the ground and make it serve my own homiletic end?

Learning to Receive the Spiritual Meaning of Scripture

As well, there are some basic questions that we who ponder such things continue to ask ourselves. What does it mean to describe the Bible as the inspired word of God? Is the Bible literally true? Is it historically accurate? To what degree do its biases and cultural contexts no longer reflect how we now view the world and our place in it?

The Enlightenment, beginning in the eighteenth century, and the historical-critical approach to Scripture that developed in the nineteenth century have left their mark on how we approach Scripture and how it is taught in seminaries and universities. As a result, the voices of earlier commentators have been largely discounted, or dismissed as naive. But are they? I confess here that I have asked these questions of myself over many decades, and along the way I have found some revelatory answers.

We can be informed here by the influential voice of a third-century scholar and theologian, namely, Origen. Here are his thoughts on two ways to approach the study of Scripture:

The reason why the divine power has given us the Scriptures, is not solely to present facts according to the literal interpretation of the narrative. If one looks to the letter of the text, some of the facts have not actually happened, and would be irrational or illogical. Granted the facts that have happened in the literal sense are much more numerous than the facts that have been added and have only a spiritual meaning. All the same, in the face of certain pages the reader feels embarrassed. Without accurate research it is not possible to discover if a fact that seems historical actually happened according to the literal sense of the words or if it did not happen at all. By keeping the commandment of the Lord to “search the scriptures” (John 5:39), one ought to examine with care and attention where the literal meaning is historical and where it is not. In Scripture not everything is objectively historical in the literal sense. Sometimes it is obvious that the result of taking it literally is impossible. But the divine Scripture, taken as a whole, has a spiritual meaning.^*

Origen’s point that Scripture can be approached historically and critically, and also spiritually, takes us beyond true or false—either/or—into an expanded notion of biblical truth that transcends historical literalness. And yet, for many of us who are “professionally religious,” the historical-critical approach has largely eclipsed the spiritual, and Scripture, rather than addressing us on its own, has become the victim of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Reaping the Harvest