Reading the Bible Spiritually will lead to a Christocentric reading. As James Houston, in his essay “Toward A Biblical Spirituality” says that “being transformed by the personal presence of Christ in all the Scriptures, is what ‘exemplary reading‘ is all about. Beyond the text and page of Scripture, one is challenged and transformed by the person of Jesus Christ himself.”

What does it mean to be a reader? What’s actually happening when someone reads a text? Ever since the rise of post-modernism these kinds of questions have been in vogue. And though many of the popular answers today are new, the questions themselves are not. In fact, he Bible itself as well as many of its early readers, wrestled well with what it means to read, giving us a definition to a biblical art of reading. I want to explore briefly five components to what it means to read the Bible.

Reading the Bible Spiritually

Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthian 2:14 that the natural person, is counter-distinction from the spiritual person, does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. Paul maintains that if any reading of God’s word is to be true reading, reading that leads to understanding, it must be done by the Spirit. Until the Spirit of God opens the eyes of a man, that man’s understanding is veiled to what the Scripture’s are actually saying! Paul gets at this in 2 Corinthians 3 when he writes that even to this day when the Israelites read God’s word a veil lies over their hearts.

So much could be said about this and how we understand reading, interpretation, preaching, and so on. Craig A. Carter in his fantastic book Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition rightly brings out the implications of this in how the church has unwittingly adopted hermeneutical principles from an unbiblical enlightenment worldview. So much so that now in many institutions which seek to teach the Bible and its meaning, the atheist is valued as a more objective reader; someone better suited to understand the text!

This though is diametrically opposed to Paul’s understanding of reading. For Paul, it is only “when one turns to the Lord that the veil [of understanding] is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Corinthians 3:16-17). Carter, in quoting theologian John Webster, rightly states that exegesis, understanding what we’re reading, is an attempt to hear what the Spirit says to the churches.^[1]

This also means that reading the Bible Spiritually will lead to a Christocentric reading. As James Houston, in his essay “Toward A Biblical Spirituality” says that “being transformed by the personal presence of Christ in all the Scriptures, is what ‘exemplary reading‘ is all about. Beyond the text and page of Scripture, one is challenged and transformed by the person of Jesus Christ himself.”^[2]

And this leads us to the second point.

Reading the Bible Righteously

When we read Scripture we must do so righteously. In fact, Paul makes this charge against the Corinthian Christians saying, “I could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ… for while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way (1 Corinthians 3:1-2). The principle is this: Reading the Bible Spiritually, controlled and led by the Spirit of Christ, must lead to a righteousness of life, that is, being led and conformed to the image of Christ. This is precisely why Paul says that to understand the Scriptures we must have the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2:16).

It is in having the mind of Christ where our hearts, our desires, and our presuppositions are reordered to know and understand rightly. In other words, how we live deeply corresponds to what we understand. Is this not what Jesus means when addressing the Pharisee’s in John 8? He asks them, “Why do you not understand what I say?” That’s the question, right? Here is the incarnate Word, the clearest revelation of God to man, and yet, still, these Pharisee’s cannot understand. Why? Listen to Jesus’ stinging answer.

            “It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me…. If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? Whoever is of God hears the words of God. The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God (John 8:39-47).”

Hans Boersma highlights how this was the understanding of the early church. For the Patristic “one needs virtue to be able to understand or appropriate the biblical text properly. Furthermore, for Nyssa, the very subject matter of the text is virtue. The ultimate reason for this is that he believes virtue, in its true sense, should be spelled with a capital V, since God himself is virtue… Since the biblical text has God for its true subject matter, it has virtue for its subject matter. And finally, since it is our aim to share more deeply in the life of God, virtue is also the very aim of biblical interpretation.”^[3]

Thus, reading the Bible Spiritually leads to reading the Bible righteously.

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