A Pentecost Vision for Scripture: A Review of Cheryl Bridges Johns’ Re-Enchanting The Text: Discovering the Bible as Sacred, Dangerous, and Mysterious

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The emergence of the Global Methodist Church has initiated conversations on a variety of theological topics. In each case, the objective is to build something that is faithful to Wesley’s vision and theology. One such conversation centers on how Wesleyan Christians handle the Bible, and old positions persist, turning on words like inerrancy, infallibility, and authority. Because of this, moving the discussion forward toward consensus is challenging.

Into the fray steps Cheryl Bridges Johns, with her new book, Re-Enchanting the Text: Discovering the Bible as Sacred, Dangerous, and Mysterious. Her Pentecostal voice, insisting on the power of the Spirit, provides a refreshing and exciting lens to see how God speaks eternally and authoritatively through the Bible, while remembering that the experience of God’s sanctifying Spirit does matter, because “the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb. 4:12, NASB).

Her diagnosis is simple: The church has fallen for modernism in every respect, with fundamentalist approaches to Scripture that deaden the living word of God and use it like a dry, propositional textbook. That said, no appeal to staid tradition and orthodoxy will do, either. Instead, still holding to the absolute authority of the words, but reaching back into a pre-modern worldview, Johns reminds readers that it is the living God who breathes through the words, calling Christians again to view life in a way that makes God’s presence bear on everything. Our Christian ancestors understood an imminent God moving in all creation, and Johns calls for new imagination to see the Bible for what it is, a gateway to that living God. Reminding readers that the Holy Spirit is the active agent who enlightens every thought, the church should look to the Bible as an enchanted document through which the Spirit speaks directly to the reader, and by which God inhabits the words as an opening to Divine presence.

She begins with an interesting observation: Western culture is now profoundly biblically illiterate:

In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the silence of the Bible is deafening. In so-called Christian countries, the Bible is rarely quoted in public. Parents do not quote Scripture to their children. . . . Speech is no longer seasoned with reference to biblical texts. Americans, in the words of Gary Burge, “are in danger of losing the imaginative and linguistic world of the Bible.” It is hard to disagree with George Gallup’s assessment that the United States has become a “nation of biblical illiterates” (1-2).

In answer to the observation, she remarks that the Bible no longer captures the imagination of anyone who reads it, Christian or otherwise. Why? Because “its words do not haunt us, filling our days with images and stories. It does not satisfy our longing for mystery. . . .The modern version of the Bible is a book that has been stripped of its power. It is a text that is neither alive nor mysterious. It is a disenchanted text” (3). This happened, she argues, because the Enlightenment brought us a world where God no longer dwells, an Epicurean world, devoid of mystery, because humans have no need for God. God cannot inhabit our Bibles because he no longer inhabits our world.

Johns moves to take apart the project of modernity from both the left and the right. She covers Kant’s disastrous separation of the noumenal from the phenomenal. Though she argues that biblical illiteracy is a disease of huge proportion, she does not stop at the illness without providing a prescription. She contends for the truth of the Bible, though not because it can be used as some bludgeon of inerrant statements, like a mathematics sum or quotient. Instead, the text is true because it points to a living God before whom all of us should stand in awe. He is a God who has not left us simply propositional documents, but a narrative of imagination. There is mystery and enchantment in a world soaked in miracles. Johns declares Scripture is not simply text to prove a point or to study as an historical artifact. It is the invitation from God to jump into an adventure.

Johns’ work immediately reminds one of the power that our world has lost because it stopped believing that the universe is more than meets the eye, and as C.S. Lewis said, “sometimes fairy stories say best what needs to be said.” In the spirit of Lewis, Tolkien, and Chesterton, Johns calls Christians to start reading the Bible with a child’s heart, looking for a world where magic and miracle are synonyms, and God literally inhabits the pages. This, she argues, is the true ontology of the Bible.

Scripture, Johns asserts, is not an insipid text from which to make arguments, but a living Word where we encounter God in a sacramental way. Johns engages N. T. Wright in a number of places, noting that Wright calls the Bible the “Spirit-empowered agent,” but while Wright’s focus tends to be Christocentric, with the Bible as primary witness of Christ’s action to redeem all creation, Johns pushes further and says, “It is not divine, but Scripture has its own genuine reality, one that is fit to enter into the divine service,” as a means to relationship with the Holy Spirit.

Here she sends the reader back to the history of God’s given word. She writes, “Pentecost is the enchanting feast that brings it all together: heaven and earth, God and humanity, flesh and spirit, Jews and gentiles, sons and daughters, young and old.” Why is this? Because of what Pentecost really is: not some invented Christian holiday to celebrate the “birthday of the church.” It is an ancient Israelite feast given by God to honor the giving of the Law to Moses on Sinai. Its fulfillment, the giving of the Holy Spirit, makes the Torah living and active, and it implants believers with the ability to have it written on their hearts by the power of the Spirit.

In Johns’ telling, Pentecost fuses the Word of God and the People of God with the manifest presence of God, now fully known in the Holy Spirit. The key to finding life in the Bible is knowing the Holy Spirit and the power of God’s incarnation within his people. Though the Bible should be analyzed, studied, and read, the Christian’s work does not end there. The Bible must move further, as God’s own Word inscribed into the depths of our deepest being. This brings the prophet Jeremiah’s words fully to life:

“This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time,” declares the Lord. “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest” (Jer. 31:33-34, NIV).

Once Johns lays out the background and points to the Holy Spirit as the agent, she sets about building a foundation. She begins in the Trinity, reminding readers that God’s being is part and parcel to God’s economy, or mission. It is the Bible that reveals the very mission of salvation, inspired by a God whose being is salvific in nature. Therefore, the true presence of God and plan of God come together in Scripture, actuated by the Holy Spirit.

Continuing that structure, she imagines a Spirit-filled Christology, uniting the Word with the Spirit. In Genesis, God’s Word goes forth to create, but God’s Ruach power “hovers over the waters and . . . the words of God speak creation into existence” (128). In Johns’ vision, the word of God comes through the text by the Spirit to ignite the imaginative Presence within the heart of the reader. Consequently, Scripture’s revelatory power draws the reader into relationship with the Writer.

Johns completes her foundation with a discussion of revelation, noting that there is a disturbing “tendency among Evangelicals to collapse revelation into Scripture, thereby reducing both the power of revelation and the power of Scripture. . . [making it] a disenchanted view of revelation, one that fits comfortably into the modern ethos.” In this scenario, Scripture simply becomes a tool to distill doctrines and rules, neglecting the fact that God continues to speak in the encounter of reading. This, writes Johns, “is a vision of the Bible that fits nicely into the category of historical artifact, one that is set apart from the life of God as well as the life of the church” (131). She calls the church to participation in the Bible itself. Viewing it in sacramental fashion, it becomes a vehicle to encounter the presence of God, because revelation is as much inspiration as it is information. It draws the reader into the very character of God.

Thus, Johns’ vision of the Bible becomes as much ontology as it is epistemology. Ontology involves studying the state of being, how things exist, and how they relate to other things. Its companion discipline, epistemology, examines how we know things, and how we acquire information: revelation. In this case, Johns argues that the Bible has its own being within the life of God, even as it brings revelation to the people who seek God’s being within its pages. “In the context of Pentecost,” she writes, “the ethos of Scripture reflects the moral ontology of relationship. It makes the Bible more than a compilation of rules and principles and calls for participation with revelation in a manner that unites being, knowing, and doing” (132). It brings the reader to sanctified unity with the Spirit, who is both the ultimate Being and source of knowledge.

Johns provides an exciting and compelling case for a new look at the Bible’s role and purpose. That said, she gives little specific practical instruction in “enchanted” exegesis to make it a reality. One of the writers she cites positively, Hans Boersma, provides more instruction in his work, Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church, though Johns does warn that Boersma is “unabashedly a Christian Platonist” (86). For her part, Johns’ solution tends to focus on re-enchanting people, which would start the process, but for those who already have an enchanted worldview, how should exegesis proceed? She leaves the reader hanging. Perhaps a more practical follow-up would put flesh onto the body that she here begins.

She concludes the book with a few thoughts on human re-enchantment. People are incarnational beings, spaces in which God truly dwells. Additionally, people inhabit a world brimming with the vitality of the living God. Pointing to a creation that is more than biological processes, she reminds the reader that biblical visions of trees clapping their hands are not just poetic. People were meant to rule over a creation telling the glory of God, but without their own re-enchantment, that cannot happen. “It takes an enchanted people to engage an enchanted text. It takes an enchanted people to evangelize and disciple people into an enchanted Christianity” (156). Without remembering our incarnational status within a world filled with what C.S. Lewis termed “deeper magic,” we will not bring a living God to a world that is dying without him. This brings the church back to mission, which is a very good place to start.

Matthew Sichel is a doctoral student at the London School of Theology in London, England, and a Deacon in the Northeast Region of the Global Methodist Church, serving at Grace Church (GMC) in Hanover, PA.