Meditation and Communion with God: Contemplating Scripture in an Age of Distraction by John Jefferson Davis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There has been a remarkable growth of books around spiritual formation and spiritual practices that lead us into communion with God. The title and artwork of this book offer the promise of both deepening our relationship with God and doing so through an engagement with scripture.

As one delves into this book, it appears that the author has taken on an important project. He acknowledges the plethora of meditation practices in the culture, some grounded in Eastern sources, some in ancient or more contemporary Catholic practice, and some grounded in neuroscience. What it seems that Davis is proposing is a theology of communion with God that grounds meditative practice in evangelical theological conviction. As such, this is an important project as some approaches to prayer and meditation seem to be thinly veneered adaptations of practices grounded in a very different worldview.

Davis grounds the possibility of communion with God in the real presence of the Trinity through the work of the Holy Spirit, our union with Christ and the possibility of real intimacy with the Father. All this is because we are now in “the age to come” because of the work of Christ.

Interestingly, Davis also argues for the rehabilitation of the ancient four-fold reading of scripture in light of these theological realities. We not only read in a literal sense. We read in a tropological or Christological sense, reading all scripture in the light of Christ. We read in a moral sense, and we read in an anagogical or heavenly sense, realizing that heaven and the rule of God is already breaking into our present reality because of Christ.

He concludes with an outline of how this might inform our practices. This includes a four step process of meditative engagement with scripture that consists of (1) intention and invocation, (2) reading and reflection, (3) prayer, and (4) recollection at some later point in the day. He also proposes Five Practices of Right Comprehension that flow from his theological convictions:

1. Right Comprehension of God (as the Triune God)
2. Right Comprehension of Reality (that includes the heavenly, unseen world.
3. Right Comprehension of Self (in union with the Triune God and the people of God)
4. Right Comprehension of Purpose (to glorify and enjoy God forever)
5. Right Comprehension of Worship (of the Holy, present God)

He differentiates this from the kinds of meditation practiced in contemplative prayer that seem to focus on the wordless comprehension of the presence of God. His method is focused prayer centered around theological truth about the God who encounters us.

While I strongly affirm the work Davis has done in theologically framing our communion with God including our uses of scripture in that communion, I had several difficulties with the work. One is the question of who Davis was writing for. It appeared from the cover and some of the things said in the introductory material that this was for a thoughtful general audience. Yet the language seems more for the theological guild in its assumptions that we will understand things like “ontology” and “realized eschatology” without explanation. Second is that it would have been helpful to provide some “guided practices” that fleshed out how one might enter into the kind of meditative
communion with God he is proposing.

My third difficulty is with an either/or approach that seems to deny the value of approaches that assume a theology of God “beyond words.” He acknowledges that our knowledge of God transcends words but is not dissimilar from the words we use to articulate that understanding (p. 140). If this is so, is there not room to move from words to wordless contemplation of God in a sense that is still consistent with evangelical theological conviction? Where is it right to simply be still and know that God is God (cf.Psalm 46:10)?

In sum, somewhere in the title of this book, I thought the word “toward” should be added. It raises important questions and proposes a theological framework often absent in spiritual formation circles. Yet I believe more work is needed to translate this into spiritual practice and to integrate this practice with contemplative practices grounded in the apophatic tradition (a tradition that does not always negate the use of words but recognizes that God transcends the words we use of Him and makes place for wordless adoration). I hope Davis will carry this work further.

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