Confessing Evangelical

John H June 26th, 2010

In the second chapter of Life Together (see previous post), Dietrich Bonhoeffer looks at “the day with others”. Most of the chapter is concerned with praying with our fellow Christians: as Bonhoeffer writes, “common life under the Word begins with common worship at the beginning of the day”.

The nature of this common worship will vary depending on the type of fellowship (e.g. families with children, fellowships of ministers), but the basic ingredients should always be the same: “the word of Scripture, the hymns of the Church, and the prayer of fellowship”:

1. Scripture (1): the psalms

Bonhoeffer urges the singing and praying of psalms as part of our life together. In the psalms the church joins its prayers to those of Christ himself, whose prayer the Psalter is. (More of this in my next post.)

2. Scripture (2): reading the Scriptures

Bonhoeffer advises that the reading of Scriptures in the fellowship should consist of extended, consecutive readings rather than isolated texts. It is as a whole that the Scriptures are “God’s revealing Word”:

Only in the infiniteness of its inner relationships, in the connection of Old and New Testaments, of promise and fulfilment, sacrifice and law, law and gospel, cross and resurrection, faith and obedience, having and hoping, will the full witness of Jesus Christ the Lord be perceived.

Hence Bonhoeffer recommends that a family fellowship “should surely be able to read and listen to a chapter of the Old Testament and at least half a chapter of the New Testament every morning and evening”.

3. Singing the new song

The psalms and the scripture readings should be followed by “the singing together of a hymn, this being the voice of the Church, praising, thanking and praying”. Why do Christians sing together?

The reason is quite simply, because in singing together it is possible for them to speak and pray the same Word at the same time; in other words, because they can unite in the Word.

Music is “completely the servant of the Word”, which leads Bonhoeffer to argue that “the singing of the congregation … is essentially singing in unison”. “Destroyers of unison singing” must be “rigorously eliminated”: whether that’s those calling attention to their musical abilities by improvising harmonies, or those “who because of some mood will not join in the singing and thus disturb the fellowship”.

4. Saying our prayers together

Having “heard God’s Word” and “been permitted to join in the hymn of the Church”, now “we are to pray to God as a fellowship”. This “must really be our word, our prayer for this day, for our work, for our fellowship, for the particular needs and sins that oppress us in common, for the persons who are committed to our care”.

Bonhoeffer’s advice is that this prayer should be “said always by the same person”, but in their own words rather than using set forms:

The use of formal prayers can, under certain circumstances, be a help even for a small family group. But often a ritual becomes only an evasion of real prayer. The wealth of churchly forms and thought may easily lead us away from our own prayer; the prayers then become beautiful and profound, but not genuine.

The “situation in public worship is different from that of daily family worship”; within the family or small community, “the poorest mumbling utterance can be better than the best-formulated prayer.”

Conclusions

I found this chapter challenging. It made me acutely conscious of how weak/non-existent our own collective family devotional life is, and also of how weak my own personal prayers have become. Use of the daily office has been a great help in the first three stages described by Bonhoeffer – praying the psalms, reading the Scriptures, singing the hymn of the church – but has led me to underplay the fourth aspect, that of praying in my own words. Not completely, by any means, but enough for this chapter to make me rethink how I go about my personal prayers.

Similarly, I hope Bonhoeffer’s challenge will also inspire me to new attempts to foster more shared devotional time with E as a couple and with the boys as a family – though my work patterns (among other things) make this difficult to implement to the extent described by Bonhoeffer.

• TIWIARN , Theology
• Comments(1)

John H April 20th, 2009

Another interesting point made by Tim Keller in his first talk at the London Men’s Convention (see previous post) was in relation to Jesus’ use of Scripture. He quoted Acts 10:38, where Peter speaks of how:

…God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.

Dr Keller argued that this reference to the Spirit’s anointing and the Father’s being “with him” shows that Jesus, during his earthly ministry, had only the same spiritual resources available to him as we have available to us: in particular, the word of God and the work of the Holy Spirit.

Furthermore, Jesus’ quoting Scripture on the cross shows how “saturated in Scripture” he was, because it is when one is under duress that the “real you” emerges. For most of us that can be a painful or embarrassing situation. With Jesus, however, “if you stabbed him in the heart, he bled Scripture”. As Dr Keller continued, if Jesus needed to saturate himself in Scripture in order to face what he faced, how much more should we need to do so.

In a Q&A session later in the day, Dr Keller was asked how people should set about becoming “saturated in Scripture”. How should we read the Bible in order to have its words and message seep into our bones, as it were? He replied by recommending Martin Luther’s letter of advice to his barber, now known as “A Simple Way to Pray”. He summarised Luther’s method for meditating and praying on the Bible as “TACS”:

• Teaching
• Adoration
• Confession
• Supplication

Luther himself describes this process as follows:

I divide each commandment into four parts, thereby fashioning a garland of four strands. That is, I think of each commandment as, first, instruction, which is really what it is intended to be, and consider what the Lord God demands of me so earnestly. Second, I turn it into a thanksgiving; third, a confession; and fourth, a prayer.

Luther was referring to the Ten Commandments, but the same method can be used with any passage of Scripture. Tim Keller cited Luther’s treatment of the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer, starting with the first word: “Our”. Applying the outline:

• Teaching: the word “our” teaches us that we are not to pray alone, but in fellowship with other Christians.
• Adoration: we should thank and praise God for giving us the church.
• Confession: we should confess our cold-heartedness and ingratitude towards the church, and our neglect of taking the opportunity to pray with our fellow believers.
• Supplication: we should pray for a true faith that keeps us in the fellowship of the church forever.

Dr Keller said that this method had transformed the way in which he reads the Bible; I was very grateful for the reminder of this outline, and will be trying to use it in future.

• Prayer , Theology
• Comments(2)

John H July 23rd, 2008

The previous strapline for my blog had been annoying me since… well, since about thirty seconds after I put it up there. But I was struggling to find a replacement.

Then I was prompted by a discussion on the BHT to look up Robert M’Cheyne’s introduction to his Bible-reading plan, where he speaks to those who might feel oppressed and guilt-ridden by a fixed plan for reading the Bible, particularly one as challenging as his:

A yoke to heavy to bear. Some may engage in reading with alacrity for a time, and afterwards feel it a burden, grievous to be borne. They may find conscience dragging them through the appointed task without any relish of the heavenly food. If this be the case with any, throw aside the fetter, and feed at liberty in the sweet garden of God. My desire is not to cast a snare upon you, but to be a helper of your joy.

After years of struggling with one Bible reading plan after another, perpetually falling behind and feeling guilty at my inability to stick with the programme, I’ve found it enormously liberating in recent months to “throw aside the fetter, and feed at liberty in the sweet garden of God”.

And these words can be applied more generally, to the experience of living the Christian life in the assurance of the promises of the gospel – particularly the gospel as it comes to us in the concrete realities of baptism, absolution, the proclamation of the gospel and the Lord’s Supper – rather than in the fetters of the law.

• Blogging about Blogging , Law and Gospel
• Comments(1)

John H August 19th, 2007

I love this passage from Jacques Ellul’s What I Believe (out-of-print, PDF version here), in which he describes “the God … whom we know in the heart”, in addition to the intellectual knowledge we have about him.

Ellul argues that “this God is known in my concrete life and not in ecstasy”. He “does not make me take leave of myself”, but rather “he comes for a moment into the life that is mine and modifies and reorients it.” This experience is “strictly ineffable” with “no proof or demonstration” to back it up. “Yet we know also … that this God speaks and that we are gripped by a word of God”.

Ellul continues (and it is this with which I can particularly identify):

The revelation is not for me a matter of mystical contemplation. It is more like what many of us are familiar with; a word suddenly becomes so true to us that we can no longer doubt it.

We know well how astonishing this experience can be. I read in the Bible texts that I have read a hundred times, that I know by heart, that are part of my objective knowledge of the biblical God, and suddenly the word that I know so well intellectually takes on an unexpected significance, a blinding force that constrains me to accept it as truth, as a truth at once comprehensible, irrational, and rigorously certain.

At this moment I can do nothing to challenge or reject it. It is suddenly placed at the core of my life. But I cannot transmit this experience as such. I cannot tell how the biblical text has become truth for me. I cannot offer any proof or guarantee. I can bear witness only to what has happened. (What I Believe, p.175)

This reminded me of John Bunyan’s description (in his book Grace Abounding, on which I have blogged before) of his experience in reading the Bible over many years of Christian life:

I have sometimes seen more in a line of the Bible than I could well tell how to stand under, and yet at another time the whole Bible hath been to me as dry as a stick; or rather, my heart hath been so dead and dry unto it, that I could not conceive the least drachm of refreshment, though I have looked it all over.

• Holy Spirit , Jacques Ellul
• Comments(2)

John H January 23rd, 2007

An intriguing suggestion for a Bible-reading programme from Cerulean Sanctum, involving reading entire books at a single sitting and spending a month reading only that book. I think I’ll pass, myself, but it’s still an interesting approach.

Over the past few years, I’ve used (intermittently) a slight variant on the M’Cheyne Bible Reading Plan that is aimed at reading the OT over two years and the NT in one year. I find this a less frenetic approach than trying to read the whole of the Bible in a single year.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that, as Dan Edelen puts it, while M’Cheyne is a great saint, “this doesn’t change the fact that his Bible-reading program’s not all that good”. If you do the whole thing (OT in a year, NT twice each year) then you’ll either collapse under the strain or else read in a very superficial manner. Plus, with my own “50%” approach, the strictly sequential approach meant reading all four gospels in the first three months or so, then the psalms for another three or four months, and then clattering through the rest of the NT in the remainder of the year. Not ideal: the months spent in the psalms become a bit of a slog, and by December I’ve almost forgotten what the Jesus of the gospels is like.

And then there’s its complete detachment from the rhythms of the church year. For example, the readings for 25 December are 2 Chronicles 30, Revelation 16, Zechariah 12:1-13:1 and John 15, none of which is what you’d call particularly “Christmassy”.

A number of Lutheran bloggers have been commending Pr Weedon’s plan for using the Lutheran Service Book’s assigned readings and psalms, together with a daily reading from the Book of Concord. The problem with the LSB’s plan, however, is that it doesn’t cover the whole Bible (unless you read the optional “fill-in” readings, which can mean reading several chapters at a single sitting).

So the plan I’m currently using is the St James Daily Devotional Guide published by Touchstone Magazine. For each day there is assigned:

• an OT reading (normally a full chapter);
• an NT reading;
• a reading from one of the four gospels; and
• psalms for morning and evening.

Notes are provided for some days, with further notes available online (though I don’t generally use these).

The overall aim of the plan is to read the OT over the course of two years, and the NT in a single year, which is the sort of rhythm I was aiming for anyway. I tend to read the NT and gospel in the morning, and the OT reading at night, but the notes suggest other approaches.

Some “pros” of the St James plan:

• the readings are a good length, and I’ve found it particularly helpful to read the gospels in shorter, more concentrated chunks rather than racing through a chapter at a time;
• the plan means you read from the OT, NT, gospels and psalms every day, which I think is a very healthy approach; and
• the plan provides a devotional framework in which to use the readings, with suggested forms of intercession and other prayers. Hence it can function as a “mini office”.

Against that, the main disadvantage so far is a tendency to switch and chop a little more than I’d like, rather than just reading each book sequentially. For example, the NT readings over the past seven days have been: Hebrews 6:11-20, 11:1-12, 7:1-10; Romans 4:13-25; Hebrews 7:11-19; Galatians 4:21-31; Hebrews 11:13-22, 7:20-28. The gospel readings have been more regular, though.

On the other hand, that approach does allow for some helpful pairings of passages (e.g. pairing Genesis 22 with Hebrews 11:13-22). I’m also hoping this will help achieve what would be a very useful aim for me: to maintain a habit of regular, systematic Bible reading, without getting constantly hung up over “how far through” I am, how long it is since I read this or that book.

Overall, I’d say if you’re looking for a plan that covers the whole Bible without turning into a gallop, that takes account of the church year, and that keeps you in daily contact with all the main parts of the Bible (not least the psalms and the gospels), then this is well worth a look. The annual subscription is $14 for the US/Canada, $20 for the rest of us.

• Devotion
• Comments(0)