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The Bible at the heart of the believing community

Americanisms aside, David Winter discovers a balanced approach to Lectio Divina

Book jacket © not advert

Life with God: A life-transforming new approach to Bible reading
Richard Foster

Hodder & Stoughton £10.99 (978-0-340-95494-2)
Church Times Bookshop £9.90

THERE ARE quite a few things about this book to put off the sensitive British reader, from the sub-title to the publishers’ decision not to bother to Anglicise the contents, so that we have American spelling, grammar, and idiom all the way through. There are also the familiar mannerisms of best-selling Christian writers in the United States: exaggerated adjectives (supernatural, pulsating, relational, cosmic, wondrous); the need to codify everything — the “Emmanuel Principle” (endlessly), the “with-God principle” (excessively); and the complicated way of saying simple things — “relational dynamic” (then helpfully rephrased as “periphrastic reality”).

The book aims to deliver readers from any formula for Bible reading, but at times it seems to be playing for the other team.

All of that, however, is essentially cultural prejudice. In the end, this is a book that successfully unpacks the ingredients of a balanced approach to devotional Bible reading. Although the publishers call it new, it is, in fact, blissfully old; for here is Lectio Divina explained and enthusiastically endorsed. Here are the traditional means of grace, drawn from their biblical roots and exposed as keys to spiritual formation.

Here, the six traditions of Christianity — the contemplative, the holiness, the Charismatic, the social-justice, the Evangelical, and the incarnational (sacramental) — are revealed as entry points into the “richness and diversity of the biblical witness”.

This is a book that puts the Bible at the heart of the life of the believing community, not as a one-stop problem-solver, but because all through Christian history it has been read “in company with the historic witness of the people of God”.

Sensitive readers will avoid the charts at the back: “fifteen expressions of the dynamic of spiritual transformation in the with-God life”. Far better to concentrate on the thoughtful and often profound exposition of the disciplined, expectant, attentive, and humble approach to the Bible which Foster sets out in the previous 200 pages.

Canon Winter is a retired cleric in the diocese of Oxford.

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