Experiencing God through the Scriptures
Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was an outstanding theologian, journalist, pastor and prime minister of Holland. As an evangelical he was ahead of his time when he taught that Christians acquire a knowledge of God through the “soul in its totality”, which includes the “understanding, feeling and imagination”. Evangelicals not aware of recent developments in evangelical theology may still object to the idea that we know God through our feeling and imagination as well. Historian James E. McGoldrick in his recent biography, Abraham Kuyper: God’s Renaissance Man, faults Kuyper on this point. He claims that this teaching cannot be consistent with Kuyper’s high view of the Scriptures.
But how is truth about God revealed in the Scriptures? Scriptures are mostly either narrative or poetry and sometimes both. Narrative and poetry are designed to speak through the imagination to recreate experience and communicate feeling. When we read the parable of the prodigal son, we cannot say we understand what it is teaching about God’s love unless through our imagination we recreate the experience of the father and feel how he felt toward his wayward son. And to more fully appreciate God’s love towards sinners we also need to get into the skin of that son and feel the unconditional love he experienced from his father.
When we read Psalm 23, we cannot say we understand what it is teaching about God’s faithfulness unless through our imagination we recreate the experience of the sheep and feel the deep sense of security it enjoys because of who the shepherd is. To help us feel how deep this sense of security can be the psalmist complicates the poem by suddenly switching the imagery of the shepherd to that of a generous host who prepares a feast for his guest in the very presence of the guest’s enemies. Imagine ourselves securely enjoying a feast while those seeking to harm us could only stand and watch. How secure can we be, when God is our Shepherd?
Of course the Bible is not just narrative and poetry. If it were so we will likely misinterpret it. For instance, if the parable of the prodigal son is all we have to teach us about God’s forgiveness of sin, we may wrongly conclude that God could forgive sin without having to pay for the price of sin. Narrative and poetry do not spell out the teaching they embody. But we have speeches and epistles that teach truth explicitly through propositions. These propositions help provide interpretive controls for us to experience the truth embodied in narratives and poetry.
For instance, Romans 5:8 spells out that for God to forgive sins out of His love Jesus had to die for us. And from His speeches Jesus teaches that He is God and that God is a Trinity. This means Jesus did not die for us as “an innocent third party”, but as a member of the Triune God, the involved party whom we sinned against. Thus to forgive sin God must Himself bear the consequence of the wrong done against Him (which is death). With this insight we can see that the forgiving father in the parable did pay the price of sin by bearing the consequence of the son’s wrong. He had to bear the insult, hurt and shame his son caused him all by himself. Thus human forgiveness resembles divine forgiveness.
It is important to note that even in Romans 5:8 when Paul is teaching truth propositionally and logically, he tries to make us feel God’s love. He says that one would hardly die for a righteous man though someone may dare to die for a good man. But God loves us so much that Christ died for us when we were yet sinners. Through this comparison he seeks to evoke our imagination to feel how much God loves us. Thus when we talk about getting to know God through our understanding as well as our feeling and imagination we are talking about feeling and imagination evoked by Scriptures properly interpreted. It is not enough, and is not possible, to “know” God through a purely rational “understanding” of who He is. Unless we also feel God’s love, faithfulness, sovereignty, holiness, wisdom, etc., we cannot say we know God. If we are only informed of who He is we will have a hard time trying to trust or obey Him.
The Bible is not only full of narratives. Genesis to Revelation is one overarching narrative, interspersed with laws, poetry, biographies, speeches, epistles, etc. The Bible records the very beginning of the world to its very end and on to a new beginning that has no end. As Craig Bartholomew and Michael Goheen shows in The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story, this overarching narrative has both cohesion and direction. It is important to read, study and teach the Bible as such. This is not just for the sake of comprehending the message but also for living it out. According to Bartholomew and Goheen,
Many of us have read the Bible as if it were merely a mosaic of little bits--theological bits, moral bits, historical-critical bits, sermon bits, devotional bits. But to read the Bible in such a fragmented way is to ignore its divine author's intention to shape our lives through its story. All human communities live out of some story that provides a context for understanding the meaning of history, that gives shape and direction to their lives. If we allow the Bible to become fragmented, it is in danger of being absorbed into whatever other story is shaping our culture, and will thus cease to shape our lives as it should. The dominant cultural story of the secular Western world has been twisted by idolatry. If as believers we allow this story (rather than the Bible) to become the foundation of our thought and action, then our lives will manifest not the truths of Scripture, but the lies of an idolatrous culture. Thus the unity of Scripture is no minor matter: a fragmented Bible may actually produce theologically orthodox, morally upright, warmly pious idol worshippers!
If our lives are to be shaped by the story of Scripture, we will need to understand two things well: that the biblical story is a compelling unity on which we may depend, and that each of us has a place within that story….
We need to be familiar with at least an outline of this overarching narrative and “make the Story our story, to find our place in it [somewhere between Acts 28 and Revelation], and to indwell it as the true story of our world”. Even when we are only studying a part of Genesis-Revelation, we still need to be immersed in this Story and allow the text being studied, be it a narrative, a poem or an epistle, to shape or reshape our thinking and feeling. It is like reading a well-written novel or watching a well-made movie and being changed by the message embodied by the story. The crucial difference is that through the Bible we can also experience and encounter God, the Reality behind the Truth it embodies. Is this the God we serve?
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