Lectio Divina

From God's World to our lives

Enzo Bianchi

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780281073344
• eBook ISBN: 9780281073351
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

The Bible is an ancient, enigmatic text from a culture vastly different from our own and most of us find it hard to read: how then can we understand its importance in the church, and how can it enrich our lives? Central to Lectio Divina is the conviction that to read the Bible faithfully and prayerfully is to learn an art. It is also to be in community, and to enter into dialogue with the God who speaks to each of us through the biblical page. Enzo Bianchi touches on some of the key insights in the history of Christian biblical interpretation - from the brilliant thinker Origen in the third century, to the development and refinement of historical criticism and related approaches in the modern era. He explains how to do lectio divina and understand its four 'moments' - lectio, meditatio, oratio, contemplatio. This is not simply a book about how to approach to the Bible, because Scripture ultimately wants to lead us beyond itself - to the truth and mystery of Christ that can never be captured fully in the written word.

Part 1

BIBLE AND SPIRIT

1

The rooms and the keys

The Hebrew has passed on a beautiful tradition to us; it has to do with divine Scripture in its entirety. According to this man, all of divinely inspired Scripture, because of the obscurity that is in it, can be compared to many locked rooms in a house. Next to each room is a key, but it is not the key for that room. The keys are all distributed next to the rooms, but none of them matches the room near which it is placed. The Hebrew says that it is a very difficult task to find the keys and match them with the doors they will open. Similarly, we come to understand the Scriptures that are obscure precisely when we start by placing them alongside one another, because they have their own interpretative principle hidden in their midst. I think the Apostle also suggests a similar method for understanding the divine words when he says: ‘We speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, comparing spiritual things with spiritual things’ (1 Cor. 2.13).¹

This is how the third-century church father Origen expresses the cornerstone of his own approach to biblical exegesis, and of any spiritual interpretation of Scripture: Scriptura sui ipsius interpres. Scripture is its own interpreter.

The keys to understanding Scripture, for Origen, are found in Scripture itself. This statement has two implications: that the Bible is a unity, and that it is inspired – meaning that the Bible’s words are Spirit-bearing, ‘spirit and life’ (John 6.63). They bear the Spirit’s dynamis or power, so that the knowledge we gain from Scripture is the Spirit’s teaching. We know because it has been revealed (cf. Matt. 11.25–27). This is why only ‘the . . . one, who has the key of David’ (Rev. 3.7) can open the locked doors. ‘The Root of David’ alone (Rev. 5.5) can break open the seals of the book. The One who inspired the holy texts is the only one who can unveil their meaning.²

If we want to understand the Bible, we will see it not only as an object to grasp, but also as a subject. We enter into a relationship based on mutuality and dialogue, and this is why the biblical text is able to inspire, make meaning, and be useful for salvation (cf. 2 Tim. 3.15–16). The Bible’s unique status calls for the interpreter to use an approach uniquely suited to it. Faith is the space in which we meet and come to know a text that was born of faith. Our faith then becomes hermeneutical potential, a key that opens the door to knowing Christ as we spend time in dialogue with Scripture.

Even when a passage of the Bible is obscure, Origen says that faith is where we should begin: ‘First of all, believe, and you will find great and holy usefulness beneath what you thought was an obstacle’.³ When we have faith, a stumbling block in the text may turn into something that is revelatory – and then our faith opens into thanksgiving. Origen points out on the basis of a passage from Romans (9.20–21) that Scripture does not necessarily answer each and every question we ask of it. What happens when people read the Bible today, he explains, is similar to what happened during Jesus’ lifetime: ‘Those who were . . . faithlessly inquiring of the Lord by what authority he was doing the things he was doing . . . were not even deemed worthy of an answer.’⁴

But when Daniel the prophet, a faithful and attentive servant, questioned God because he

desired to know the will of the Lord, for which he was even named ‘man of desires,’ it was not said to him, ‘Who are you?’ But an angel was sent to teach him about all God’s ways and judgments. Therefore, if there is some secret and hidden thing of God we long to know, if we are men of desires and not contentions, let us faithfully and humbly inquire into the more concealed judgments of God that are sown in the Holy Scriptures. Surely this is also why the Lord was saying, ‘Search the Scriptures!’ since he knew that these things are opened not by those who fleetingly listen to or read [the Scriptures] while occupied with other business, but by those who with an upright and sincere heart search more deeply into the Holy Scriptures, by constant effort and uninterrupted nightly vigils.⁵

Who is the reader whom Scripture hopes to find? For Origen, it is a man or woman who is desiring, not contentious, a person who truly wants to know God, love and cling to God and do the divine will. Origen’s words are consistent with Scripture’s own desire in our regard, at least in so far as this purpose and intention is voiced by the scriptural self-awareness we find in the original ending of the Fourth Gospel. In John 20.31 we read: ‘These [signs] are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.’ Scripture beckons to the reader to become personally involved, appealing to his or her faith. Interpretation seen in this light becomes a meeting of desires.

There are a number of other principles that make up Origen’s richly nuanced exegetical method. One of them is the idea that the biblical text has multiple senses. Origen bases this idea on Proverbs 22.20 and fleshes it out by analogy with the traditional anthropological conception of the self as threefold (body, soul and spirit). According to this interpretative principle, there are three senses – literal, moral and spiritual – concealed in the words of Scripture.

Another principle is derived from 1 Corinthians 10.6–11 (‘These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down to instruct us’). The idea here is that we must discover how the biblical text is relevant in our lives today. And then there is Origen’s very important conviction that Truth is mystery. Because of this, Truth – the Word, God’s Son – cannot be fully captured in the written word, but goes beyond it. In commenting on the second ending of the Fourth Gospel (‘There are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written’, John 21.25), Origen glimpses an unsaid, unwritten dimension in the Bible that reveals mystery: ‘Not only is it impossible for the grandeur of reality to be set down in writing, it cannot even be spoken by a fleshly tongue, nor can it be expressed in human words and languages’.⁶

Both the Bible’s words and its silences are revelatory of the One who is ‘the Word come forth from silence’. Scripture wants to introduce the reader to this Word. This is why Origen says, ‘I think that all of the Scriptures together, even when they are understood perfectly and in depth, are only the very first elements and the briefest of introductions to the totality of knowledge’.⁷ Still, only Scripture, when encountered in the Holy Spirit, has the ability to guide the reader beyond itself, into what is ‘beyond the written’ (cf. 1 Cor. 4.6). There is only one way to reach this knowledge, and that is to let oneself be caught up in the Spirit’s action and go where the Spirit goes. ‘It is not granted to everyone to seek what is “beyond the written” – the only way is to become one with it.’⁸ With its words and silences, Scripture wants to guide readers to a way of knowing Christ that is the Spirit’s work and the fruit of spiritual interpretation. Why else would Scripture itself tell readers that the Holy Spirit is its own hermeneutical key? It is the gift of the Spirit that gives Jesus’ disciples insight into the words he has spoken, and into scriptural words (cf. John 2.22; 7.39; 14.26). The Spirit is also the interpreter of what Christ left unspoken, inspiring his disciples throughout history to be faithful to the gospel in creative, not literal or legalistic, ways. As Jesus says in the Gospel of John:

I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

(John 16.12–14)

And so ‘the Scriptures wish to be read in the same Spirit in which they were written, and through the Spirit they must be understood’.⁹

2

Is a spiritual approach to the Bible relevant today?

I have spoken about Origen at some length because he is the classic representative of a tradition of interpretation that ‘was the formula for Christian biblical exegesis as it was practised without interruption until the sixteenth century, when the critical era turned it into simply one possible way of reading the Bible’.¹ Origen reminds us that reading Scripture can be ‘a complete exegetical act, one which integrates textual, liturgical and existential realities that are often weakened today by their mutual isolation’.²

Several decades ago, a heated debate took place over how the Bible ought to be interpreted in the Catholic Church. The place of scholarly exegesis in the Church was an especially contested topic. An urgent need was felt to reunify exegesis: to rediscover what it means to read Scripture spiritually, to return the Bible to its place at the heart of spirituality, and to do exegesis so that it is also theology. It was also felt that homiletics, catechesis, Christian initiation and the Church’s traditio fidei all ought to be biblically grounded. Exegesis, many realized, needs to be brought close to people’s daily lives so that it can lead to prayer and action.

More recently, we have realized that we need to make a careful distinction between healthy spiritual exegesis and ways of reading the Bible that are overly spiritualized, allegorical, literal or fundamentalist.

My conviction is that the need to read Scripture in the Spirit flows naturally from the Bible’s centrality in the life of the Church. It is a task on which the Church’s present and future hinge.

The Bible at the heart of the Church

The Bible’s centrality in the Church, which Catholics rediscovered during the Second Vatican Council after having lost sight of it for quite some time, is expressed in the conciliar document Dei Verbum (DV). This document affirms that Scripture unifies the four major areas of the Church’s life. In liturgy, the Bible makes ‘the voice of the Holy Spirit resound’, and through it ‘the Father . . . meets his children with great love and speaks with them’ (DV 21). Preaching should be ‘nourished and regulated by Sacred Scripture’ (DV 21). Theology must be based ‘on the written word of God . . . as its primary and perpetual foundation’, and the study of Scripture should be ‘the soul of sacred theology’ (DV 24). As for the faithful in their daily lives, they should ‘learn by frequent reading of the divine Scriptures’ (DV 25).

The Word wants to renew the face of the Church by turning every Christian into its servant (cf. Luke 1.12), and every ministry into a ministry of the word (Acts 20.20). ‘Pastoral preaching, catechetics and all Christian instruction, in which the liturgical homily must hold the foremost place’ (DV 24), need to look to the Bible for their nourishment and vitality. The Bible is at the heart of the Church so that, by keeping it close to us, we can learn ‘the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ’ by frequent reading: ‘Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ’ (DV 25). Christianity is ‘not the religion of the Bible, but the religion of Jesus Christ’.³ This means that it is not a religion of the Book but a ‘religion of interpretation’.⁴ The Bible’s centrality in Christianity becomes meaningful and effective when we read closely enough so that in our perscrutatio we experience an epiphany, or unveiling, of the face of Christ. As we come to know him, we are bound more and more closely in covenant with him. But it is the Holy Spirit who makes Scripture fertile in the heart of the Church, showing us Christ’s face and the way to an encounter with him, and giving direction to each of us personally and in our communities. Only then can we obey the Word that has come forth from the words on the biblical page.

When our use of philological, historical, and literary methods of biblical analysis remains open to the Holy Spirit’s action, we can read the Bible spiritually and ‘correctly balance respect for the text’s otherness with the fact that it is given to us to live by’.⁵ Awareness of tradition is an essential part of interpreting the Bible: such an awareness is an epiclesis, an invoking of the Spirit upon the biblical ‘letter’ as we follow in the footsteps of many readers throughout history, with their sensus fidelium and their unfolding stories of holiness.

Spiritual exegesis is an approach to the Bible in faith, where by faith we mean the belief that in the Bible the Word of God can be found. It is not a technique or method that competes with other methods. Far from it: spiritual exegesis has actually gleaned from other methods a range of valuable insights without which it would be much poorer. As exegesis in ecclesia, it seeks to forge a bond between the principle of the Bible’s unity, the variety of exegetical and hermeneutical approaches that are available, and the lived narratives of believers. Only this harmony can produce an interpretatio...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• About the author
• Title page
• Imprint
• Table of contents
• Series Foreword
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: BIBLE AND SPIRIT
• Part 2: LECTIO DIVINA IN THE CHURCH
• Notes