He gave me more instruction, I listened (in the sense of attended to), but I did not absorb what he was saying. The situation got worse as I backed even farther up the hill. I was frustrated, as only a fifteen-year-old male (now shamed in public) can be.
I stopped the car, put it in park, and offered a suggestion that indicated I was not listening to his instruction—in the sense of attention, absorption, and action. I said I should drive forward out of this mess and start all over. My teacher, convinced I wouldn’t learn from this mistake, refused to let me. I “listened” to his advice, put the car in reverse again, began moving backward, and made the situation worse. Now all four tires were on the hill.
I said it was impossible to back out, quickly put the car in forward, and began to drive. My instructor slammed on his brake and said, “Put it in reverse!”
I had stopped listening and was seeing everything my way. I argued, my frustration heating up into stronger words. I demanded that I drive forward.
He said, “Listen to what I say and you will get out of this mess.”
I said, “No way, it’s impossible.”
With his foot still on the brake, I did a fifteen-year-old thing. I put the car in park, pushed open the door, got out of the car, shut the door, and began to walk home. I had had enough. Up the street about a half a block, my teacher drove by, gave a little honk, and waved at me. I nodded and kept walking.
About two weeks later, my instructor suggested we continue my driver’s education lessons. He didn’t have to mention that the lesson would be on how to drive in reverse. I was now ready to listen and I absorbed and acted on his words. (I never back up without thinking of that event in Reed Park.)
Did I mention the driver’s education teacher was my father?
David, a Nonlistener
The Bible is filled with people who, by not listening to God, became saintly folks acting sinfully. Take David as an example. David knew what Moses said in Deuteronomy 17:17: the king “must not take many wives, or his heart will be led astray. He must not accumulate large amounts of silver and gold.” David heard this (attentiveness), but he didn’t listen (absorption, action). Instead, David accumulated wives and concubines:
Michal, daughter of Saul
Abigail, widow of Nabal of Carmel
Ahinoam of Jezreel
Maakah, daughter of Talmai king of Geshur
Haggith
Abital
Eglah
Ten concubines according to 2 Samuel 15:16
Bathsheba, intentionally widowed from Uriah the Hittite (2 Samuel 11:14–17)
Abishag (1 Kings 1:1–4)
A colossal example of not listening. His son Solomon had 700 princess wives and 300 concubines (1 Kings 11:3). He must have been on steroids!
Love Listens
The Bible is also filled with examples of good and godly folks who paid attention to, absorbed, and then acted on the words of God. Abraham, Joseph, and Josiah are the first ones who come to mind for me. You may think of others. It’s all about listening, the kind of listening that leads us to love God and to love others. The apostle Paul did not put the word “listen” in his list of what love is like in 1 Corinthians 13, but he would agree with any of us who join Alan Jacobs by saying, “Love listens.”
Alan Jacobs’s fine study, mentioned above, leads me to this question: “What would Bible reading look like if it were to be governed by ‘the love chapter’?” I read Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13:4–8 and see in these words a blueprint for reading the Bible. If love listens, then listening to God in the Bible will look like Paul’s virtues of love. Add the word “listening” to each of these lines and see what happens:
[Listening] love is patient;
[listening] love is kind.
It does not envy,
it does not boast,
it is not proud.
[Listening love] does not dishonor others,
it is not self-seeking,
it is not easily angered,
it keeps no record of wrongs.
[Listening] love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts,
always hopes, always perseveres.
[Listening] love never fails.
Good reading is an act of love and therefore an act of listening. But good listening—good attentive listening, good loving listening—is more than gathering information. It is more than just sitting around the back porch with God as we sip tea while God tells us his story. God speaks to us for a reason—I call this “missional” listening. In brief, God tells his story so we can enter into a relationship with him, listen to him, and live out his Word in our day and in our way.
CHAPTER 8
THE BORING CHAPTER (ON MISSIONAL LISTENING)
What Does God Want to Happen to Listeners?
After reading this chapter, Kris referred to it as “the boring chapter” and kept asking me if I had made it better. It was not that she thought it had bad ideas, but she thought it was too theoretical and more than once asked me if I really needed this chapter. I can say I have hacked away and reshaped this chapter a number of times, and I know one thing: it’s not as boring as it once was. If you get bored, skip to the next chapter. But let me begin with a story; maybe that will help.
A few years back I taught a course at North Park called “Methods in Bible Study.” I believe it is important to read the Bible with tradition, so one of our textbooks, by the great fourth-century church father St. Augustine, was titled On Christian Doctrine.1 Augustine’s book was the ancient church’s equivalent of our How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth.2 What I read in Augustine’s book annoyed me and delighted me at the same time. It gave a method that undid everything I was teaching my students and yet told them everything I ultimately wanted to say. Why? Because it made the bold claim that if the Bible leads the reader to be more loving, then the Bible has accomplished its mission. What annoyed me was that the mission was accomplished whether or not we interpreted the passage with historical precision and contextual accuracy.
Of course, someone would have immediately called good ole Augustine on the spot for suggesting accurate interpretation doesn’t matter. Augustine anticipated that, so he offered a graphic image. Getting the right result of becoming more loving, even if we aren’t as accurate in our interpretation as he’d prefer, is like a person on a journey who gets lost but somehow finds the way to the right destination.3 It’s not as if Augustine thought every interpretation was as good as any other. Augustine wrote shelves of commentaries on books of the Bible; he knew how to turn his finger into a pointer and his quill into a torch when he thought he had to. But Augustine knew the Bible’s main mission: so we can become people who love God and love others. If our reading of the Bible leads to this, the mission is accomplished. If it isn’t . . .
Here is a sad fact: many of those who teach us how to read the Bible teach us how to gather information and find the right path from A to B. They teach us about words and paragraphs and book outlines, and they point us to sources and resources for understanding the historical context. Each of these is important. But what Bible study books don’t focus on is church and personal transformation. Any method of Bible study that doesn’t lead to transformation abandons the missional path of God and leaves us stranded.
So what is God’s missional focus in giving us the story of the Bible? In one expression, it is to give us facts so that we will move those facts into relationship, character, and action.
The Relational Approach Is Missional
The relational approach to the Bible goes beyond normal methods to take us to the heart of what reading the Bible is all about. What is that heart? I can think of no better place than Paul’s words to Timothy in 2 Timothy 3:14–17. This and Psalm 119 are the most significant passages in the Bible when it comes to the Bible talking about itself. It tells us that God gave the Bible a mission: God speaks to us so we will be the kind of people he wants and will live
the way he wants us to live. Read the verses below quietly until you get to the beginning of verse 17, and then forcefully announce (unless you are in a public place) the first two words of verse 17:
But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17SO THAT the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. (emphasis added)
Everything leads to verse 17, where we come face-to-face with a big fat “so that.” Educators know that teaching begins at the end, with outcomes, with the “so thats” of education. Outcome-based education means we ask this question as we prepare and teach: “What do we want our students to be and to be able to do at the end of this assignment, this course, this major, and this degree?” We no longer ask just what we want students to know—measured normally by exams and papers—but we want to know what students are able to do with what they know. Typically, theological schools have three major outcomes or something like them, three major “so thats”:
• knowledge of Bible, theology, and church history
• critical thinking skills
• spiritual formation in both identity and behavior
That is, we want our students to know some facts, we want them to be able to think reasonably about faith, and we want them to be internally formed so they can practice what they believe. We cannot promise they will achieve each of these, but we shape our courses toward these “so that” outcomes. By the way, the word “outcome” for me is gobbledygook English from a group of people I call “educrats,” whose job it is to run from school to school to make sure professors are accomplishing something measurable. The word “outcome” makes me think of what our plumber pulls out of our sewer. But “educrats,” most of whom must not have done well in English classes, have worked themselves into a position to decide which terms teachers must use. We now use this word as often as our students use the word “like,” as in “she was, like, so late to class,” and as often as our politicians use the gobbledygook “single-payer.”
God too is interested in “outcomes,” though I’m not sure he’d approve of the word, so the Bible uses “so that.” To get to the outcomes, we have to go through a sequence of thoughts for Paul, unmasking the four stages for missional listening as he writes to Timothy. Just remember that everything is aimed at “so that.” Everything! Any reading of any passage in the Bible, the whole Story, that doesn’t end up with the “so that” of 2 Timothy 3:17 is not done.
Missional Listening
Missional Listening Begins with the Wisdom of the Ages
Paul begins where we left off in an earlier chapter: he exhorts Timothy to read the Bible with the tradition, not through the tradition, and certainly not all by himself. Timothy has been formed by those who knew the gospel. Here’s what Paul says to him in 2 Timothy 3:14–15.
But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. (emphasis added)
As Phil Towner, who has written the finest commentary we have today on this letter from Paul, deftly observes, “The teaching is only as good as its teachers.”4 I would add, “The teaching is also just as good as its teachers.”
Judaism is known for its mastery of Torah and Talmud. It is also known for teachers who not only know but observe. Such was the world in which Jesus and Paul lived. When we think of teaching in the first century, we dare not let ourselves think of a classroom with desks and inkpots and papyrus scrolls bundled up on a library shelf at the back of the room. Or of a teacher in the front of a room lecturing away as students were doing what they could to stay awake and memorize their lessons so they would pass the next test. Nor should we think of learning as simply amassing information. Instead, we need to think of a Jesus and a Paul who were out and about engaging folks in conversation, with disciples hanging around them, asking questions, and studiously watching the behaviors of Jesus and Paul. In other words, education for them was not simply information; it was also formation. Education was training in righteousness and in good works. It was more like a golf lesson than a classroom lecture. Don’t forget the apostle Paul said, “I urge you to imitate me” (1 Corinthians 4:16), and he also said that he and his co-workers had offered themselves to the Thessalonians “as a model for you to imitate” (2 Thessalonians 3:9).
Timothy’s teachers were two women—his mother and grandmother (2 Timothy 1:5; 3:14)—and the apostle Paul (3:10–11). Missional listening begins with wise mentors, such as Timothy’s.
Slide and Land
You have no doubt either been to or seen a waterslide in a big theme park. Confession time: I’ve been to water parks, I’ve watched my children at water parks, but—here’s my excuse—sliding down a slide (or swinging on a swing) is not a thing I do; it easily disrupts something my doctor calls the “inner ear” and “labyrinthian canals.” I get nauseated sliding down slides. My illustration here comes from watching my kids when they were young.
Waterslides are long and wide and curvy and have wonderfully banked sides. Water runs down the waterslide freely and abundantly to increase the speed of the slider. What we might not observe is that everything about a trip down the slide and into the pool of water at the bottom is determined by the slide itself. Even more important for our safety is that where we land is shaped by the slide. Without banked, steep sides, we would fly off the slide and . . . well, we’d get hurt.
Reading the Bible with our wise mentors is like sliding down a waterslide. The gospel is the slide; the Bible is one wall, our teachers and our Great Tradition are the other wall; the water is the Holy Spirit. The pool at the bottom of the slide is our world. If we stay on the slide and inside the walls as we slide down, we will land in our own water world. If we knock down the walls of the slide or get too careless and tumble out of the safety of that slide, we could injure ourselves. However, observe this: our life is lived in the pool. Here’s my point: God asks us to listen—attention, absorption, and action—to the gospel story and to read the Bible with our wise mentors who have gone before us. When we do that, we will land in the pool in our day and in our way.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Missional listening begins with the wisdom of the ages, but there is a special dynamic at work in missional listening that has the capacity to change who we are and how we live.
Missional Listening Is Empowered by Inspiration
Scripture is also God-breathed, or “inspired.” Paul didn’t have a New Testament, so when he says “Scripture,” he probably means the Old Testament and perhaps some gospel traditions about Jesus and some early apostolic writings (1 Timothy 5:18; cf. 2 Peter 3:15–16). What is most important here is the dynamic Paul is pointing at: the presence of the Spirit who takes words on paper and turns them into the living presence of God speaking to us. Here is where the relational approach reminds us that Scripture, as God-breathed, is God the person speaking to us on paper.
What makes missional listening powerful, what leads the reader into a life of righteousness and good works (the outcomes Paul mentions), is the promise that the Spirit who hovered over the author is the same Spirit at work in the reader.5 Unfortunately, too many of us spend too much time arguing about the meaning of “inspiration” and not enough on the point of it all. The Spirit who guided the author through a history and a community to the moment when he put quill to papyrus is the same Spirit at work when you and I sit down with our Bibles.
What gives us the power for the outcomes is the Spirit.
Missional Listening Is a Process
For years Kris would get home from her office as a psychologist and ask me how my da
y went. She always asked me what I was studying, and sometimes I would bubble up in a flourish of words. Now before I say anything further, I need to insert this thought: I live and breathe and eat and sleep and walk and play and converse with a woman who is unflaggingly committed to what matters and to what is useful. She knows that “theories” can only go so far; she knows that theology is supposed to involve a process leading to real life changes.
One day when she asked what I had studied, I told her I had been studying the participle “going” in the Great Commission and informed her that after hours of study, a good translation would be “Go make disciples!” That, I thought (and still do think), is better than “By going, make disciples” or “Go and make disciples.” I had discovered something. Not earth-shattering, of course, but my hard work paid off. Kris thought my translation was clever and, for all she knew, accurate. Then she made another point by asking a question, just the sort of question a psychologist might ask: “So, did you go make any disciples today?” Bingo! The “So what?” question got me. If what I learned wasn’t “useful,” if the process didn’t lead to the “so that” of 2 Timothy 3:17, it wasn’t much good. Kris’s questions have changed my career interests.
My book, The Jesus Creed: Loving God, Loving Others, which discusses the significance of loving God and loving others as the heart of spiritual formation, emerged from a string of Kris’s “So what?” conversations. The point of the book is to get us to recite the Jesus Creed so often that it digs its way into our very bones. One time I said something out of impatience (my besetting sin) to Kris, and she observed in the far room that what I had said “wasn’t very Jesus-Creed-like.” Ouch. So a week or so later, Kris said something to me I didn’t like, so I informed her that her comment was not very Jesus-Creed-like. Her defense: “I didn’t write the book!”
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