SIMPLE FAITH, LOVE AND HOPE

I remember once as a young Christian going to a service where the bible passage was from Ezra. The preacher told the congregation that if they didn't know where Ezra was it was right beside Nehemiah. Like that helped!

I always remember that incident when seemingly learned people say things like: As everybody knows ... xyz ,

or it is commonly accepted that ...

and then they look at you as if you were a numptie for admitting you had never known that until then.

So I was thinking the same thing again this morning while reading Micheal Gorman's book Cruciformity: Paul's Narrative Spirituality of the Cross. The paragraph (on p7) reads:

... what a biblical text says about faith, lover and hope, (in that order) corresponds to an ancient Christian way of reading the Scriptures that flourished in the Middle Ages (from Augustine to Luther) and is enjoying something of a renaissance in the present.

I hadn't even heard of the renaissance never mind the original methodology ... or at least I had, but those who told me always made it sound more complicated that it might have been. The gist of this ancient way of reading the bible (for those of you who didn't know it) is simple, Mr Gorman again:

It asks not merely what a text says but also what it enjoins us to believe (faith), to do , (Love) and to anticipate (Hope).

What a wonderfully simple paradigm for engaged bible study. What does this tells us we are to beleive, to do and to expect.

(incidentally I did already know the footnoted parallel technical terms of what was going on, allegorical, tropological and anagogical, but no one had ever put it as simply as being centred on Faith Love and Hope.) This isn't what Mr Gorman's book is about and its already stimulating the little grey cells on other matters, but I liked this and will no doubt use it soon.