On Reading the Bible as Scripture, Encountering the Church

Abstract

As an exercise in the ‘theology of disclosure’, the present essay proposes a kind of phenomenological analysis of the act of reading the Bible as Scripture with the goal of bringing to light the theoretical commitments which it implicitly demands. This sort of analysis can prove helpful for the continuing disputes among Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox insofar as it is relevant for one of the principal points of controversy between them: namely, the relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and Church as theological authorities. It proceeds by analyzing both the objective and subjective ‘poles’ of the act, and it illuminates the presence of the Church and her Tradition on both sides. The Church—i.e., the community of God’s people—is both that which is immediately encountered in the text, as well as the factor which enables scriptural reading in the first place. The article terminates with an application of the insights of the preceding discussion to the controversy about icons.

Keywords

• phenomenology of scripture
• tradition
• bible
• ecclesiology
• icons