The 24 Rhythms of Hearth & Hinterland: The Study of Scripture & Tradition
How can the rhythmic study of scripture invite us to be better pilgrims than apologists?
There are some things we return to again and again, not because we’ve forgotten them, but because they become the wellsprings of our life—the water that flows from somewhere deep beyond our sight and makes our dry bones live again. Some things make all places feel thin.
Scripture is like that.
It meets us in different ways across seasons, not as a static archive or a systematic text book of rightness, but as a living word made active in our lives through the active presence of the Spirit of God.
And though we may come to it with questions, it often responds with presence and new questions to ask.
The rhythms of studying scripture and tradition shape us not only as thinkers, but as seekers—not as lawyers, but as pilgrims
Scripture as Invitation
We do not read scripture to win arguments.
We do not study it to stockpile answers or to defend our creeds or doctrine, no matter how firmly or loosely we might hold to them.
We study scripture because, within its pages, God stoops to speak to creation. In it’s overarching narrative, poetry, wisdom, and letters, God is teaching us about the character and nature of God.
That kind of divine self-disclosure should demand our full and reverent time and attention.
The old apostolic word spoken to Timothy still speaks to our day.
All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the person of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work. (2 Timothy 3:16).
Mind you, Paul says that it equips us for every good work, not every good argument.
Scripture does not attempt to arm us with absolute certainty but to form us into people who are becoming more like Christ, together.
The profit of studying scripture is not in providing absolute static certainty for all time, but to invite us into a conversation with God as we work to bring healing and restoration (shalom) to our own time and place, beginning with our own lives.
This way of reading the scripture, modeled in the Hebrew testament and interpretive tradition that was shared by Jesus and the apostles alike, does not always set you down on solid ground, but instead draws you out into the wilderness to have your assumptions and worldviews tested and tried.
It breaks your categories open as it teaches you a new way to think and live.
It brings you face-to-face with a Jesus who will not fit tidy systems or cultural labels.
Our spiritual ancestors did not read with haste or hubris, but with embodied rhythms that guided them toward a conversation long lost in a garden but still known deep in our spiritual, God-breathed DNA.
Interpretation as Pilgrimage
While scripture is fully inspired, we are wholly not—at least not in our current state. That’s a hard word for our modern minds shaped by a desire for scientific certainty and the individualism normalized by the enlightenment.
We misread and misinterpret more often than we admit (or realize), and often we don’t know just how much we bring to the text until it resists us.
But scripture is generous. If we return to it—not once, but again and again—it opens us, not merely to knowledge, but to wisdom and greater understanding.
But, like most things in life, God meets us in our desire and striving to truly understand who God is and what he wants to teach us. To read scripture well is to ask not only what it says, but also when, where, and to whom it was written.
Context matters
To say context diminishes the authority of the scripture, which I have often heard from my “plain reading” brothers and sisters, is to say that we can learn all there is about a place simply by passing through it and observing from a park bench without ever bothering to learn its history, language, or the stories of its people.
Understanding the context of scripture does not diminish its message, it deepens our understanding of what it wishes to teach us.
The prophets didn’t speak in abstraction or for the benefit of a people born two thousand years into the future. They spoke directly into empires, droughts, exile, and return.
We were not the intent of scripture.
We benefit by applying the intent of scripture.
Paul didn’t write so that his words could be woven into a systematic theology. He wrote pastoral letters to fractious, struggling communities dealing within the context and place of their current situations.
If we want to rightly divide the word of truth (2 Timothy 2:15), then we must listen with ancient ears.
This isn't an academic detour like sprinkles on top of an ice cream sundae—it’s spiritual attentiveness rooted in a deep desire to really know what the writers of scripture are trying to teach.
The more we understand the world scripture came from, the more clearly we hear what the Spirit might be saying to ours.
This is the mind of studying scripture.
But what of the lungs?
Dwelling Within the Text
Lectio divina, an ancient monastic practice, teaches us to worry less about systematically dissecting the scripture, but to instead dwell within it—to let it seep into our hearts and speak as the Spirit leads.
Sitting with scripture is less like reading a book and more like watching the sunrise with someone you love—you notice different things each day about both the sunset itself and the person you are sitting with.
And some mornings, when everything is perfect, you may find yourselves simply sitting in silence together, enjoying each other’s presence.
The Celtic monks, wild-hearted as they were, often read scripture aloud under open skies or shaded glens, letting wind and birdsong interrupt their reading.
They understood that scripture was not merely ink on page but God’s presence in place.
Christ who met them in the Gospels was the same who wandered the green hills and tidepools with them. To study scripture in that way—prayerfully, poetically, with holy slowness—was to let it transform not just their thoughts, but the posture of how they navigated the mundane.
May it not only be theirs but also ours. (+)
Tradition as Illumination, Not Idolatry
There is a temptation, especially among those of us weary of broken and unprofitable church structures, to throw off anything that smells of tradition. But in doing so, we forget that tradition is the chain of the past; it’s the fire we carry forward from one generation to the next as we attempt to make a new way for a new people in a new place.
Scripture speaks.
Tradition helps us listen well.
It tethers us to the ancient as we work to contextually move within the present toward the new wineskins of the future.
St. Basil the Great said, “Time will teach you what you could not learn from teachers.”
And yet, he still had teachers. We all do.
It is not either-or.
It is both working together.
Tradition is not static doctrine carved in stone. It is the accumulated wisdom of those who have prayed longer than us, struggled more deeply than us, and whispered the name of Christ into the darkness that we are experiencing. They found the light again, were changed by the experience, and lived to tell about it.
Does tradition demand our unflinching obedience? No, it does not.
Does tradition call for our attention and open hearts to the possibility that it has something to teach? Yes, it absolutely does.
From the Anabaptists, we’ve learned a community-centered hermeneutic—an insistence that scripture should be read in circles, not silos.
From the Orthodox, we’ve receive the reverence of mystery—the willingness to leave some things undecided, not from apathy, but from awe.
From the Celtic stream, we inherit a spirituality that sees no division between soil and soul, word and wonder.
And on, and on, and on.
We do not study tradition the way we study scripture, surely. But we do study it.
We seek it out because it helps us see scripture (and it’s application toward faithful practice) through a mosaic of colors, cultural lenses, and a multitude of experiences.
Now, the early church fathers didn’t always agree—and neither do we. And that is okay. At their best, they (and we) share a disposition of humility as we seek to understand each other better. At their worst, they (and we) fall victim to the human propensity to silence the voices that disagreed with whatever the prevailing power and influence might be.
Christ is known in and through the Church—a communion that spans centuries, cultures, and a multitude of ways of knowing and practice. And as the Orthodox theologian Fr. John Behr reminds us, “It is not the past that is normative, but Christ.”
We Study not for Answers, but Attunement
The goal of scripture study is not mastery.
The goal of scripture study is attunement.
There are days we come to the text tired and unsure, and it meets us not with answers, but even more questions—with an open invitation to “Come and see,” as it says in John 1:39.
Sometimes, that seeing is like scales falling from our eyes.
Sometimes, that seeing takes years of sitting and study.
Both experiences are mystical and transformative in their own ways.
Both experiences should evoke an endless sense of wonder.
When Jesus walked the Emmaus road with two disillusioned disciples, he did not begin with a miracle or a manifesto.
“Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27).
Only later, in the breaking of bread, were their eyes opened.
A growing desire.
A slow unfolding.
A patient revealing.
St. Teresa of Ávila once said, “All the troubles of the Church come from one source: that we do not know scripture well enough.”
Scripture surely does not give us clear rules for every new complexity, but because it shapes us into the kind of people who can listen well, act justly, and remain rooted when the wind shifts, it slowly prepares our hearts to apply what we learn of God’s character to every new situation we encounter.
Scripture, when truly experienced, should form us into a people of love, mercy, and justice without end because that is the character of the God we walk with. If it does not—if it bears different fruit—then perhaps we are sitting under the wrong tree.
Holding Difference, Holding Christ
As people walking in between places, we should learn how to hold our understanding in tension. We live at the edges—between mountain and meadow, old ways and new ones, our present and our eternity.
Our communities are often patchworks of opinion and practice. And yet, we are commanded to break bread together and fill our table with those least likely to expect an invitation.
The same is true in our theology. Matters of spiritual understanding and application are worth debating, yes. But those differences, even in the most passionate debates, should not divide us.
As the saying goes, “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.” This is not spiritual laziness—it’s spiritual maturity.
For all of Christian history, we should hold a tense awareness that we have never agreed on the non-essentials and we have barely agreed on the understanding and application of what we have deemed essential by creed and confession.
Romans 14 reminds us of this with remarkable clarity: “Let each be fully convinced in their own mind … Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another?” (Rom. 14:5, 4). And again, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, “We know in part, and we prophesy in part.”
Our knowledge is fragmentary. But our love, grace, and mercy makes it’s practice whole as we learn to love and work with each other in spite of our differences.
Returning Again and Again to Study
So we return.
To scripture.
To the gathered community.
To the wisdom of those who’ve walked the long way home before us.
We do not return because we idolize the past or because we believe every interpretation holds equal weight but because we know that truth is not a weapon to wield—it is a light to walk by.
In this rhythm of return, we are shaped.
We come to scripture not to get what we want from it, but to let it have its way with us. And as we do, we are drawn deeper into communion—not only with God, but with one another.
The desert fathers often prayed a single verse over and over for hours, not to memorize it, but because they hoped to become it. That is the invitation we accept as we take on the rhythms of hearth & hinterland as well.
As St. Columbanus said, “Let us be Christ’s, not our own; for we are not our own, since Christ bought us at a great price.”
To belong to Christ is to belong also to seeking him in scripture, and to the quiet work it does in us over a lifetime.
We study.
We pray.
We wrestle.
We listen.
We return.
And in doing so, we make space to be changed.
Not all at once. But surely. In the perfect timing of the Spirit of God
And that is enough—more than we could ever hope for.