pat loughery

Tomorrow we’ll be discussing how a servant of the Kingdom of God interacts with Scripture. On that theme I absolutely love this quote, which comes from Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading by Eugene Peterson (and which I can highly recommend).

Spiritual theology, using Scripture as text, does not present us with a moral code and tell us, “Live up to this”; nor does it set out a system of doctrine and say, “Think like this and you will live well.” The Biblical way is to tell a story and in the telling invite: “Live into this – this is what it looks like to be human in this God-made and God-ruled world; this is what is involved in becoming and maturing as a human being.”

We do violence to the Biblical reveltaion when we “use” it for what we can get out of it of what we think will provide color and spice to our otherwise bland lives. That always results in a kind of “decorator spirituality” – God as enhancement. Christians are not interested in that; we are after something far bigger. When we submit our lives to what we read in Scripture,we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.