“Thy word is a lantern unto my feet,/ and a light unto my path”
Our Advent text is particularly appropriate for this Sunday, sometimes called Bible Sunday in part because of Cranmer’s beautiful Collect which derives from Paul’s strong words about the purpose and nature of scriptural revelation. “Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning,” we are told. As Cranmer and Hooker note “scripture is a doctrinal instrument of salvation”. On this Sunday we contemplate the pageant of God’s Word coming to us as light and judgement which is hope and comfort for us in our lives but only if we will hear and read. That, of course, is Cranmer’s great insight and prayer: “Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.” There is something great and powerful to be gained from the Scriptures.
And yet, reading, let alone reading the Scriptures, is one of the challenges and crises of our times. Paradoxically, students read more now than they did a decade ago but their reading is almost entirely digital; not the reading of printed texts which are now a considerable challenge for them. The crisis is about shallow reading at the expense of acquiring the capacities for deep reading. Alberto Manguel in his lecture to the editorial board of the TLS in 1995, subsequently printed as St. Augustine’s Computer, notes the shift in metaphors that belong to the history of the technology of reading. He was speaking and writing at a time when there was a serious worry that digital formats would render books obsolete and therefore journals about books would no longer thrive. And for a time e-books did overtake the sale of printed books but that has shifted back the other way. In other words, things have balanced out because there are benefits to both digital and print reading. It is not a matter of one replacing the other but there are significant differences with respect to the patterns of reading for each even in terms of brain activity.
Our modern metaphors are about browsing, surfing, skimming, scanning. They are all metaphors of the surface in contrast to the older metaphors to which Cranmer alludes in the Collect. “Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” are metaphors that look back to Ezekiel’s eating of the scroll and to the idea of being turned into what you are reading, becoming a living book, as it were. As such books are more than objects. They speak to essential aspects of our humanity. The history of the technology of reading from cuneiform tablets, to papyrus scrolls, to the codex – the book, to Gutenburg’s 15th century revolutionary invention of the printing press, and now to the digital revolution, is all a part of the story of human culture. It belongs to our understanding and to our remembering of who we are and what it means to be human. Consider, for example, the analogy between a page and the human form where we speak of the page as being like a person with a ‘header’, a ‘footer’ and, in between, the body. Shakespeare, about a letter containing bad news, refers to “the paper as the body of my friend and every word in it a gaping wound issuing life-blood” (The Merchant of Venice).
Revelation is about God’s Word coming to us, a kind of constant advent, as it were, of God engaging our minds and hearts. Revelation as Scripture has to do with what comes to be written down. Paul captures the theological insight brilliantly in saying that what was “written aforetime was written for our learning”. The word he uses refers to teaching and instruction, what the Latin Vulgate terms ad nostrum doctrinam, for our doctrine. Paul is referring to the Hebrew Scriptures but what he says about the purpose of the Scriptures will embrace the texts of the New Testament, the Christian Scriptures, a large part of which are the writings of St. Paul.
And yet, what is written in the Hebrew Scriptures and then in the Greek New Testament and subsequently translated into many, many different languages is understood to be the Word of God. Why? Because of what it teaches about God and about our humanity. This is the understanding that belongs to the place of the Scriptures in the life of the Church where Scripture has a kind of primacy. As the 6th article of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles of Religion states, “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation” and argues that nothing is to be required for faith as necessary to be believed that cannot be proved from the Scriptures. Such a statement means that there is a necessary engagement with the Scriptures with respect to what they teach and what they mean that belongs to at least two things: the process of determining which writings are deemed Scripture, and determining what are the fundamentals of the Faith. That process is the work of the Holy Spirit directing, guiding and inspiring human thinking.
John Bramhall, an irenic apologist for the essential catholicism of the reformed churches, argues that “we have a rule of Faith, dilated or spread out in the books of the Scriptures but distilled in the Creeds”. This is to say that Scripture and Creed go together and cannot really be understood apart from one another. To put it another way, the Creeds come out of the Scriptures and return us to the Scriptures in a pattern of understanding. This allows for a number of different interpretations of scriptural passages but as contained within an essential doctrinal principle. For instance, Augustine, in one of his inquiries into the meaning of the first few verses of Genesis 1, notes that there are at least five or six perfectly legitimate ways of understanding just what is meant by the creation of the heaven and the earth, different ways of thinking about this philosophically, we might say, but which all are contained within the basic and essential distinction between the Creator and creation.
We are meant to take seriously the task of hearing and reading the Scriptures and it is Scripture which largely determines and shapes our liturgy which in turn shapes us. It is really all a kind of teaching which seeks to ground human experience in God. This counters the false opposition between things intellectual and things experiential. Early modernity in both its reformed and counter-reformed moments, Protestant and Catholic, was intent on the importance of teaching. For both Scripture was central hence the intense debates about scriptural translation and about preaching as teaching.
In our Anglican history, this sensibility can be illustrated by the Books of Homilies once appointed to be read in churches. The first homily in the first Book of Homilies written in 1547 by Thomas Cramner is titled “A Fruitful Exhortation to the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture”. It highlights beautifully and powerfully the doctrinal purpose of the Scriptures and serves as a kind of commentary on today’s readings.
“For the Scripture,” he says, “is the heavenly meat of our souls; the hearing and keeping of it maketh us blessed, sanctifieth us, and maketh us holy; it turneth our souls; it is a light lantern to our feet”, explicitly referencing our sermon text (Ps. 119.105); “it is a sure, stedfast, and everlasting instrument of salvation … it is called the best part, which Mary did choose, for it hath in it everlasting comfort.” There is a repeated insistence on the word comfort which means an inward strengthening. But to be strengthened or comforted means taking the Scriptures seriously in an attentive and thoughtful manner. A kind of mindfulness is required. Cranmer puts it this way: “In the reading of God’s word, he most profiteth not always that is most ready in turning of the book, or in saying of it without the book; but he that is most turned into it, that is most inspired with the Holy Ghost, most in his heart and life altered and changes into that thing which he readeth.” This is a high view of Scripture and Revelation. It is not about information but knowledge leading to wisdom and understanding.
Revelation is about God’s turning to us so that we might be turned to God. Some of you might be wondering how today’s Gospel is comforting. It seems rather threatening, a bit like the daily news “upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth,” a sense of the apocalyptic, to be sure. Where is the comfort in that? Yet, it is precisely this sense of the limitations of the finite and of human sinfulness that awakens us to the presence of God’s word coming to us. We look to God, the God of hope. “And then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud,” the cloud of God’s presence, “with power and great glory”. Revelation turns us to God, to what is eternal and everlasting in which we find the truth and dignity of our humanity. “Heaven and earth shall pass away; by my words shall not pass away”. This is the high doctrine of scriptural revelation that speaks to our souls. It provides understanding and strength. “The effect and virtue of God’s word” as Cranmer says, “is to illuminate the ignorant, and to give more light unto them that faithfully and diligently read it, to comfort their hearts, and to encourage them to perform that which of God is commanded.”
It is all about the doctrine, all about what the Scriptures teach about our life with God and in God. Our end is in God who turns to us to turn us to him. As Cranmer beautifully puts it, “he that keepeth the word of Christ is promised the love and favour of God, and that he shall be the dwelling-place or temple of the blessed Trinity.” A light lantern to our feet and our lives, indeed.
“Thy word is a lantern unto my feet,/ and a light unto my path”
Fr. David Curry
Advent II, 2021