This God of the new creation is the God who is working today and who was at work in the original creation. And the Word into whose image we shall be transfigured is the same Word who presided over the birth of the universe and who unceasingly stirs up in us the birth of the ‘interior person’.
This is the background against which the Fathers range any problem. At root it has the unity of the Pauline theology, which is reflected, for example, in what Augustine said: ‘As Christ is the Word of God, every action of the Word is for us a word.’
History is an activity of humanity ‘activated’ by God. And God’s activity is his manifold speaking: challenging and scandalizing, appealing and testing.
In this is revealed the action, or rather, the personality of God, in the life of each individual and in the life of the universe. And in this God ratifies the Scriptures for us, since they are the book in whose words the Word became incarnate to enter the world.
For the Fathers, the book of nature, the book of history and the book of the Bible are not three documents but one revelation. A single activity is unveiled thereby. The result of it depends on the readiness of the human heart to understand. ‘The Word of God is in your heart. The Word digs in this soil so that the spring may gush out,’ says Origen.
The reading of the Bible, therefore, is neither a work of erudition nor an excuse for pious transports of the soul. It is the reception of the Word that digs into us and saves us. As Jerome affirmed: ‘You are reading? No. Your betrothed is talking to you. It is your betrothed, that is, Christ, who is united with you. He tears you away from the solitude of the desert and brings you into his home, saying to you, “Enter into the joy of your Lord.” ‘
Certainly, the Fathers did not have at their disposal the critical and scientific armoury that we possess today, and which we have the right and the duty to use. But their spiritual reading of the Bible, a reading understood as a means to salvation, as an initiation into the Light, as an approach to communion with the Living One, teaches us to be on our guard against two dangers. On the one hand, to beware of the dryness of a certain biblical exegesis today which offers, or claims to offer, exactness at the expense of the living nature of the message. On the other, to beware of the subjectivism which merely comes down to a certain virtuosity in playing the strings of the human psyche, giving the believer the suggestion of ‘doing the truth in love’ without giving any love for the truth, still less the truth itself.
The Fathers think that the reading of the Bible is not only an intellectual activity; it is going to school with the Spirit. Gregory Thaumaturgus writes: ‘The one who prophesies has as much need of grace as the one who listens. No one can understand the prophets if the prophetic Spirit does not give them the ability to receive their meaning. The Bible, in fact, says that only the one who shuts is able to open, and it is the divine Word who opens what was closed, making mysteries intelligible.’
The Fathers also think that the reading of the Bible should have an effect on daily life, into which the Scriptures must be translated. Gregory the Great, for instance, says at the beginning of his homilies on the Book of Job: ‘Anyone who speaks of God ought to think about the need for some sort of thought that will make the hearers better.’
In the last analysis, for the Fathers the finest exposition of the Bible is the life of the believer.
~Adapted from Thomas Spidlik, Drinking from the Hidden Fountain: A Patristic Breviary, Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World
