We are frequently told by “they”—anonymous experts cited in the popular media—that we should stretch before exercising. Good advice, I suspect, although in all my years of exercise I have never actually stretched. Still don’t. If it’s tennis, I grab a racquet and head for the court. If it’s a jog, I strap on my running shoes and head out. I’ve always thought that it’s only highly toned athletes who need to stretch. They need to loosen up their taut muscles. For schlubs like me, their muscles are already loose. But please don’t take my example on this; I don’t want to be responsible for any injuries among my readers. I’m sure the experts have it right. Stretch.

Good advice not only for physical exercise. My focus here is on another kind of stretching. The biblical Greek word for “stretch” is ʾepekteinō. It’s used once in the New Testament, in Philippians 3:13. Here in David Bentley Hart’s translation is the end of verse 13 and verse 14:

Both forgetting the things lying behind and also stretching out to the things lying ahead, I press onward to the mark, for the prize of God’s call above in the Anointed One Jesus. (The New Testament: A Translation, p. 395. Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

The familiar Philippian metaphor is of the Christian life as a race. The stretching of which Paul writes is not before the run but as one nears the goal—stretching for the stamina and the determination to finish.

It’s in this sense that Gregory of Nyssa, the great 4^th century theologian, takes up the word. For Gregory, the spiritual life is an epektasis (the nominal form of ʾepekteinō), a stretching upward toward the goal of what is forever beyond us. He says in Life of Moses,

. . . We affirmed that the perfect life was such that no description of its perfection hinders its progress; the continual development of life to what is better is the soul’s way to perfection” (Life of Moses 306. Translation, Introduction, and Notes by Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson. Paulist Press, 1978, p. 133). 

The “perfect life” cannot be fully described, nailed down, for to do so is to hinder the soul’s progress. No description of its progress should be thought to be final. The soul must always stretch for more, for what lies tantalizingly beyond us. “Continual development” for Gregory is “the soul’s way to perfection.”

What distresses me about the state of the church in America—no, let me narrow that down to the state of the church in the conservative Reformed enclave from which I come, although it applies more broadly—is there is so little stretching going on. The notion of church and theology and the Christian life now held up as orthodox runs opposite of Gregory. The last three synods of the Christian Reformed Church, for example, have acted on the idea that all one needs to know of God, the Bible, life, the church, and, sexuality, in particular, has been neatly packaged in a few 16^th and 17^th century Reformed confessions. One only needs to sign on to these truths.

No stretching needed. But this is not only to lose much of the best of Christian theology, including Gregory and many others; it is to lose the Bible. The Bible is not the sort of book that can be reduced to a set of summary statements as if the Bible says just these things and no more. In the uncanny way of the Spirit, the Bible opens paths toward what David Bentley Hart calls the “horizon of infinite causality” (You Are Gods: On Nature and Super Nature. Notre Dame Press. 2022 Kindle Edition, p. 16). It points beyond itself, and like the horizon, one never arrives. It always stretches out before you.

In her evocative reading of the book of Genesis, Marilynne Robinson catches the way that the Bible often gives us not so much set teachings as prompts to think in ways we otherwise might not. It hints at things beyond our ken. Robinson says of Genesis 1:

Then there is the fact of His oneness and His omnipotence. I may appear to be imposing terms not appropriate to the religious consciousness of a literature as ancient as Genesis. (Reading Genesis. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024, p. 145)

But (she says in another place):

[These] simple statements . . . are explicit and necessary distinctions with profound theological meaning having to do with the nature of God and His relationship to His Creation. Words like omniscience, omnipotence, transcendence, and immanence can enter theology, language about God, because the Old Testament makes and maintains these distinctions. . . (p. 42).

Note what she is saying here. She is not saying that the Bible gives us these terms of later theology—omniscience, omnipotence, transcendence, immanence, and the like. It does not. But these terms arise as ways of trying to appropriate theologically what the Bible suggests to us in other ways. 

A stronger example is the many ways the Bible—especially the New Testament but also the Old—speaks of both the singularity and the plurality of God, of Father, Son, and Spirit or, in the Old Testament, of Yhwh and Elohim, of Voice and Word, all of these requiring the early church to consider and reconsider how to speak of God, coming at last to the formulations of the great councils of Nicaea and Constantinople, so that all of Christian theology since has a distinctive trinitarian character. To quote David Bentley Hart again, “A . . . boundary was crossed—albeit invisibly, even inadvertently—with the Trinitarian dogmatic definitions of the fourth century . . ., and thus a new path for Christian thought was opened. . . (You Are Gods, p. 102). The new path led to new insights—new ways to see and understand God and ourselves and the world in which we live. 

Nor is this the last boundary. I have just come from the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature in San Diego. These meetings bring together scholars of religion and Bible from across the world, as many as 10,000 of them. The meetings fill up the rooms of convention centers and hotels. Suddenly, on the streets, you hear a strange patois, people speaking casually of various sacred scriptures, of gnosticism and mysticism, of things chthonic and things celestial. As perhaps in no other place, these meetings bring together scholars whose daily concern are matters of the spirit.

I’ve not been at the meetings for several years. Ministry assignments have gotten in the way. But at the meetings I just attended, I noticed a shift toward theological interpretation of the Bible. This shift may have happened some years ago, but I was not in a position to notice. Now, there are many sections dedicated to theological interpretation, and especially to the interpretation of the Bible as practiced by the early church.

Of the two societies, the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), each with its own concerns and culture, I tend to frequent the sessions of the older and somewhat more staid SBL. SBL, as its name implies, is an academic society for students of the Bible and of the literature associated with the Bible. Over the many years that I have attended SBL meetings, the mood and focus has shifted. When I first attended as a graduate student in Old Testament in the early 1970s, the society was dominated by scholars trained by William Foxwell Albright, including two of my own teachers, George E. Mendenhall and David Noel Freedman. The focus was on the intersection of Bible, history, and archaeology. The question was what happened back there? How can we reconstruct biblical history?

Gradually, these concerns gave way to literary studies. The concern was less about what happened back there and more about what is happening in the text itself. The focus moved from the author—trying to discern who wrote what—to the text and to the reception of the text. To what the text means and to whom.

It is perhaps this emphasis on the text that has brought the academy to where it now is: to, among other things, reconsidering how the early church read the Bible. The early church believed that the Bible must be read not once but twice. It must be read first for the literal meanings of the words. They called this historia. The concern was not with history in our sense but with the plain sense of the words. But these early Christian readers of the Bible believed that, if the Bible was a book of the Spirit, more was going on in the text than just historia. The Bible in sometimes playful and often surprising ways draws the reader into new meanings. These meaning have various names—allegory, anagogy, tropology, and others—but with the early church call these readings of the Bible theoria, a word that means “seeing” or, perhaps better, “insight.” 

I would like to say more about this, and in subsequent posts I will, but for my present purpose it’s enough to say that this way of reading the Bible sets up a conversation, a conversation that includes not only the Bible but the church, and this conversation stretches us. Or should. The Bible acts as a catalyst, prompting us to think of ourselves and life and what’s going on around us and God in fresh terms. And when we are so stretched to see things in new ways, we return the Bible with new eyes, seeing what we had not seen before.

In this way we are drawn towards God and towards the Christian life. Drawn upward, as it were. In Paul’s terms (and Gregory’s) we stretch to grasp that for which we have been grasped. Grasped by the knowledge and the love of God, we stretch to know and love God back. And knowing and loving God, we stretch to know and love what God loves.

This is not a static faith, not faith that one can simply sign on to. It’s not saying yes to a set of theological propositions. You won’t get to this faith by signing forms of subscription. You won’t find this faith neatly packaged in synodical statements. This is a faith that changes lives, a faith that challenges the church, that challenges you and and me. This is a faith that stretches us.

And when we stop stretching—this is the essential Gregory truth—we fall into idolatry, the idolatry of our own ideas. And so, yes, stretching is required, if not for physical exercise, then for the Christian life.

Still stretching,

Clay