Perhaps I can share with all some of my opinions on the matter. I am going to speak from my experience as a Roman Catholic, I am not in the mood to quote catechisms. My opinions here may or may not collaborate with the official Roman line- but I nonetheless understand my perspective on scripture to take the Catholic side of the debate in the Protestant/ Catholic division. As I sometimes pray to God, "Lord protect Your Church, even from my own heresies!"
Scripture, in my evaluation, is the word of God in a secondary or derivative sense. The Word of God that is foremost in our faith is the
Logos- Christ Himself- as testified in the Gospel of John. A word is a communication of thought, it comes from our mind, passes through our lips and moves out towards the intended listener. Christ is God's act of self-communication.
Christ lives from the Father, and lives for humanity the listener. His very existence as an Incarnate reality is one, as it were, strewn between the two poles of his existence- coming from God and living for man. He is the "in flesh" speech of God, which means, consequently, that
God's divine language is the language of human reality (a foundational principle for liturgical worship and sacramental living). The God of Islam might speak in Arabic, of the Jews in Hebrew- but the God of the Christian understanding speaks a language of flesh and blood, so that it is not only the words of Jesus,
but his very act of living which is revelatory.
By no means do I think the Fathers of the Reformation and their children deny this. I do not think, however, they have taken this sufficiently to heart.
The first notion that I take from the above is that Scripture is a witness to God's self revelation in Christ- and is not that revelation itself. They are not, therefore, self-sufficient.
The Scriptures are only the word of God when they are read in union with the Word of God. This is why I think Catholics tend to have an easier time, or certainly will so in the future, with the co-existence of the discipline of historical-criticism and orthodox belief. Unlike certain branches of Liberal Protestantism, which see the critical method as the only lens for discovering the meaning of Jesus and regard reading it in light of the
Logos as an error of method, the Catholic understands that Scripture is only such when it is read in the context of the life of the Church-that community which is itself a living witness to the action of God in history. This community is
apostolic, meaning that it is a testimony to God's incarnation into history in part because it is the same community which was founded by the original event of Christ's revelation- it points us towards the God of history.
There is no living Scripture without a living Church, because the former is actually contained in the latter. Christ founded not a text, but a community of people whom he chose and called out to be witnesses to the power of his salvation. Neither does this community stand on its own as something self-sufficient, but, in its essence, has been hewn out of His Sacred Side amidst the flow of baptismal water and the eucharistic blood (re: John 19:34).
The Church is more than the witness to the revelation of God in Christ, however, lest we allow the Incarnation to become a mere event confined in the pages or memory of history. Christ is the New Creation in person. Through the Incarnation and the shedding of His Body and Blood, Christ deposited Himself, as it were, into the world. He sew into the common flesh of man the flesh of a second human body, injected into the common bloodstream of humanity the blood of a new humanity.
The Church is, as per the New Testament literature, the very Body of Christ which He has sewn into the world and which He commands as the Head. I am of course speaking of the Church as she is in essence, and not in her sinful members. The Church, therefore, testifies to the event of Christ
and insofar as she is His Body, is also called to bring all of humanity into Christ's enfleshed embrace- hence the sacraments, primarily the Eucharist.
The Church, being Christ's Body on earth, is set up to oversee and, through Christ, carry out the transfer from Body to Body- that is to say:
the history of the world after Jesus is the history of the exodus from, pruning, and transfiguration of the Body Adam to and into the Body of Christ.
Thus, for me, the central passage that I will cite as "gospel" is:
"If, because of the one man's trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ"
One last word before I conclude. I began with noting that Jesus is the Word of God and thus, as the Word of God,
lives from the Father, and lives for humanity the listener. But this idea is not complete. It is also clear that Jesus does not just bring the Father to us, but
stands in the place of humanity in the sight of the Father (and hence the basic idea of the Cross as an atonement).
This means that Christ is not only the Word from God to humanity-
he must also be humanity's word to the Father. This means we also have to speak in the incarnated language which the Father has given us in Jesus. In the language of the Liturgy, this means that we have to give to the Father as a gift the very gift which he gave us. Hence, the Eucharist as the Divine Sacrifice of the Mass. We offer the Lord the Flesh and Blood, the Incarnated Word, which He has already entrusted us with.
We must speak the Word which the Father spoke to us.
I hope you can see I intend this far beyond Liturgy, but rather life as a whole.
And this is the beginning of the journey towards that vision where, "we will become as He is, because we will see Him as He is"...and "God will become all in all".
