Luke Timothy Johnson, Robert W. Woodruff Professor Emeritus of New Testament and Christian Origins at Candler School of Theology, has spent a lifetime writing on the New Testament. If you want to know more about his latest book,Constructing Paul, consider Nijay Gupta’s interview or Scot McKnight’s book review.
Here, I wish to connect Johnson’s vision of Scripture to the life of the church. Under his supervision as a doctoral student, he taught me how to read Scripture both closely and imaginatively, as an artful skill and spiritual discipline. A significant refrain in Johnson’s work is the centrality of religious experience for the interpretation of Scripture. At times, for Johnson, the cumulative weight of human experience contradicts scriptural commands; while for evangelicals Scripture holds the central place of authority over other common sources of theological reflection (experience, tradition, and reason). Yet Johnson has a lot to teach on reading and experiencing Scripture together. This interview explores how we might form a scriptural imagination, and why it matters for the church today.
How did your experience as a Benedictine monk shape your theological imagination?
I was first a seminarian, then a monk, for some fifteen years, from the age of thirteen to the age of twenty-eight. I found in the monastery the expression of the church as an intentional community. All members agreed with Léon Bloy, that the only real human tragedy was not to become a saint, who shared all their possessions, who cared for the weak among them and sought to edify each other through common practices carried out mainly in silence. Before Vatican II, we chanted the entire Latin psalter every week in choir, repeated some psalms daily, with the Magnificat (at Vespers) and the Benedictus (at Lauds). Daily Eucharist was also chanted in Gregorian chant, along with hours of contemplative prayer, the weekly chapter of faults, and the habit of lectio divina. All of this “Ora” was interspersed with daily manual and intellectual labor of the most varied sort. These practices had their transformative effect through daily repetition. It is almost impossible to sing the psalter so regularly in choir without its teaching one to “imagine the world that Scripture imagines.” In that context of silence and prayer, I read patristic writers, medieval mystics, and contemporary philosophers and theologians, not as texts to be analyzed critically, but as fountains of wisdom for the shaping of the mind and heart in the obedience of faith. In 1969, I was caught up in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and everything that monasticism taught me about the work of the Holy Spirit suddenly gained new urgency and power. Observing (and experiencing) that transforming power of the Spirit affected everything I have subsequently thought or written.
I can see why openness to the Spirit’s continuing work is crucial for you. Why is this important for the church?
Prayer for the gift of the Spirit, and the alert silence of attentiveness that is an element of such prayer, enables believers to discern in and through the Spirit how God’s Spirit is present in the world. It also enables believers to discern how human patterns of resistance and disobedience (including our own) obstruct that presence. I think that mainstream Christians (Catholic as well as Protestant) have much to learn from their Pentecostal brothers and sisters. Some expressions of the Spirit in these traditions may be distorted, but so, surely, are the all-too-predictable processes of less enthusiastic traditions. The Charismatic emphasis on Pentecost as an enduring reality, and on the presence of the Living Christ through the Spirit to all who are open to that presence, I think, is exactly correct. The premise of God’s Spirit working in the world and inviting our spiritual discernment distinguishes the church’s “not despising prophecy but testing all things” from the merely human process of political calculation concerning present circumstances.
You insist that theology belongs to the church, as a response to what God is doing among us. Why is this?
When I think of “church” I think first of all of the local congregation, the community of believers that meet in the name of Jesus to sing and pray and share their lives. The local church is where the church is most the organism Paul calls the Body of Christ, the place where the Spirit can most effectively animate and empower. We can think of church, to be sure, as a world-wide organization, as complex sets of authority structures, as a political presence in the world, as an element in culture. But all these are derivative. The church is above all the embodied presence of believers to each other in an intentional community enlivened by the Holy Spirit. It is local. It is specific. It is humble. But it is also alive and flexible.
The community called the church has its own social location and its own rules of discourse. What counts here is the discernment of the Spirit and the profession of faith, and the witness of sanctity. My position that theology is the proper activity of the church follows directly from this understanding of the church as the embodied community of faith and of theology as the articulation of faith. In short, theology is not in the first instance something to be written in books; it is a process that is practiced in the context of a community’s shared prayer and pondering of their lives in the light of Scripture.
You also insist that theology must also recover “scriptural imagination” for the church’s life and mission. Can you explain what you mean by this?
When believers gather together and seek to “do theology” in the manner I have suggested, they find themselves greatly inhibited by their lack of scriptural imagination and are fearful of the counter-cultural stance the language of Scripture and the Creed invite them to adopt. We are all deeply shaped by the epistemology of the enlightenment, that mode of reasoning that runs the world around us so dominantly that we can speak of the “secularization” of consciousness. To gather in the name of Jesus to praise God defies the sort of rationality that reduces, rationalizes, and commodifies all material things, insisting that what we can see, touch, and feel is all that is real, while labeling people who devote themselves to an unseen, ultimate power as self-deceived and deluded. Such defiance depends on an alternative construal of reality to the one provided by the purveyors of secular success.
This alternative construal I have called “imagining the world that Scripture imagines.” Rather than reading Scripture with the question of how it is true according to the standards of modernity, with respect, say, to history and cosmology, we allow ourselves to enter into the world that Scripture imagines. The truth of Scripture, we must insist, is found not in the way it describes the world but in the way it prescribes for the world. The point of true biblical scholarship is not the discovery of the world that brought Scripture into being, but rather an understanding and embracing the world that Scripture itself brings into being.
Scripture, from the beginning of Genesis to the conclusion of Revelation, imagines a remarkably consistent world, one which is created by and ordered to an unseen yet all-powerful God.
Scripture, from the beginning of Genesis to the conclusion of Revelation, imagines a remarkably consistent world, one which is created by and ordered to an unseen yet all-powerful God, one in which this unseen power creates creatures whose purposes are known fully only to him. God creates humans in his own image with the ability to discern and praise the implicit presence of the creator in all things created, who calls humans to obedience and chooses some people especially to represent his call among others, who intervenes to save people from their own worst tendencies and through the sending of prophets and finally of his own son, has elevated humans to a share in God’s own life.
This “imaginative world” appears ludicrous to the visible masters of the universe who pull the strings of political, cultural, and economic power. To speak of an imaginative world, however, is not the same thing as speaking of an imaginary world. The world I describe is not a fantasy. It is brought into empirical visibility by those who enter into it, embrace it, embody it, and enact it.
When the church recovers scriptural imagination to fuel its theological vision, what does that look like on the ground?
Suppose that a congregation, after a long period of prayer and discernment, decides that it will truly try to keep Sunday as a day holy to the Lord, a true Sabbath. Keeping the Sabbath is one of God’s commandments; it is also a profoundly good thing for humans to have a day of true rest from labor, to relax the body and the mind and allow a rested body to imagine and dream.
Negatively, such a decision would mean members committing themselves to not working on Sunday, not scheduling services around youth soccer or NFL football and not shopping in stores or online. It would mean devoting the day to rest and worship. Such a decision, if taken seriously, would quickly reveal the difficulties of many in participating in such a day of rest: people who must shop on Sunday because they work every other day, people who must work on Sunday because that is how they can meet the mortgage payment, people who have small children needing their care, people whose immobility and lack of transportation (or oxygen) prohibits their sharing in the communal prayer and worship of the gathered community.
In short, the congregation would be given the opportunity to discern and respond to all the levels of need within the congregation itself—all of the ways that stand in the way of making one day of the week truly “holy” and different from every other day. Having a Scriptural imagination for the sake of Sabbath would mean mobilizing the resources of the church, each healthy and able part of the Body of Christ, to make it possible for all its members to share in a day of rest.
Where is theology in such practical discernment? It is implicit throughout the entire process of prayer and faithful obedience in response to God’s presence. An openness to the presence of God’s Holy Spirit, expressed through the posture of silent prayer, is the necessary prerequisite for discernment in and by the church. Praying the psalms together helps believers form a scriptural imagination. But prayer for the gift of the Spirit, and the alert silence of attentiveness that is an element of such prayer, enables believers to discern in and through the Spirit how God’s Spirit is present in the world. We’re made aware too of how our human patterns of resistance and disobedience obstruct that presence. It becomes explicitly “theology” when the premises of the entire process are expressed verbally in the give-and-take conversation of the faithful as they read their lives within the context of a scriptural imagination.
Dr. Elizabeth Shively is Senior Lecturer in New Testament and Director of Teaching, University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She serves as a theology advisor for Christianity Today.
