Scripture and Discipleship
Delivered at the Restoration Collective in Dallas, TX, on April 21, 2026.
“But a devotional and sanctifying reading of that sacred Book, is essentially different from the readings of the theologian, the moralist, the sectary, and the virtuoso of every caste and school. The man of God reads the Book of God to commune with God, “to feel after him, and find him,” to feel his power and his divinity stirring within him; to have his soul fired, quickened, animated by the spirit of grace and truth. He reads the Bible to enjoy the God of the Bible; that the majesty, purity, excellency, and glory of its Author may overshadow him, inspire him, transform him, and new-create him in the image of God. . . God speaks; he listens. Occasionally, and almost unconsciously, at intervals he forgets that he reads, he speaks to God, and his reading thus often terminates in a devotional conversation with God.”
Alexander Campbell, Millennial Harbinger (January 1839) 38
“We don’t understand the words of a person we love by first dissecting them, but rather by simply receiving such words and letting them echo within us all day long. . . This is how we should treat the words of the Bible. Only when we dare to deal with the Bible in this way, as if here God is really speaking to us, loving us, and does not want to leave us alone with our questions–only then will we find joy in the Bible.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I Want to Live these Days with You, 289
Reading Scripture is a means to an end, but not the end in itself. Both Campbell and Bonhoeffer understood this. We read to enjoy God and commune with God so that the glory of God might transform us and create us anew. Reading Scripture becomes a means by which God stirs our minds, hearts, and souls that we might be animated by the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of grace and truth. Reading Scripture is a means of grace; the spoken words become an explosive and transformative encounter.
Discipleship, though often couched in individualistic terms, is a communal process because disciples belong to a community. The invitation to “follow me” is a shared call, not an isolated one. As a communal reality, discipleship stands upon and under Scripture as the primary word that identifies and shapes what it means to follow Jesus. Therefore, we do not read Scripture, according to Stanely Hauerwas, “as democratic citizens who think their common sense is sufficient for understanding Scripture” who “feel no need to stand under the authority of the truthful community to be told how to read.” Many “assume,” he writes, “that they have all the ‘religious experience’ necessary to know what the Bible is about. As a result,” Hauerwas continues, “the Bible inherently becomes the ideology for a politics quite different from the politics of the church” (Unleashing the Scriptures [1993] 15).
While a democratic common sense leads to the dominance of political ideology, reading Scripture in a community of disciples is artegenic, as Ellen T. Charry put it (By the Renewing of Your Minds [1977] 19). The purpose of theology—grounded in Scripture as its primary source and shaped by communal engagement—is character or spiritual formation. Theology should give the people of God an identity (a sense of calling and status) and equip them with values that form them into the image of Christ.
We read, embrace, and teach the story of God given to us in Scripture so that, as Titus 3:8 puts it, when we “stress things . . . those who trusted God may be careful to devote themselves to doing what is good.” The goal is a beloved community that does good.
An Encounter
Reading Scripture, then, is a means of grace which serves the goal of renewal or transformation into the image of God by participating in communities of faith that seek to embody that image. The aim is transformation (a community devoted to good works) by entering the story of God as believers seeking understanding. To place this reading of Scripture as an act of discipleship and formative for discipleship into a larger frame, consider these four bullet points.
- Reading Scripture is an act of piety; a liturgical act of listening to God. It is a word about God from God heard through God who inhabits us.
- Reading Scripture is a transformative encounter with God; it is experiential, an existential communion with God.
- Reading Scripture is an act of loving God and loving neighbor as the foundation of life with God in the world.
- Reading Scripture nourishes the community of faith through divine habitation.
Scripture is living and active, a means of grace by which God encounters us in the Spirit. God actively encounters and transforms. Thus, the act of reading Scripture is a sacramental one, a means of divine presence and action. Reading Scripture is a pneumatological event—God acts and shapes us through reading.
When we encounter God through Scripture, the authority of God calls us, disciples us, and forms us into the image of God. We encounter authority as we encounter God’s own self. To be sure, it is a loving encounter but can also be confrontational as we are called to repentance and embrace a new allegiance as we enter the kingdom of God.
A Contrast
Over the years I have slowly shifted from reading Scripture as a legal brief designed to provide a specific blueprint for organizing a church to reading Scripture as a story into which we are invited in order to participate in the mission of God by imitating God.
Growing up in Churches of Christ, I embraced and practiced a hermeneutic that sought an implicit blueprint for the work and worship of the church in Acts and the Epistles. Through a filter of generic/specific distinctions, coordinate associations, the law of silence, and expediency (among other rules for authorization), I shifted through the commands, examples, and inferences within the New Testament to deduce a blueprint, which then became the standard of faithfulness and a mark of the true church. And if everyone agreed upon and practiced the blueprint, we would be united!
The problem is the location of the pattern. The pattern is not found in an implied blueprint in Acts and the Epistles. Paul does not call people to obedience based on a blueprint identified by the practices of the church. Instead, he calls them to obedience based on the pattern manifested in the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and exaltation of Jesus. This is the gospel we obey—the story of Jesus—rather than a blueprint we have inferred from the text. This gospel story is the narrative air we breathe. The pattern of God’s work through Christ in the power of the Spirit is explicit, objective, and formative.
We will discover unity when we confess the same pattern, and the shame of our past divisions is that we already confess the same pattern. Our pattern is God acting in Jesus through the Spirit, or the gospel itself. Here we are united, and our hermeneutic must not undermine that unity but provide ways to embody it. This past shame, however, may become our authentic hope—to embody the pattern of Jesus in our lives and communities.
This involves a hermeneutical shift that entails a different understanding of the authority of the Bible. Whereas the blueprint hermeneutic located God’s authority in the blueprint—what God authorized, specified, and excluded, a theological reading locates the authority in God’s acts—the pattern of God’s activity. Scripture mediates God’s authority not by a specified blueprint but by witnessing to the acts of God for our salvation. The authority of God is meditated through the story of God where we encounter God’s own self.
For blueprint patternism, the authority of the Bible is found in what it authorizes and excludes. It is a legal search for the boundaries, specifics, and rituals of ecclesial life. But a more story-formed approach hears God’s speaking through Scripture, but authority does not reside in Scripture per se but in the God who self-discloses in the story.
A Story
A Hindu friend of Lesslie Newbigin, a long term missionary in India a generation ago, told him this (from A Walk Through the Bible, 4): “I can’t understand why you missionaries present the Bible to us in India as a book of religion. It is not a book of religion–and anyway we have plenty of books of religion in India. We don’t need any more! I find in your Bible a unique interpretation of universal history, the history of the whole creation and the history of the human race. And therefore a unique interpretation of the human person as a responsible actor in history. That is unique. There is nothing else in the whole religious literature of the world to put alongside it.”
Scripture offers an interpretation of human existence in relation to God within God’s good creation. This interpretation is fundamentally a narrative into which we are invited—not as religionists but as human beings.
A healthy reading of the Scripture assumes a Triune understanding of the basic story to which the text bears witness, that is, God creating, revealing, and redeeming the world as the Father sends the Son and then sends the Spirit through the Son for the sake of recreating humanity in the image of God. The story—the canonical world—is the world in which the church reads, understands, and applies Scripture for formation as disciples of Jesus. It equips us for participation in the mission of God.
Scripture bears witness to God’s redemptive acts, interprets them and appropriates their significance for the people of God in their particular circumstances. Our task to understand the meaning of God’s redemptive acts through Scripture’s own witness, and then to interpret and appropriate its significance in our own particular circumstance. We recognize the occasionality of Scripture, but we perceive its narrative theological unity and embrace those values in our contemporary setting.
A Call
The language of Scripture privileges the vocative rather than the descriptive. Words are not merely signs for things but a call from the God. The God of Israel and Jesus invite us to participate in this redemptive drama. This prioritizes the relational over predication within Scripture. It prioritizes the personal over propositional reality. The function of Scripture is to make us wise unto wholeness (salvation)—sapiential rather than primarily or fundamentally propositional.
The Christian faith is not so much defined in terms of a set of beliefs as it is characterized by the story it performs (e.g., “Rule of Faith”)—practicing the kingdom of God in the created though broken world. It is not the doctrinal affirmations that define Christianity but how the drama is enacted. Truth is being and doing rather than mere propositional affirmations. Truth is fundamentally performative; it is lived. Truth is evidenced in the practice of the kingdom. Praxis in community precedes maturation of faith and knowledge—communal practices shape faith and knowledge. Theology functions as dramatic direction for our participation in the story.
This leads to missional interpretation. This means that we indwell the story driven by the mission of God so that we are enabled to perform the drama and participate in that mission. Consequently, we locate every text of Scripture within the drama, view it through the lens of the mission of God, and read it as participants in the mission. And we do so in dialogue with each other, both within and without our own faith communities. At the same time, our own missional praxis and practices are a resource for new meaning within the story we indwell.
Missional interpretation focuses on praxis as participation in God’s mission. Interpretation is no mere mental exercise but embodied so that the church’s participation is always already shaping how we interpret reality. In this sense, while theological hermeneutics is “faith seeking understanding,” missional hermeneutics is “works seeking understanding” (as per our friend, Greg McKinzie).
Just as missional theology and practice prioritize the question, “What is God doing in this situation?” So, the missional reading of Scripture prioritizes the question, “What is God doing in this text?” Or, what is the word God speaks through this text? Or more fully, how does this text not only participate in the mission of God, but also how does it bear witness to the mission of God? But this is incomplete without appropriation.
An Appropriation
This language comes from Paul Riceour. To appropriate what is in a text is to “make what was alien become one’s own.” The “matter of the text” is what is appropriated. “But,” Riceour says, “the matter of the text becomes my own only if I disappropriate myself, in order to let the matter of the text be. So I exchange the me, master of itself, for the self, disciple of the text” (Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 113).
As we think about inhabiting the story, what we appropriate is a “proposed world”—a world that the text through appropriation “unfolds, discovers, reveals.” This happens as we expose ourselves to the text and receive from it an “enlarged self.” This proposed existence fits the proposed world, lives coherently within it, and lives out the trajectory of the text. Discipled by the text “as a reader,” Riceour writes, “I find myself only by losing myself” (Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 143).
Interpretation—or the hermeneutical event—is not complete without appropriation where reading becomes an existential “event in the present moment.” It is an event because the text is addressed to a person, and the person appropriates the proposed world of the text. In this way, “as appropriation, interpretation becomes an event” (Interpretation Theory, 92).
Interpretation as appropriation has at least two moves. First, it seeks “the internal dynamic” of the text “that governs the structuring of the world,” that is, the dynamic that creates the proposed world. Second, the text has the power to “project itself” and “give birth to a world that would truly be the ‘thing’ referred to by the text” (From Text to Antion, 17). Hermeneutics both reconstructs the “internal dynamic of the text” and “restore[s] to the work its ability to project itself outside itself in the representation of a world that the reader could inhabit” (From Text to Action, 113). That is the “world of the text” readers are invited to inhabit.
When we read Scripture, we seek to be discipled by the world that Scripture proposes, the kingdom of God. We submit to that world, embody it, and practice it. Theological interpretation may help us discern that world in terms of Scripture’s inner dynamic, but missional interpretation illuminates the reality of that world through praxis, that is, by actually acting as disciples in the world.
A Theological Summary of the Hermeneutical Event
A reader (within and with the present traditioned community) inhabited by the author (pneuma of God—individually and communally), reads the text (the product of a pneumatic, traditioned community) in community (present, global, and historic) for the sake of wisdom (listening to God’s wisdom) to inhabit its world (the kingdom of God) and perform the drama and participate in that world (missio Dei), depending upon God’s active leading (pneumatology).