Does this make sense? Is it helpful and illuminating or is it silly nonsense and a great pile of rubbish?!
Does calling Scripture sacramental tend to a Barthian
understanding of the Bible becoming the Word of God[1]?
That is, are the Scriptures objectively God’s words or do they only become so
when the Spirit speaks through them to believers in the moment of encounter?
Conservative evangelicals will want to say that the Bible
is God’s Words because he has spoken them (through the process of inspiration)
and not merely because he uses them to speak to his people today, though he
does. The Bible is the Words of God, it does not become God’s Word only as the
believer encounters it in the power of the Holy Spirit. To use a sacramental
analogy, the question here is, when is the moment of consecration? Granted that
the Bible uses ordinary words, are the words of the Bible special because God
speaks them or do they only become special when received by faith in the power
of the Spirit?
Preaching might be more analogous to the Lord’s Supper
than Scripture here. If the words of the sermon are elements, then there is a
limit to what elements can be used in preaching. Similarly in the Supper only
bread and wine may (normally) be used. But any bread and any wine may be used.
In Scripture God has used particular words in a particular way that are
permenantly authoritative. Scripture might be said to correspond to Christ’s
institution of the Lord’s Supper. Subsequent preaching might be likened to each
subsequent celebration of the Lord’s Supper.
John Webster speaks of the creaturely text of Scripture as being "sanctified" rather than divinized. (Webster, Holy Scripture: A dogmatic sketch, p28) For Webster the biblical texts are "creaturely realities" that have been "set apart by the triune God to serve his self-presence"[1]. Perhaps instead we might speak of the words of the Bible as ordinary human words which God consecrated (sets apart) for his special use?
It might be said that the Words of the Bible used in this
way are permenantly consecrated. Not that they have been transubstantiated into
magical words or changed into some kind of divine language. They remain just
ordinary human words. But God has chosen to use these words in this way and
sets forth these writings for his permenant use. Scripture is a bit like a
perpetually reserved sacrament.
[1]
An example of this approach would be
Donald G. Bloesch, Holy Scripture: Revelation, Inspiration &
Interpretation volume 2 of Christian Foundations Series (Carlisle,
Paternoster, 1994) who argues that “Scripture as the written Word of God
becomes the living Word of God only through the illumination of the Spirit”
(p12? Check reference)
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