“Thy word is a lantern unto my feet, / and a light unto my path”
(Ps.119. pt. 14, v. 105)
What is the Bible? It is a book, to be sure, even ‘The Book’, as it were, though it was not always a book exactly. Formerly, there were scrolls of parchment as the Bible itself shows us. Jesus, for example, takes up the scroll of Isaiah and reads from it and proclaims the fulfillment of what he reads. But, at any rate, it has become a book, that is to say something enclosed between two covers. It is, moreover, a library of books, a book containing within itself a great number of books, a wide variety of literature, of things written at different times and in different places and by many different hands. Is it just a collection of literary artifacts from times and places long ago and far away? And if so, why read it now? As an historical curiosity? No.
Because it speaks not only to particular cultures but beyond them. Something of the answer to the question ‘what is the Bible?’ is captured in this characteristic. What we call ‘the Bible’ bears witness to this phenomenon of speaking beyond the particular context and circumstance for which or about which a particular text was originally written. It also bears witness to the writing down in one context of what is remembered from another context. For example, the people of Israel wrote down and put together while in exile in Babylon what was remembered of God’s Word to them at the time of the Exodus from Egypt. The prophets, too, are constantly recalling Israel to the Law.
Somehow what is remembered and written down is received as being altogether definitive, as defining the fundamental identity of Israel in quite different political and cultural circumstances. Somehow what is written down cannot be constrained to just one context. It reaches beyond.
The point is captured best, perhaps, by St. Paul’s marvellous summary phrase: “Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning.” “Whatsoever things were written…” The Bible, in all its varied literary array, is inescapably what is written. Hence, it is ‘Scripture’ – what is written. And yet what is written is simply what is remembered as Revelation. The Bible is the witness of God’s Revelation of himself to us.
“Whatsoever things,” St. Paul says. There are all manner of writings, all manner of things written. All of them, meaning the scriptures which Paul knew, which we know mostly as the Old Testament or as the Jewish Scriptures, he is saying, are “written for our learning.” Somehow there is a unity to that vast and great diversity of writings. Somehow there is a unity which extends beyond the immediate context of the Jewish Scriptures, which Paul is talking about, to include what Paul himself is writing in what we have come to know, mostly from Paul, as the New Testament. It, too, is “written for our learning.” What is that unity? Ultimately, it is the unity of God’s Word, God in his self-communication and his communication to us.
Scripture, we may say, is the Word of God which bears witness to God’s Word. It testifies and is itself the testimony, the written record of what it testifies to. What holds together the diversity of writings which comprise what we call the Bible is God’s self-communication, God making himself known by his Word. The Bible, in this sense, is God’s Word written, and it has a unity, a unity in what it fundamentally and primarily teaches, a doctrinal unity with respect to the essentials of salvation. This is how Anglicans, in particular, receive the Bible as “containing all things necessary to salvation,” all things as belonging to our essential identity in the sight of God. This stands in stark contrast to all the fragmented, limited, and often destructive images of ourselves which arise out of our own self-posturing, our arrogance and our vanity, what the Magnifcat refers to as “the imaginations of our hearts.”
Advent is the strong reminder of the coming of God’s Word to us. It is revelation. Advent is the season of revelation. It is the strong reminder of the coming of God as Word – God in his revelation of himself to us.
This Sunday, in particular, we celebrate the pageant of revelation, the Bible as the written record of God’s self-communication. It is written for our learning. St. Paul’s text is altogether formative for an Anglican understanding of our Christian identity. It was the text for one of the most important series of sermons in the English Reformation: Bishop Hugh Latimer’s seven “Sermons Preached before King Edward the Sixth” in 1549. “By the occasion of this text” he said, “I have walked … in the broad field of scripture.” That broad field of scripture contains the things written for our learning or, as it is in Latimer’s Latin text, ad nostram doctrinam, for our doctrine. They are the things written for our understanding. That scriptural path of understanding is captured most completely in the Collect composed for this day by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. It articulates the purpose for reading the Scriptures from the Scriptures themselves.
The Word of God coming to us is Revelation. Advent would remind us of this and underscores the lesson by teaching us that the Word is Light. “Thy word is a lantern unto my feet,/ and a light unto my path”
That does not mean that God’s Word written is simply a flashlight, something which we use to assist us in the way of our choosing. No. The Word of God here is more than a tool for our practical, material and social purposes. Rather it illumines our end as well as our way to that end. It is, we may say, “a doctrinal instrument of salvation,” to use the language of Cranmer and Hooker. It speaks to us about our fundamental identity with God in his revelation of himself to us. It speaks to us about our primary spiritual identity as “members of Christ, children of God, inheritors of the kingdom of heaven.” It reminds us, too, that we are sinners, all of whom stand in constant need of God’s redeeming grace. It illuminates the pageant of God’s coming to us and it illuminates the pageant of our being with Christ, the one who comes.
The Word is the light which illuminates the darkness of our uncaring and our uncharitableness, the darkness of our judgmentalism and sentimentality, the darkness of our sin and confusion, the darkness of our vanity and presumption, the darkness of our culture and world, the darkness of our doubt and despair. It shows us all our darknesses. But it does so in the greater light of God which defines the darkness. And in so doing it illuminates the way of forgiveness and forebearance, the way of repentance and joy, the way of salvation and charity. In the light there is love. Salvation is about our being with Christ.
The pageant of revelation recalls us to our identity in Christ. Scripture illuminates a path of understanding which measures and judges the adequacy of all categories of identity. However much it shapes cultures and lives, it cannot be reduced to cultural, ethnic and linguistic identities. What is central is the theological understanding, a doctrinal understanding, the understanding of the things “written for our learning” about our fundamental spiritual identity, namely who we are in the sight of God. God’s Word written challenges each and every culture, and each and every person. Scripture engages the confusions and the desires of each and every age. The Advent of God’s word belongs to the charity of God and compels our charity in return, both to God and to one another.
The Bible is the Book of the Church, to be sure, but not as the Church’s possession to do with it whatever she wishes, but rather as that to which the Church is held accountable. The Church stands under the Word of God revealed in the witness of the Scriptures and not over it. That Word constantly challenges our assumptions and our categories of expression. But it is not a cudgel to beat down those with whom we disagree or those who are wrong. It calls us to speak the truth in love, to love the sinner but not the sin, and to know ourselves, too, as sinners in need of God’s redeeming grace. In the clarity of the Word, there is the constant call to charity.
We are called to a path of understanding in the illuminating grace of God’s Word. It is what we are given to pray, especially on this day.
Blessed Lord, who has caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ.
“Thy word is a lantern unto my feet, / and a light unto my path”
Fr. David Curry, Advent II, 2010, Christ Church, 10:30am