Fathers on Scripture as Sacramental

Louis-Marie Chauvet argues that the view that the Bible is sacramental has “a long tradition within the Church” and indeed “is obviously one of the strongest of Church traditions” but his quotations are disappointing.

The first, from Origen, is only a parallel between how we ought to treat Jesus’ body (wrongly thought to be locally present) in the Eucharistic bread and the written Word of God with equal reverence:

You who participate regularly in the divine mysteries, you know with what respectful precautions you keep the body of the Lord once it is given to you, lest a few crumbs fall and some part of the consecrated treasure be lost… But if you justly take such precautions with regard to the Body of our Lord, can you expect that neglect of the Word of God deserves a lesser punishment than neglect of his Body? (Homily 13 on Exodus)

Taken in isolation, Tertullian claim that in John 6: “The bread is the living Word of God, come down from heaven.” (De Or. 6) refers more obviously to Jesus than to the Bible and is hardly controversial. Some evangelicals would want persuading that John 6 should be connected to the sacraments at all, so even a bread-Bible link need not amount to a sacramental account of the Lord’s Supper here.

Ambrose says apropos Scripture:

Eat this food first, to be able to come later to the food of Christ, to the food of the Body of the Lord, to the sacramental feast, to this cup where the love of the faithful becomes inebriated. (Expos. Ps. 118 vv15, 25)

This is parallelism similar to that in Tertullian, but the metaphor of the Bible as food can hardly be called a strong statement of its sacramentality.

In Origen the metaphorical parallelism is more developed. Chauvet says:

For him the Eucharistic body of the Lord can be understood only in relation to his scriptural “body,” the whole constituting the symbolic mediation of the body of our Lord Jesus, historical and glorious. This is why for him the broken bread refers as much to Scripture as to the Eucharist: “If these loaves had not been divided, if they had not been broken into pieces by the disciples – in other words, if the letter had not been broken piece by piece – its message could not have reached everyone” and the assembly would not have been satisfied. (Homily on Genesis 12:5)

Chauvet says: “We could multiply quotations from the Fathers supporting this position.” We could wish he had done so.

Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence translated by Patrick Madigan and Madeleine Beaumont (Collegeville, Liturgical Press, 1995), pp213f