Theological Journal – August 4 How Do We Read the Bible?

   

                                        

Pictured here are an early 1600s painting of Saint Paul Writing His Epistles and an Orthodox Byzantine icon of the prophet Jeremiah.

What are your first impressions of each picture?

a.       Where are the two figures eyes focused?

b.      What are their hands occupied with?

c.       What role does the text play in each picture?

d.      How would you title each picture?

e.       Which is more characteristic of your way to engaging scripture?

f.        Which figure is more like your sermon preparation?

“On the one hand, the painting images a bookish spirituality, one  in which the individual reader is enveloped in his own world, communing with texts. The icons, on the other hand, image a relational  spirituality, one in which worshippers are taken into another’s world,  as they together hear the apostle’s blessing spoken over them, and  overhear the blessing of God spoken to the prophet. Instructively, the apostle’s Bible is closed, and the prophet’s text is open to us, but the apostle himself offers us his attention, and the prophet himself directs our attention to God.  These ways of living are not incompatible, of course. But the relational-ecclesial takes precedence over the monastic bookishness, just as the iconic takes precedence over the artistic. And it does so because receptivity takes precedence over creativity.”

Green, Chris. Sanctifying Interpretation: Vocation, Holiness, and Scripture (p. 78). CPT Press. Kindle Edition.