Opening to God, Life with God, Lectio Matters and Lectio Divina

A member of an adult education course that I taught on the book of Acts showed up one Sunday morning with his own maps and charts, a CD by an evangelical preacher whose credentials seemed suspect, and a quiz on the material that he promptly distributed to the other members of the class. He proceeded to take over the morning's session as I sat there in proper indignation. He told me that he was tired of all the conversations about our lives. He wanted to "learn something about the Bible." If it had not been for his imminent departure from the class, we might have had a productive discussion about the different ways in which we learn when we read scripture. He wanted us to learn more about God, while I wanted us to also learn about loving God.

I am considering sending my erstwhile Sunday school student a copy of Richard Foster's Life with God, a book that reminds us that we do not read the Bible just for the facts. Foster is the founder of Renovaré, an institute for spiritual formation, and the author of several best-selling books on Christian spirituality. In Life with God, he argues that modern historical and critical interpretations supply crucial information about the Bible and are necessary for helping us see it as a contextual, fallible and human document, but that the heart of the Christian story is the God whom we encounter in the pages of the Old and New Testaments.

Simply put, the Bible is about our life with God and God's life with us in Christ. Foster calls this the "Immanuel Principle" and summons us to discover the God who came to dwell with us and to do so by entering the pages of scripture in a mood of expectation, attention and humility. "Across thousands of years," Foster writes, "with wave upon wave of names and faces and recurring events, the Bible threads God's patient words of love and faithfulness: I am with you." The gospel proclaims the good news and invites us to become part of it.