Handling the Holy Word

MEDITATION

IF holy silence and holy listening are important windows on God, how should we understand and how should we handle the Holy Word? These questions bring us into contact with one of the most sensitive touchstones in the life of the Church.

For some the Word of God is coterminus with the 66 books of the Bible which were included in the canon of scripture agreed by the Westminster Assembly in 1647. I well remember one elder telling me that none of the great disciplines of learning had anything to add to our understanding of life and how it should be lived, because God had spoken once and for all through scripture and all we ever needed to know was to be found between first chapter of Genesis and the last chapter of the Revelation of John. This view is supported by the contention that scripture needs no redaction and that its meaning is plain and straightforward.

For others the Word of God is somehow more dynamic and more fluid than that – it is in the Word made flesh, it is contained in the written Word and it is in the Word proclaimed. In this approach the canon of scripture may be closed to further additions, but the Word of God can be heard in fresh interpretations and new ideas. This is not a new way of thinking: it is one that has been around for as long as women and men have had questions about the meaning and purpose of life itself.

So it is that handling the Holy Word can be complex, multi-layered and challenging. Even the business of deciding what books to include or exclude from what we call the Old and New Testaments was not simple. The Council of Trent in1546 gave its blessing to books such as Tobit, Judith and Baruch later; however, others relegated these to a kind of second division known as the Apocrypha, while later still, others, such as the Westminster Divines, demoted these books to a non-league position! When Luther, in post reformation overdrive, made his contribution to the canonical discussion he sought to remove Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation from the printed text. When you read behind how and why those various arguments were won and lost, it is hard to escape the fact that both content and translation of the Bible have been greatly influenced by theological bias and social history. So, no matter how much we believe in the Holy Spirit’s inspiration in the final choice, it’s not surprising that we hold a range of diff erent views on how to discern the authentic voice of God.

Wherever we stand on the spectrum we need to wrestle with the context and the pretext of the Biblical text, because failure to do so leads to the abuse and misuse of what we describe as Holy Word. Each of us has to have a gauge for fine tuning our hearts and minds and ears to what God might be saying to us in our context. For this we depend on One and One alone.

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.

In the magnificent prologue to the Gospel of St John, John describes the Word as the uncreated force which gives life to all that there is, he describes this eternal Word as light which cannot be overcome by darkness and then in a great crescendo he declares that, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.”

If the Holy Word that you hear is not full of grace and truth then you must doubt its veracity. If, however, it speaks of the unconditional love of the eternal or if it speaks truth to power – then you may be on to something. If it penetrates to the places in your life which are in need of forgiveness, hope or understanding then it will be the real thing. If its truth apprehends you and transforms your thinking, your values and your priorities then you may be experiencing the transformative power of the Holy Word as revealed in Word made flesh.

This article appears in the March 2018 Issue of Life and Work

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