The use of the Bible in theology: Theology as a ‘lived experience’ of God

Abstract

The use of Bible in this article refers to the 66-books (39 OT and 27 NT) as they occur in the Protestant Bible. This is because of my reformed church tradition as the space where memory is cultivated in a way that generates meaning and provides norms, a space into which the members of a group may (Schnelle 2009:48) repeatedly enter to receive assurance, answers and orientation (Schnelle 2009:49).2.The Bible is not congruent with itself on this point. Jacob claimed, for example, in Genesis 32:30 that he saw God face to face. According to the wholistic picture of God from the Bible, we can say that a finite being will never see or even comprehend an infinite being.If the theme of this special edition can be reformulated as a question (what was and is the current use of the Bible in theology?), it would be challenging and very difficult to answer the question because of a diverse usage of the Bible throughout history and today, stretching in a continuum of both vertical and horizontal probabilities: vertically, theism vs. atheism and horizontally, worldliness vs. holiness. The objective of this essay is to argue for the incorporation of the 'spiritualities' of divine immanence and divine transcendence in the composition of theologies, facilitated by a comprehensive and multidimensional reading of the Bible and the acknowledgement of contributions from the sciences. In this research, the reasoning will address the following relevant aspects: (1) taking into account the epistemology of the 'Bible' and 'Theology';(2) the consideration of postmodernity, post-secularism and spirituality and(3) the composition of neo-theologies.Contribution: This article pleads that biblical analyses should play a more comprehensive and determinative role in the composition and formulation of theology, pointing more explicitly to the transcendence and immanence of God. The reading of such theologies then must create different lived experiences of the immanence and transcendence of God.