I. Spirituality
Chapter 1
Exegesis and Spirituality: Completing the Circle
Although the subject matter of this essay has been brewing over a long season, its present impetus stems from writing the commentary on Paul’s letter to the Philippians during Winter and Spring of 1994. As I worked through Paul’s text with great care, I experienced an ongoing encounter with the living God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — an encounter which happened in two ways. On the one hand, as I exegeted the text so as to articulate its meaning for the sake of others in the church, I was often myself so overcome by the power of the Word that I was brought to tears, to joy, to prayer, or to praise. On the other hand, I was also regularly experiencing the text of this letter in church settings, in such overwhelming ways, that I felt compelled to mention it in the final paragraph of the Author’s Preface:
This essay was the first of four lectures delivered as the Ongman lectures at Örebro Theological Seminary, Örebro, Sweden, in December 1994, and repeated in slightly altered form as the Huber Drumwright lectures at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in October 1995. I have deliberately kept the lecture format and have resisted the temptation to add footnotes.
The writing of this commentary is unlike anything I have heretofore experienced as a part of the church. In a regular stream of divine appointments, in a variety of church settings over the four and a half months in which I wrote the first draft of the commentary, one Sunday after another either the worship (including liturgy) or the sermon was in some very direct way associated with the text of the preceding week. It was as though the Lord was letting me hear the passage played back in liturgical and homiletical settings that made me pause yet one more time and “hear” it in new ways. It is hard to describe these experiences, which had a profound impact on my sabbaths during the sabbatical; and their regularity seemed beyond mere coincidence. All of which made my Mondays take on a regular pattern as well, as I would go back to the prior week’s work and think and pray it through yet one more time.
This essay was born out of these experiences. What I propose to examine is the interface between exegesis and spirituality, between the historical exercise of digging out the original intent of the text and the experience of hearing the text in the present in terms of both its presupposed and intentional spirituality. Thus I will attempt to address three matters: first, a few words about spirituality; second, some words about exegesis; and finally, some suggestions as to how these two must interface in order for us to be interpreting Scripture properly on its own terms.
These two topics, it should be noted, are very often perceived as being unrelated. Indeed, in most theological seminaries, one can take courses in exegesis, but “spirituality,” that most slippery of words to pin down, is pretty much left to the individual — and there is seldom any suggestion that the latter has very much to do with the former. Indeed, even at Regent College, where we have faculty who teach in both disciplines, our students tend to take courses that focus on one or the other, and they are sometimes left with the impression that exegesis and spirituality are separate disciplines — which indeed they are academically. My concern is that they must somehow be brought much closer together or the ultimate aim of exegesis itself is lost.