4 Ways to Revolutionize Your Bible Reading by Peter Leithart for The Gospel Coalition
It’s humbling to read the sermons and homilies of the church fathers. Grab virtually any passage from Augustine’s Enarrations on the Psalms, and you’ll find a tour de force, as Augustine leads you on a labyrinthine journey from the psalm to Genesis and Exodus to the Gospels to Revelation and back. William Blake trained himself to see the world in every grain of sand; Augustine sees the kaleidoscope of Scripture refracted through every verse.
Augustine isn’t humbling to read because he gets everything right. Some of his twists and turns lead to blind alleys, and he has to back his way out. He’s humbling to read because he’s able to range across the whole Bible without any of the props and crutches we rely on. He didn’t have a written concordance, much less Bible software or a search engine. From the patristic age to the Reformation, Christian teachers roamed freely across the canon because they had stored it in the palace of memory.
It’s probably too much to hope we can replicate their knowledge of Scripture. But is there a way to approximate it? Perhaps, if we grasp and practice four axioms.
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We love helping others and believe that’s one of the reasons we are chosen as Ambassadors of the Kingdom, to serve God’s children. We look to the Greatest Commandment as our Powering force.
1. Trust the Text
What I really mean is: trust the Author. At bottom, that means believing this book is God’s speech in human language. These words are God’s words. If you don’t believe that, nothing else I say will make much sense.
Trusting the text also means believing that everything belongs and everything is meaningful. The Spirit doesn’t waste his breath. There are no incidental details. We’re told that Abraham had 318 fighting men for a reason, and the Spirit wanted us to know the man at the pool of Bethsaida had been lame for 38 years. Is 153 fish mere local color? No; it’s part of the Word of the Lord.
