I knew Scripture was inerrant and inspired, but didn’t let it move me to devotion.
Augustine said there’s a way you can check or double-check whether you understand the Bible. If you read it right, he said, it would produce a “double love of God and of neighbor.”
In fact, “whoever finds a lesson there useful to the building of charity,” Augustine wrote, “even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived, nor is he lying in any way.”
I read these words from On Christian Doctrine in the fall of 2008, and I knew that I had a problem. I had spent the previous two years in the Biblical Exegesis program at Wheaton College Graduate School, and I was not confident that all my training in Hebrew, Greek, and exegesis had fostered that “double love” in me. I understood the importance of Scripture, I knew it was inspired, but had I let it affect me the way that it should?
I didn’t think the problem was my Greek or Hebrew. I knew it wasn’t the Scriptures themselves. I suspected it was my theology.
I was taught all the verses explaining how Scripture is inerrant, infallible, inspired, and sharper than a two-edged sword, but these words seemed sterile and static when describing the book I knew was different than all other books. The facts of Biblical inspiration were solid enough, but I didn’t have a dynamic social imaginary to animate my Christian life towards study and devotion.
Augustine was right: I should love God and my neighbor more after reading Scripture, so what might this look like? Was there a Biblical paradigm, and not just prooftexts, that could help me? I found a way forward in John 5.
In John 5:1-18, Jesus heals a man at Bethesda who was sick for 38 years. ...
from Christianity Today Magazine
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