Inter-Varsity Press

from the Introduction: A strange silence

James Smart gave a haunting title to the book he wrote in 1970 – The Strange Silence of the Bible in the Church. It is one of the curious features of contemporary Christianity that at the very time when the Bible is most freely available in a multiplicity of versions and mediums, it is also effectively silent in many areas of church life. It is also strange when we realize that the increasing access to the Bible by ordinary church members in the Roman Catholic denomination has been matched by a decreasing attention to the Bible in much of Protestantism, as is evident in Christian bookshops.

This is especially obvious when looking for resources on spirituality. In secular bookshops it is easy to find books on every kind of spirituality, we might say from Aztec to Zoroastrian! In Christian bookshops books on spirituality will include many sources, including Catholic, Celtic and Orthodox. There is curiously little available on the Bible as a source of spirituality, or on biblical views on spirituality.

What an irony that the assumption that the Bible has little to do with spirituality is often found among Protestants. It is the Roman Catholic John L. McKenzie who has published The New Testament for Spiritual Reading (McKenzie 1969–71) following the long Catholic tradition of Lectio Divina, the reflective and meditative reading of Scripture. It is the distinguished Roman Catholic writer Lucien Joseph Richard who has written his moving account of the spirituality of John Calvin (Richard 1974).

Another common idea that has affected our assumptions about the status of biblical spirituality is that spirituality is only concerned with the exotic, the abnormal, the exciting, so the Evangelical preoccupation with the Bible means that it will have little to offer in the area of spirituality. The evidence for this idea is that Evangelical faith and practice is often now regarded as a good first step in spiritual growth, but that people must then grow up to maturity in other traditions: Catholic, Celtic, Eastern Orthodox or charismatic.

There are strange dilemmas and confusions in these modern assumptions, but the result is clear and tragic: we pay little attention to the Bible as a source of spirituality, fail to enjoy the riches that it offers, fail to apply the biblical test to what other sources of spirituality offer, and fail to use the Bible as a guide and source of true spirituality. This is not the place for me to attempt to demonstrate the authority and sufficiency of the Bible, but I do hope to demonstrate its usefulness and effectiveness in the area of spirituality.

It is important for us to be confident in the model of spirituality taught in the Bible. It is important for all of us to recover biblical spirituality, and to test our spirituality by the Bible. It is important for those Christians who have left the Bible behind to recover the Bible and its spirituality.

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In this book I am trying to explain biblical spirituality because of what I believe about the significance of the Bible. If the Bible is God-given and therefore has God’s authority, then biblical spirituality will express God’s will. If the Bible is the sufficient word of God, then biblical spirituality will be sufficient spirituality. If the Bible is the effective Word of God, then biblical spirituality will be effected in us by those words.

I am writing

• to show how the Bible is a rich and fruitful resource for spirituality, that is, what we can learn from the Bible about spirituality, or what spirituality it contains;
• to show the fundamental shape and structure of the ‘spirituality of the Word’, or, how it works;
• to show the spirituality that the Bible teaches and encourages, or what spirituality results from using the Bible.

In The Gagging of God D. A. Carson ends with an appeal for Christian spirituality that has the following characteristics (1996: 566–569):

• Spirituality must be thought of in connection with the gospel. This means that the gospel itself must be the interpretative or heuristic device by which spirituality must be assessed. Spirituality must begin and end with the gospel, and not draw away from it or have an independent existence apart from it.
  
• Christian reflection on spirituality must work outward from the centre. The point here is that it is not good to assume the centre or heart of the Christian faith, and to develop peripheral matters and interests. If we avoid rehearsing the core of biblical faith then it will be lost in one generation. If it goes without saying, then it needs to be said!
• At the same time we should be rightly suspicious of forms of theology that place all the emphasis on coherent systems of thought . . . but do not engage the affections, let alone foster an active sense of the presence of God. Carson comments:
• Sometimes this stance is simply an overreacting to the obvious excesses of the charismatic movement. But whatever its cause, it stands against both Scripture and the entire heritage of the best of Christianity, where men and women, by God’s grace, know God. (1996: 568)
  
  
• Nevertheless, what God uses to foster this kind of Gospel spirituality must be carefully delineated. In order for us to receive the life that God gives, he has decided to use what the Puritans called ‘means’, such as the Bible, prayer, fellowship, the Lord’s Supper and the created world. We should be careful to make full use of the means that God has given us. One of the neglected means in discussions about spirituality is the Bible. We need to recover the spirituality of the Word. This spirituality will come in various forms, including private reading, meditation and memorizing of Scripture, sermons and Bible studies, mutual exhortation and encouragement. This will also in turn lead to the spirituality the Bible commends, including the sacraments, fellowship, and enjoying the life and the wonderful world God has made and given us to enjoy.
  
• Finally, such Word-centred Reflection will bring us back to the fact that spirituality, as we have seen, is a theological construct. This means that as we continually check that our theology is being reformed by the content and shape of the Bible, so we will do the same with our spirituality. It will mean that there is no dissonance between our minds and our hearts, between what we know to be true and what we put into practice in our life with God.

I hope that this book will help to achieve these aims.