Take Up and Read!

Orthodox Christians always have known theirs to be a biblical Church. The Bible plays a key role in virtually every aspect of our life, from personal meditation to the public liturgy and mission outreach.

Yet it is true that we more often venerate the Bible than read it. We hear it in church, we encourage our children to peruse and even memorize select passages, and we bow before it and kiss it during liturgical processions. We would immediately miss its countless quotations if they were extracted from our services of worship, and we would be scandalized if someone casually tossed it onto the floor. Yet in many ways we treat it more as an icon than as a book, more as a sacred object than as a living Word.

St Augustine heard a child’s voice summon him to “Take up and read!” He obeyed, took up Holy Scripture, and became a devoted disciple of Jesus Christ. That same voice speaks to each of us, calling us to take up the Word of God and to read.

Scripture is not like a newspaper or a novel that we scan for information or entertainment. It is an inexhaustible wellspring of wisdom and illumination that both reveals God to us and enables us to commune with Him. Therefore we need to ask just how we are to read His Word.

The Holy Fathers prescribe for us a certain approach to Scripture, one which is neither a method nor a technique. It is a vision (theôria), a perception of the presence and activity of God within history and in our personal life. That vision includes certain convictions about the nature of Scripture and its place within God’s work of salvation. Here are perhaps the most important of those convictions.

First, the entire Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit. Although it is written in human language, with human limitations, it is God’s Word in the sense that the biblical authors were guided in their writing to convey all that is necessary for us to know God and to enter into eternal communion with Him.

Second, the Old Testament, as much as the New, is a Christian book. Its persons, events, and institutions are types, or prophetic images, that point forward to Christ and are fulfilled by Him. Whereas Moses is a figure of Christ as giver of the Law (Torah) to Israel, Christ is the “new Moses,” the giver of the true Law of Righteousness that leads His followers to the kingdom of heaven (Mt 5-7). Under the Old Covenant (Ex 16), God provided manna— “bread from heaven”—to sustain His people during their journey through the wilderness toward the Promised Land. As the Bread of Life (John 6), Christ is the true Manna come down from heaven, who provides (eucharistic) nourishment to the children of God in their journey toward eternal life. Similarly, the temple of the Old Covenant is a type of the Church, as the burning bush of Exodus 3 is of the Virgin Mary (who bore divine fire within her womb, yet was not consumed). Old Testament types are related to their New Testament counterparts, or antitypes, as “promise” to “fulfillment”: what God promises to His People of Israel He fulfills in the New Covenant of the Church, which embraces both Jew and Gentile.

Third, Holy Scripture contains both a literal meaning and a spiritual meaning. The former refers to the author’s intended message, the revelation he understood and sought to convey. The spiritual sense, on the other hand, refers to the message God speaks to us today, through the text of Scripture. This is the higher sense that relates the biblical story to our own story, our own personal life, particularly in its moral and “spiritual” aspect—that is, as our life is lived out “in the Holy Spirit.”

How do we move from the literal meaning of a biblical passage to its spiritual meaning? How do we discern within the text of Scripture the living Word that God addresses to us, to guide and nourish us in our quest for His kingdom? The answer can only be that God Himself creates this movement and this discernment within us, through the inspirational activity of the Holy Spirit. For the Spirit inspires not only the writing of biblical books. He also inspires their interpretation throughout the life of the Church.

To take up and read, in order to hear in Scripture God’s Word for us today, is to open both heart and mind to God in prayer. We do not know how to pray as we ought, St Paul tells us. True prayer is the fruit of the Spirit within us (Rom 8). The same is true with our reading of Scripture. We hear God’s Word in Scripture as the Spirit guides our reading and fills it with ever new meaning.

To come to know God and to commune with Him through the Scriptures, then, is to submit ourselves in prayer to the work of the indwelling Spirit. Taking up the Word of God, we truly read by the power and grace of God, who desires all of us to hear His voice and respond to it with faith and with love.

The Bible, then, is indeed an icon, or sacred image. This is true of the Gospels, and it is true as well of the entire canon. Yet it is more than an image, insofar as it is God’s living Word addressed personally to each of us. To appreciate it as such, and to be sustained by it as we can be, we need to take it off the shelf or coffee table, dust it off, open it up, and read. Every time we do, we can experience God Himself speaking to us: in our own language but with His power, wisdom, and healing grace.