“Thy word is a lantern unto my feet, / and a light unto my path”
What is the Bible? It is a book, to be sure, even The Book, 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, things written at different times and in different places. Is it just a collection of literary artifacts from times and places long ago and far away? And if so, why read it now?
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.
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 marvelous summary phrase: “Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning.” 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.
“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 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 know 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. It “contain[s] 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, arrogance and vanity.
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. Today marks a transition, our turning to God who turns to us and whose Word is a lantern and light for us in our lives. The focus is on the pageant of revelation.
That pageant of revelation focuses on 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 understanding of our Christian identity. But the image of the Psalmist also speaks powerfully and helpfully to us. It presents the idea that God’s Word is lantern and a light that illumines the ways and the paths of our lives.
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, the light of God in the time of darkness, both the darkness of the natural world and the darkness of human sin, the darkness of the horrors of death and destruction. Against such forms of darkness there is the light of God’s Word which like a lantern illumines the paths of truth and righteousness in which we are to walk. We are called into a path of understanding in the illuminating grace of God’s Word.
“Thy word is a lantern unto my feet, /and a light unto my path”
Fr. David Curry
AMD, Sunday Next Before Advent
Christ Church, Nov. 22nd, 2015