Shaped by the Word by Robert Mulholland offers a useful reminder to approach Scripture with the right perspective, as object formed spiritually by God. Too often we open the Bible to read ourselves into it, changing the point of the text to suit our ambitions or preconceived understandings. Instead, we should let the Scripture open us, reading God’s Word into our mind and heart and action, changing the point of ourselves to suit God’s ambitions and eternal understandings. It seems obvious, that God’s Word should change us… but we rarely do we allow ourselves such vulnerability before God.
We have, Mulholland stresses, become accustomed to reading the Bible informationally rather than formationally. We tend to seek to know the details in a biblical story- as if we are going to be quizzed on the account. We tend to seek to finish a chapter or a book, or to read through the Bible in a year… We start at Genesis 1 and don’t think we have done our spiritual obligation until we have read through Revelation 22. Mulholland suggests that we tend to miss so much of God’s Spirit speaking and forming within us when we give in to just reading for the sake of having read.
It’s a good book, and worth a look. It could be easy to slog through it, treating Shaped by the Word as a book to finish. But Mulholland is not as concerned with the reader finishing every chapter as he is with the reader being captured by a formational dive into the Bible. So be confident to take this book slowly, eating the nourishment of God’s Word along the way. Otherwise, this book too could become just another dust gatherer on the shelf, just another book about the Book, just another guy’s dry thoughts about the Bible. The point, Mulholland says, is meeting God in the text. May it be so!
~ Mulholland, M. Robert, Jr. Shaped by the Word: The Power of Scripture in Spiritual Formation: Revised Edition. Nashville, TN: Upper Room Books, 2000. (176 pages)
