Reading the Bible personally and experientially (by which I mean, relationally) is desirable, provided it is shaped and instructed by the discipline of careful and consistent reading. Many parts of Scripture overtly invite experiential reading. For example, the psalms are meant to be prayed and sung more than exegeted in light of their specific settings in the individual lives of their authors (which are often unknown to us). Psalms evoke feeling, employing a range of rhetorical devices, including some complex forms of parallelism (such as an aesthetically pleasing acrostic in Ps 119) or building to crescendo (as in Ps 150). We can try to reconstruct their historical situation or compare them with liturgical forms from surrounding cultures, but once we have done all possible research, psalms by their very genre invite us to do more than study them: they invite us to pray them, sing them, or use them as models to jumpstart our own prayers. They provide us a historic vocabulary of prayer.
Most readers would agree that psalms are meant to be prayed, as the Puritans prayed them. But does historical narrative invite experiential reading? What about biography? Even here, however, narratives, are meant to draw us into their world, to facilitate reader identification, to invite us to imbibe something of their worldview. We may take for an example John’s Gospel. When we read that Jesus taught his disciples to love one another, do we genuinely fulfill the intention of either the Fourth Gospel’s author or the Jesus who spoke in the narrative to merely study the Greek terms used? Do we fulfill it by merely comparing ancient opinions about love and showing how the opinion expressed here is different? Such studies have supportive value, but presumably John wants us to respond to the text faithfully by actually loving one another. John’s Gospel is meant to be more than exegeted intellectually; it summons those who attend to it to feed on Jesus, the bread of life, to crave him as our very source of life. (For that reason, I found my own commentary on John’s Gospel insufficient, able to address only one side of the biblical text, because just commenting doesn’t cut it. We have to engage the Gospel with our hearts.)
Ancient audiences expected to learn from narratives. Scholars may read biblical texts purely for information, but Christians (whether they are scholars or not) also read them for edification. Scripture thus serves as a contact point for our relationship with God and is useful for spiritual formation. The fruit of the Spirit, expected for all believers, is experiential, emotive and behavioral: love, joy, peace, longsuffering, and the rest. As already noted, one cannot read the psalms they way they were meant to be heard without embracing the emotion in them. Psalms model prayers of joy and sorrow. Emotion, then, is not foreign to Scripture. As we relate to the God of Scripture, we must do so with our whole beings–intellect, emotion, and everything else.
This content is by Craig Keener, but edited and posted by Defenders Media.
For more on how to interpret Scripture in light of Pentecost, read Spirit Hermeneutics (2016).
