Abstract
Years ago, I sat with a student who was experiencing severe doubts about her faith. She shared her struggles, many of which she illustrated with her experiences as a high school math teacher. “I know how to help students understand difficult concepts clearly, without confusion. Why can’t God do the same? Why does it all have to be so confusing? So oblique?” While I sympathized with the frustration, I also recognized the problem. Sticking with her analogy, God isn’t teaching a math class; he’s teaching a poetry class. The instructor who explicates a poem line by line may articulate the poet’s meaning but can at the same time miss the whole experience of the poem, which ultimately is the poem’s meaning.
Michael Edwards’ first line is this: “We do not read the Bible as it is meant to be read.” This is quite a claim considering the extraordinary work in Christian hermeneutics over the centuries. Yet as I worked my way through this text, I found his arguments addressed one of the greater obstacles to evangelical Christian spiritual formation—the lack of imagination—and lays this dearth at the feet of our Western intellectual traditions. We prefer “a universal architecture for the mind,” a tidy and coherent construct that allows us to extract, deduce, summarize, synthesize, and compartmentalize faith components. It caters to our desire to normalize the Word when, as Edwards emphasizes throughout his text, “the Christian religion is strange, foreign. And this is so not only because it comes from another culture and from another region of the world. It is foreign to what man is, or to what he has become.” We cannot fit the Word into our expectations or our conceptualized categories; the Divine invitation hovers just beyond our reason, demanding an inner vision. This is what Pascal called “le coeur,” a spiritual organ that has its own reason and “without which faith is only human and useless for salvation” (f 110).
In Reflections on the Psalms, C.S. Lewis wrote, “It seems to me appropriate, almost inevitable, that when that great Imagination which in the beginning, for Its own delight and for the delight of men and angels and (in their proper mode) of beasts, had invented and formed the whole world of Nature, submitted to express Itself in human speech, that speech should sometimes be poetry. For poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.”
Biblical poetry confronts us with this invisible, inaudible strangeness; it demands our imagination. While the Bible’s prose instructs and clarifies and describes this reality in revelatory ways, the Bible’s poetry inducts us into the search for and experience of that reality. Beyond its form and beyond its content, a poem kindles awareness, and that awareness is critical to relationship with the Poet. “Through its concentration and its reluctance to deliver merely a message, a poem invites us into the life of words, directs our attention to the sounds to be heard and the rhythms to be felt.” Edwards believes that the sounds, the rhythms, the movement of poetic language are themselves messages of grace, expressions of Presence, invitations into relationship.
Most readers of Scripture can easily point to the Psalms as a “book of poetry,” and so of course Edwards has an entire chapter on psalmody and its power to help the reader “access above all a certain way of seeing the real, where what we now call imagination grasps the presence around us, and sometimes even the appearing, of another world.” As N.T. Wright argued in The Case for the Psalms, regular immersion in the Psalms creates for our hearts and minds an entirely different understanding of reality, a revelation of God and the world and our place in it that cannot easily be achieved apart from the poetic vision. (Evelyn Underhill always called this Reality—the Real beyond our shadowed visions). As Edwards describes the Psalms, “they lay out…for both the individual and the community the lived experience of religion that other biblical books have the task of defining.”
Edwards, however, opens up a much bigger vision of Biblical poetry than just the Psalms. He explores both Old and New Testament poetic writings, including chapters on the Song of Songs, Job, Isaiah’s prophetic call, Luke’s numerous poetic inclusions, and other New Testament lyrical writings, from the Beatitudes to the Our Father and the hymns in Pauline and Johannine writings. Most provocatively, perhaps, he writes a chapter on the Lord’s Supper and critiques the multiple ways we have tried to manage Jesus’ blunt words, “This is my body,” rather than take them quite purely as he meant them to be taken.
While lectio divina is not the focus of Edwards’ work, his exploration of poetry and its imaginative, evocative language pushes the reader into considering new ways to read the scriptures, ways that would certainly enhance practices of lectio divina. Such reading invites awareness of God’s Presence and suggests that, like the Pleiades, these poetic rhythms and what they point to are most keenly seen in our spiritual peripheral vision. Some astronomers call this “averted vision.” Looking straight at a star cluster may give you more detail, but looking just next to it gives you a sense of its brightness and beauty. “Reading,” he suggests, “can itself become an event, above all when Jesus is present and speaks to us.” Is this a “proper” hermeneutical method? No, no it’s not; it’s not a hermeneutical method at all. It’s a listening/visioning skill that helps us welcome the movement of God within.
The heartbeat of Edwards’ argument derives from his conversion experience, which he writes of beautifully in chapter 2, “A Feeling of Presence.” “Everything, or almost everything, that I will have to say in this book flows from this strange experience.” That chapter alone is worth the price of the book. His childhood and young adulthood, empty of any Christian content, was interrupted by a troubling suspicion that there was “another way of knowing…another world to know, and the necessity of another way, of another faculty, for discovering it.” Thus Edwards emulates Pascal’s discovery of “le coeur,” this way of knowing that surpassed reason. Faith, according to Edwards, is a strange and supernatural gift, not a natural human function of amassing propositional truths. His story of quest, leap, and gift drives the reader into a simple examination of soul and a renewed longing for that Word spoken that discloses Reality.