It is no accident that monastic life is the location and model of unguarded intimacy with Christ through the Song [of Songs] and, in turn, through the rest of Scripture. In the lives of monks and nuns—those we later come to call mystics—we come to see that Scripture is not primarily a didactic, discursive, or scholarly text. It is a spiritual book for spiritual persons: those given to know the mind of the Spirit of God (cf. 1 Cor 2:6-16). The way to know Scripture, therefore, is one and the same as the way to know the Song: saturation, meditation, solitude, silence. Spiritual exegesis, in other words. For in the case of the Song, there is no proposition waiting at the end of the interpretive task, no doctrinal payoff. It is just the Lord. The ecstasy of contemplation is finding him—finding him—and delighting in nothing else. In this way the faithful reader of the Song exemplifies faithful reading of Scripture as a whole: defined, from beginning to end, by the acclamation, the exultation, the unashamed exclamation: “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing upon earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the rock of my heart and my portion forever” (Ps 73:25-26).
Brad makes a very interesting point here about monastic (mystical) interpretation of the Song of Songs and, by extension, the rest of Scripture. He thinks that monks and nuns were on to something in reading the Bible in the mode of the Song—a mode of reading oriented toward intimacy and delight rather than rational apprehension or what have you. What I find fascinating, though, is this: It seems that this ‘monastic’ style of reading shares some overlapping concerns with the so-called “theological interpretation of Scripture” (TIS) movement. TIS proponents are often fed up with the inherited scholarly ways of reading Scripture (e.g., didactic, discursive) that fail to arrive at where Scripture means to take its readers (i.e., communion with God). However, and this is what I find especially interesting, the theological interpretation movement is an academic trend being carried out by scholars. Which makes me wonder if it will ever, in actual practice, lead to the kind of spiritual exegesis of the mystics that Brad commends here. For, as he points out, the means for this kind of reading are: saturation, meditation, solitude, and silence. It seems to me that the monastery provided a certain habitus that was uniquely suited to the interpretive ends that these readers were pursuing. As well-intentioned as the TIS movement is, and as much as I resonate with its critiques of grammatical-historical exegesis, its practitioners are not well-positioned to arrive at the same end. Perhaps this is where we once more seek to “re-imagine” theological education in the vein of Bonhoeffer at Finkenwalde.