Tuesday, May 22, 2018

How do you read the Bible?

In this approach to Scripture, Pentecostals are much closer to those of the ancient church, which practiced lectio divina than they are to their fundamentalist and evangelical counterparts. Their similarity is their view that the ultimate end of reading Scripture is not “accounting for the facts” so much as it is hearing from God. This kind of activity would posit its own form of “objectivity,” one anchored in the matrix of communal worship. Given this orientation, one could say that Pentecostals read the Bible as a mystical text; they repeatedly seek to encounter God through this book, making this spiritual discipline a significant feature of their mystical outlook within their wider spirituality.—Pentecostalism as a Christian Mystical Tradition, pages 113–14

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