Reading Holy Scripture is an exceedingly dialogical event. That is to say, reading Scripture takes place in the relationship that co-inheres between the divinity and humanity of Jesus Christ for us; it is a con-versational happenstance that reposes in the context of God’s eternal and triune life. This entails that as the Christian reads the Bible they are engaging in an organic and inter-personal contact with the very author of said readings. As Jesus said: He would not leave us as orphans, but send us the Holy Spirit; the Comforter, the come-along-sider who will bring us into all truth; who will magnify the words of Jesus, as those are encountered afresh anew in the canonical spectacles of Holy Writ—in the prosopon (face) of Jesus Christ.
What I am intending to impress in this writing is the fact that reading Holy Scripture involves an exercise that comes from outside of us; that unilaterally encounters and confronts us; that brings us into the Heavenly fellowship of the Son of the Father by the Holy Spirit. It is an event, reading and living Scripture that is, that really only works as we read it within a confessional and relational frame wherein, we are given new life, from the vicarious life of God for us in Jesus Christ. This kicks against reading Scripture as an atomistic, scientific, moribund textbook that only the scholars, the intelligentsia can access. A genuinely Christian reading of Holy Scripture takes the Christian reader from the far country of this world, and places them into the home country of the new creation; and it is within this new creation that the adopted child of God comes to see this world for what it is—and more importantly, to see who in fact God is as disclosed and attested to in Scripture.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer offers the following insights as a way to think about the aforementioned further:
We are uprooted from our own existence and are taken back to the holy history of God on earth. There God has dealt with us, with our needs and our sins, by means of the divine wrath and grace. What is important is not that God is a spectator and participant in our life today, but that we are attentive listeners and participants in God’s action in the sacred story, the story of Christ on earth. God is with us today only as long as we are there.[1]
Our salvation is ‘from outside ourselves’ (extra nos). I find salvation, not in my life story, but only in the story of Jesus Christ . . . What we call our life, our troubles, and our guilt is by no means the whole of reality; our life, our need, our guilt, and our deliverance are there in the Scriptures.[2]
And more, on the necessary strangeness vis-à-vis this world relative to the new reality of the new creation encountered in the fertile and fresh landscape of the Bible:
Does this perspective somehow make it understandable to you that I do not want to give up the Bible as this strange Word of God at any point, that I intend with all my powers to ask what God wants to say to us here? Any other place outside the Bible has become too uncertain for me. I fear that I will only encounter some divine double of myself there. Does this somehow help you to understand why I am prepared for a sacrificium intellectus—just in these matters, and only in these matters, with respect to the one, true God? And who does not bring to some passages his sacrifice of the intellect, in the confession that he does not yet understand this or that passage in Scripture, but is certain that even they will be revealed one day as God’s own Word! I would rather make that confession than try to say according to my own opinion: this is divine, that is human.[3]
For Bonhoeffer, because of the location that the reading of Holy Scripture places him within, in the parousia (presence) of God, there comes a point, within this strange landscape, where regular human intellection loses all sense of gravity. But this is the miracle of the whole thing: Scripture isn’t predicated by the history of its own embeddedness within history; Scripture is predicated as the Holy and ordained place of God’s presence in the sense that its res (reality) is grounded in the free and gracious pre-destination of God to be for all of humanity in Jesus Christ, and all that entails (inclusive of the whole sweep of heilsgeschichte ‘redemptive-history’ as deposited in Holy Scripture). It is within this ‘strange Word of God’ that Bonhoeffer finds rest and relief in the new heavens and earth, as those graciously intrude upon the parameters set by this current world system. For Bonhoeffer, and I would suggest that we follow his lead, there is something about the Bible that transcends a facile and flat reading that might allow it to be subject to the whims and wits that a purported pure critical reading that the book of an abstract nature supposedly has the capacity to illumine (think higher critical readings of Scripture). These things are so, for Bonhoeffer, because the Bible’s antecedent reality is ultimately of an otherworldly reality; namely the triune life of God elect for the world in the humanity of Jesus Christ. That is to say, that Holy Scripture has an ontology; and it isn’t us.
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, cited by John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2003), 83.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., 85.