Alastair's Adversaria - Holy Scripture and the Academy

Episode Date: October 4, 2025

Talk delivered at the South Carolina Study Center on September 30th (https://scstudycenter.org/). Follow my Substack, the Anchored Argosy at https://argosy.substack.com/. See my latest podcasts at https://adversariapodcast.com/. If you have enjoyed my videos and podcasts, please tell your friends. If you are interested in supporting my videos and podcasts and my research more generally, please consider supporting my work on Patreon (www.patreon.com/zugzwanged), using my PayPal account (bit.ly/2RLaUcB), or by buying books for my research on Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/3…3O?ref_=wl_share). You can also listen to the audio of these episodes on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/alastairs-adversaria/id1416351035.

There are many different ways that we could approach the topic for this evening, and I thought about several of them, more theological approach, perhaps, or maybe a more biblical approach, thinking about the way that we handle Holy Scripture by reflecting upon how Scripture itself talks about itself. I thought might take a slightly different tack and focus maybe on a bit more of a material history avenue, into the question. So when we think about books, we usually have to have some sense of what sort of thing

the book is if we're going to read it well. If you have a recipe book, you probably don't want to be reading it primarily on your bedside table. It's probably a book that belongs in the kitchen. It's part of your process of preparing a meal. Likewise, the way that you would read that sort of book is very different from the way that you would read, let's say, a play of Shakespeare. If you're reading Shakespeare, you're not thumbing through it while you're trying to find

the onions. It's a very different sort of book from that. The book will often invite its reader to engage with it in particular ways. Or conversely, we could talk about the way in which our forms of reading invite us to think about books in particular ways. We might have a book that is encountered very differently in different contexts. And one of the things we're thinking about this evening is the way that your Bible might be encountered differently in the context of a theology class, or maybe if you were doing some literature class and going through biblical literature, you'd encounter your Bible differently in that context than you would from the context of your church.

the very concept of what it means to, let's say, interpret Hamlet, and even of what Hamlet is, for instance, will shift depending upon whether we are in high school or a college classroom or a theatrical company preparing a stage production. Questions of the sort of text we are reading and the ways in which our forms of encounter with such texts are shaping our concepts and our readings, are perhaps most important when we are reading Holy Scripture,

because Holy Scripture is a very distinct form of text, and invites very distinct forms of reading. We might think, for instance, of the many different forms of text within the scripture itself. What does it mean to read a Psalm? Is that the primary form of engagement that a Psalm invites? Maybe we should be singing the Psalms as the primary form of engagement. Likewise, we might reflect upon the historical accounts in Scripture.

That's a different sort of text from a Psalm, even though Psalms do contain many of the same features as a historical account. Some of them recount history. Psalm 105 and 106 tell the covenant history of Israel and 104 the story of creation that you find also in chapters 1 and 2. elsewhere we might find a text like we do in 1 Corinthians 11 a text of institution i received from the lord but it also delivered to you and then institution of the supper in that context what does it mean to read such a text well maybe to perform the thing that has been instituted there has been a revolution in the film of the text so in the past texts that we encounter, in the forms that we encounter them today,

would have been encountered in very different forms. You might think about the development on this front are many different ways. Might think about the way in which book ownership has changed. Books that would formerly have been communally owned are now privately owned, and that changes the way that the text is situated. Private reading, rather than public, reading out loud.

You might think about the loss of all the things that used to surround the text, all the glass that would surround manuscript. You might think about the way that the genealogy of a text changes. In the past, if you had a manuscript, it had a genealogy, other texts from which it was copied beforehand, and you could trace those back. The Bible, when I talk about the Bible, I don't necessarily mean the same thing as what I mean when I talk about. Holy Scripture. When I talk about Holy Scripture, it's a broader description of the word that God has spoken to us. When I talk about the Bible, I'm thinking more particularly of the form, the model world in which we encounter the Word of God to us in Holy Scripture.

The Bible is a very modern technology. When you think about it, all the books in a set order between two covers, it's got navigational tools like captains, captors and verses, cross-references, indices, glossary, it's got all these other apparatus that surround it. The question is, how much of this should have been recognisable to the first readers or hearers of Scripture? Very little, I suspect. Most of their encounter with Scripture was shaped by all performance of the text, hearing the text performed in the congregation. Most could not have their own personal Bible, for instance. We've too easily and uncritically equated the artifact of the Bible with the scriptures, and perhaps in the process, lost something of the breadth of what scripture is. So it went us to go back and maybe make the Bible a bit,

or Holy Scripture, a bit stranger to us. Make it seem a bit more foreign that as we start to reacquaint ourselves with it, we might see things about it that we might otherwise have missed. While Jesus and the Apostles would typically have encountered scriptural texts in the form of scrolls, from very early on in the history of the church, the church pioneered and really pushed the form of the codex. It seems to have been the preferred form for the scriptures. That's important to bear in mind that most scriptural texts would only have included one or a few books. it was only later that you'd have the great complete Bibles or PANDex where they were in a single volume or set of volumes.

Those were quite uncommon and there were very few early examples. The unity of the Bible was less the unity of a single volume or artifact, the Bible in this sense. It was a unity that was situated more within the life and liturgies of the church that recognized this set of texts as belonging to the Word of God that has been given to us. The coherence of the scripture was a lot more apparent within that setting. Reading also has a history. The work of scholars such as Paul Sanger underlines the fact, this fact.

Reading was for most of church history an oral process. I think it's Augustine who comments upon seeing Ambrose reading silently, marveling at the fact. People didn't usually read silently. Modern texts, however, are written and typeset in order to facilitate ease and speed in silent private reading, rendering texts also more accessible to a wider readership. Until the practice of 7th and 8th century Irish scribes spread to the continent and slowly became the norm from the 10th century onwards, Western manuscripts typically had no spaces between their words. Why would you need spaces?

You're not in a hurry to read it. You're practicing it and sounding it out. And it's like learning a piece of music. You're not necessarily wanting to play it right away. You want to practice it. Reading such a text then would be like preparing a musical performance more than the contemporary practice and experience of reading.

Prior to the rise of print, the practice of reading was also the preserve of an elite, Most people weren't literate, and books were costly and rare. Your encounter with the text would primarily be through the ear, as you heard it read. Books were not very common and they were very expensive. I was quite struck by the fact that Robert Toome shares in his book on the history of the English that at Jello at the beginning of the 8th century, the venerable bead had access to a huge number of volumes in his library.

200 volumes. And that, the really amazing part, was more than the library of either Cambridge or Oxford University 700 years later. What books there were were disproportionately authoritative sources of the tradition, with which communities engaged in conversation over many generations. In such a context, it didn't make so much sense to produce books for rapid and easy reading. Because you'd spend time with the text. You'd be chewing over it and meditating upon it and internalizing it.

Writing books for a more democratized readership didn't make sense either. The few texts there were were prohibitively costly and not accessible to a general population. Although books designed for reference reading were not a novel phenomenon, the high Middle Ages saw a growing dominance of text designed for discontinuous scullly reading. It equips readers to move around within the text. If you open your Bible, for instance, you'll have many features like that. You have the chapters and verses. You have the way in which there are titles and particular sections.

You have the number top or the bottom of your page. You've got this verse reference as well if you are looking for that. And all of this equip readers to engage with texts in different ways. although page numbers are sequential, for instance, they can be most serviceful to those who are moving around in the text, not always reading it sequentially. Rather than engaging with texts by following the artillery of all and generally communal narrative narration,

the terrain of the text was carefully mapped out, making it possible per readers to dip in and out at whatever points they chose, encountering texts in a more global fashion. So maybe the difference would be akin to the difference between someone writing out an artillery of a route that you should follow through some countryside,

and contrasting that with the experience of looking at that mapped out and being able to pinpoint exactly where something is. When you're dealing with an artinerary, it's a narrative that works you through the territory, and you follow it, and you learn the territory as you do so.

You have to pick out particular salient landmarks, perhaps. when you're dealing with the text in terms of a mapped out grid or particular verses and chapter references, it's a very different sort of experience. Things can be abstracted from their context to a greater degree. The medieval scriptures were far more firmly located within the church's life and liturgy. Most scriptural texts were designed for a liturgical performance

and would have had a more diffuse presence within the life of the church. The text themselves were produced, for the most part in monastic scriptoria. In Europe, commercial scriptoria and the secular practice of manuscript culture only started to come to the fore from around the 12th century with the rise of universities and a richer urban class. Before Gutenberg, however, a steady revolution was already occurring in the form of the book. Yvonne Illich talks about the move from the monastic text of Hugh St. Victor to the Scholastics, he writes, during the middle of the 12th century,

an avalanche of previously unthought-of devices appeared, indices, library inventories, and concordances. These are all devices engineered to search and find in books a passage or a subject that is already in mind. The new page layout, chapter division, might think about, in page layout, the actual title page of a book, which is increasingly important in this period.

Distinctions, the consistent numbering of chapter and verse, the new table of contents for the book as a whole, the summaries at the beginning of a chapter referring to its subtitles, the introductions are so many expressions of a new will to order. Further, in Hughes' generation, the book is like a corridor with the insipit as its main entrance. If anyone thumbs through it hoping to find a certain pattern, there exists little more chance of happening upon it than if the book had been opened randomly.

But after Hugh, the book can be entered randomly with a good chance of finding what one looks for. There's still a manuscript, not a printed book, but technically it is already a substantially different object. The flow of narration has been sliced into paragraphs whose sum total now makes up the new book. The book for the monastic reader was a discourse which you could follow. but into which you could not easily dip at a point of your choosing. Only after Hugh does easy access to a specific place become a standard procedure. Now he characterises this as a movement from one particular picture of the text. From the text as a vineyard or a garden to the text as a mowing.

From a place of leisure and maybe of contemplation to the text as a place of laybe. you mine out, you dig it, it's a treasure trobe, it's a maybe a storehouse. And so the form of engagement implied is very different. Engagement in the first case, framed by a sort of leisure in the sense that someone like Joseph people might talk about it, from liturgy, from spiritual practice, from a sort of pilgrimage, to a form of work. You're laboring a common text like an academic would. You're trying to dig out certain things and extract insight from the text. The developing uses of texts can be seen in various elements of their layout.

Page numbers, chapters and verses, marginalia, paragraph markers, headings, tables of contents and indices, summaries, etc., all play a role in orienting the discontinuous reader of the text. A number of ancient scriptural texts had divisions or passage markers. sometimes designed in order for reading in the liturgy over the course of the year, or in order to indicate the beginning of a particular topical portion of the text. But the modern system of chapter divisions only comes into existence through the work of Archbishop Stephen Langton in the early 13th century. A modern system of verses originates in the 1550s.

There are precursors of all of these, but often they were more closely related to the public reading of the text. and the divisions put a lectionary. If facilitating non-sequential engagement, chapters and verses have often led to what we experience as the atomization of the scriptures into detached texts. So people have specific texts that they might abstract from their context and learn. They have a good promised text character or something like that. Might also think about the way that the text gets ordered as a shift from the old order

principle of the scriptures. When you don't have all the books in a single volume, what gives order to the texts? The lectionary, the way that the texts are read within the life of the church. And that's a different sort of ordering. One of the things that the lectionary does is it puts text shoulder to shoulder. They're always bouncing off each other. So when you're reading John, you're thinking about Ezekiel. Or when you're reading something like the end of Revelation, you might be thinking about Joshua. And then you're thinking, ooh, there's interesting parallels there. John, in Revelation, is talking about seven trumpets being blown and the city being destroyed.

That's what's happening in Joshua, too. Maybe there's a connection between these two things. That's a way of reading scripture that is invited and encouraged by the lecture in its ordering and maybe is not so familiar to us. The medieval book would have been produced by skilled scribes on purpose. parchment or valum. It was a manuscript. It was produced by hand. The cost of the materials and the labour-intensive processes in their preparation is important to note. A book would have required the skins of many animals, which would require at least a month of preparation in most cases

for the pages. The scribal task of producing a single manuscript Bible would have demanded years of skill labour from networks of craftsmen. A single copy of Gutenberg's Bible on vellum required the skin of about 170 calves, or the equivalent of 300 sheep. Although it remained very expensive, the spread of paper generally produced from used textiles at first in Europe from the 14th century radically reduced the cost of book production. The industrialisation of paper manufacturer at the, turn of the 19th century, further reduced its cost. Paper made from wood pulp didn't take

off until the mid-19th century. The thin India paper that we're familiar with in our Bibles dates from 1875. Although Gutenberg's invention of move-will-tight made possible the production of books in far greater quantities, true mass production of books awaited the development of the steam-powered, rotary printing press. Further developments such as continuous roll paper, offset printing, the mechanical type setting of linotype and monotype machine, machines, and more recently digital printing have all increased the potential of the mass reproduction or production of texts. This is worth thinking about, we often think about the huge shift that occurs with Gutenberg. And there was a huge shift introduced by Gutenberg. If you see the shift in the number of

books that were produced in Europe before Gutenberg and then at the end of 1500 compare that it's a complete transformation of Europe but there were already changes taking place the shift from Hugh St. Victor's sort of Bible or sort of text more generally to the monastic text to the monastic text and then you see further shifts as these new forms of text focus more more upon the eye and the private, silent scholarly reading, and then mass reading, all of those were huge changes, but they happened incrementally. Also a shift from communal to private ownership, you think about what it costs, to own, to produce a Bible like that, it's prohibitively expensive.

It takes considerable skill, and the Bible that you'd have would also be a very unique artistic object. While the Bible can now be digitally replicated, scriptures were once laboriously copied by hand. As I've noted before, such a text would have a genealogical character. It would descend

from a line of texts. A unique identity and provenance. Lots of great books were produced in the northeast of England. Why? Because it was the center of book production. Because there's lots of rain. You have lots of rain. You have lots of sheep.

healthy sheep, skins that when stretched don't tear. And so book production is connected to the climate of that region. The production is an act of tradition, the handing down of the scriptures for one generation to its successors. It's a profoundly human act, one that generally would have occurred in the context of the life of the Christian community. With the machine printing of texts, the logic of production changes and our relationship with scripture can subtly shift with it.

The almost inhuman mechanical efficiency of the machine starts to displace the humanity of book production. The genealogical character of the book is muted and the particular text ceases to be a unique creation but merely one of a particular clone species. The shift is greatly intensified by the rise of mass production after the invention of the seam printing press. With the digital text,

both the materiality of the book and the form of the text largely vanish. Digital replication operates some different principles, even mass production. Most of us instinctively experience a different relationship to the mass-produced items in our environment than we do to the handmade or crafted items in our environment. Let's say that your example of this, my great-grandfather was a baker, He made a stool and my family has handed down his stool, his baker's stool, and my brother has it now. And it's a unique object that cow is with it, all the memories of him. He created it and he had this deep, storied attachment to it.

He worked in this baker's shop all his life and just about every single day of his life. And that is the chair that he stood. This is the stool that he used. And so there's a deep attachment to this material object. We don't generally have that sort of attachment to mass-produced objects and still less digitally-divided ones. You might care about who's going to inherit the books in your library, maybe not your online library or PDFs.

I mean, there's just not the same attachment there. It's not got that physical significance. The handmade or crafted items in our environment are naturally fitting bearers of particular meanings in ways that mass-produced items are not so much. Fungibility, our ability to replace an item with another item that is near identical, is characteristic of the majority of items in the contemporary human environment.

Look around you at most places and think about how many unique objects are there that you could not find a substitute for. In those cases, whether it's our clothes, whether it's the things building materials around us, whether it's the books on the shelves, whether it's the shelves, whatever it is. So many of these things could be replaced with something almost identical.

Such objects are creatures of more abstract technique and don't naturally bear the same particular meaning, histories, and values that uniquely handcrafted items can, although they can gradually come to bear these things as we make them our own. Maybe you have inherited a Bible that some member of your family spent a lot of time underlining and writing notes in the margin.

That's a very unique object, and it has a value that is particular because it's connected with that person and their memories. As you leave comments in the margins of your book, for instance, it ceases to be just a generic copy of that title and becomes your copy, a copy that has particular value and which couldn't simply be switched out

with another copy of the book without entailing some loss. As a result of our cultural movement in the direction of mass production and digital replication, we may give less thought to our Bibles as material artifacts, and thinking about the way that the materiality of these books shapes our forms of engagement. Through our labour of reading and study and through acts of giving and inheritance, a particular physical Bible can assume a great personal significance. Digital technology, by its very character, seems to float free of the particular.

particularity and uniqueness of the world of objects. Any digital copy, I mean, it's not even a particular, it doesn't really feel particular. And the mass-produced object retains some connection to the world of objects, but it is attenuated, digital objects, even less so. With the movement from the handwritten and often illuminated text to the mass-produced and digital texts, we shift from a relationship with the book. as a unique and particular human artifact, deeply embedded in an expressive of human life, work,

history, and community to the book as an increasingly functional and interchangeable thing in form, a mere vehicle for immaterial content to be consumed and disposed of in relatively short succession. The medieval Bible would often have manifested the uniqueness of an artwork, but would have been deeply embedded in a world, unlike the object in the world, Unlike the object in the art gallery or museum,

practices such as even the procession of Bibles into churches or the rich treasure bindings of some old Bibles illustrate the way that the uniqueness of these things could be understood, having a sort of iconic character, maintaining a sort of sacred presence of the word in the particular place. They often attended with all sorts of superstition and things like that. Sarah Perry has written about the character of technological decondensing, by which a new technology abstracts, she writes, a particular function away from an

object, a person or an institution, and allows it to grow separately from all the things it used to be connected to. The contemporary encounter with the Bible is the product of multiple events of technological decondensation, whereby the scriptures were steadily abstracted from the particularity of Christian communities, their life and their practices, from the world, world of specific objects, from the processes of tradition, from the act of hearing and the unity of scriptural narration. The medieval scriptural book would have had its artifactual uniqueness represented the church's scriptural task of handing on the text. The particular community's self-investment in this labour is intergenerational relationship with God's word. If you think about the relationship

with one of these texts that had a manuscript of biblical texts. They have immense value. You treasure to them and you pass them on. And it's seen as a treasure of the community that it possesses. It represents the presence of God's word in the midst, the embeddedness of the scriptures and the life of the church, and the immense value accorded to them. The modern Bible can't really do these sorts of things effectively.

And so it does many things far more effectively. I'm very, very, very thankful. We have personal Bibles. But we do lose certain associations in the process. We do lose something of what the text used to mean. And I want us to just have a sense of what that loss might entail without wanting us to chuck out our Bibles and go back to an old manuscript culture.

I'm not advocating for that. No longer is the material of Bible an object, where it is still an object at all, of condensed meaning, a charged symbol of. of a rich textual world. As our technology privileges functionality over iconicity, the modern Bible as a technological artifact

has tended to involve a displacement and effacement of the materiality of the text and of its proper world. The text can function like the commodity existing behind the realm of the particular as an entirely immaterial entity manifested in the realm of the particular in fungible material and digital form. So this also has effects upon the way that we read the Bible.

The way that we can experience the Bible as the text, the textual culture and settings within which it's embedded, and the forms of reading that come naturally to us as moderns. All of these change what we think the Bible is and how we read it, what we think even interpretation of the Bible might be. The Reformation occurred in the context of this, revolution in textuality. And it was not detached from that. In many ways it was responding to these changes in the form of the text. And as someone who strongly believes that the reformation was right,

it's important for me to reckon with this and to think about what this might mean. It occurred in the context of this decondensation of the scriptures, where the Bible was increasingly abstracted in various respects from prior forms of embeddedness, and sometimes for good as well as for ill. With the rise of secular scriptoria and printers, the work of Bible production had been increasingly secularised. Through the work of humanist scholars such as Erasmus of Rotterdam, the text of scripture itself was being detached from the magisterium of the church.

The growth of private Bible ownership, the increased production of Bibles for personal and family reading over time, and rapidly increasing literacy, all released people from their dependency on the church as the mediator of the text. And so it's important to recognize the way that this, in changing the relationship between the church and the Bible, whether it was in ownership, in transmission, or in performance of the text,

all of those relationships were weakened. And as a result, the church could have, or the Bible could stand over against the church in ways they could not be for and be used to challenge the church. Such a Bible could also deflate a sort of idolatry of the book as a physical object, where people might have little parts of a Bible and have it in an amulet as a sort of safety talisman. This can be witnessed in the fragments of scriptural books in these talismans and other superstitious objects, or in the preoccupation with the sacred character of a treasure-bound book that is named, never really opened. That's not the way the Bible is supposed to work. It may matter that it's a

testimony. Think about the way that the tablets of stone were stored in a way that they weren't there to be read, for the most part. They were there as a symbol of the relationship between Israel and the law of God. And so there is a place for textual symbols, but there is also a danger in textual symbols. Apart from the change such changes in the form of the text, the scripture would be far more entangled with the church to a degree that would make its challenging of the church much more difficult. When the church is so closely identified with the ownership, production, study, transmission, performance and preservation of the scripture, it can be very difficult for the scripture to assume the alterity, the otherness from the church, necessary to challenge it.

Humanism and its emphasis upon going back to original meaning, I think, is something that arises in part from this textual transformation. whereas in the past that connection of the book with the church, it suggests the meaning is something that's organically growing and the proper meaning of the text may be the more the downstream meaning, the ones that's been flowing out and developing and growing. It's the flowering of meaning. Whereas the meaning of the text for a humanist is the original meaning.

The text has a sort of autonomy and you go back, it's abstracted it from its connections with the church in order better to understand it. It allowed for text to be read against their traditional custodians and the assumption that the original sense abstracted from the community of the church and the context of the various readings

that had unfolded, if you think about all the gloss that surrounds many texts, medieval texts, that seems to me that's a modern development in part and it is downstream of this change in the form of texts. The increased abstraction of the text wasn't only a matter of concern for the church. It's also something rulers were concerned about. Where you have a text that gets abstracted from the church, this known body, you end up with anyone being able to use it to gainsay authorities.

So you can imagine someone like Henry VIII very concerned in the production of the Great Bible, in the Great Frontist piece to represent his authority in the way that he's handing this down, it's going down through the Sybil and the ecclesiastical authorities and the bottom of everyone, even the people in the context of the prison are saying, God save the king. He's given us this book and he represents his authority. We are living through a profound revolution in our understanding of the word, not just the text, but the word more generally, with the advent of large language models, algorithmic generation of texts and other such developments.

In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates tells the story of the inventor of writing, presenting his invention to the ruler of Egypt, who faults it. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing,

produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You've invented an eric serve, not of memory, but of reminding. And you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction, and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are, for the most part, ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

Now, that challenge to the written text at its dawn seems a bit strange to us, but I think after the developments in AI, we might begin to resonate a bit more with some of the challenge there. What I want us to think about is how does this change our way of thinking about what the Bible is, how we are to relate to it? What it means to read the Bible, what it means to interpret the biblical text. The loss of a sense of the church, its manuscripts, and its members as the primary bearers, and creature of the text, as that last has occurred,

it's been displaced by autonomous artifacts. The Bible is now the primary vehicle of the biblical, of the Holy Scripture. Whereas in the past, if you think about it, what did the Bible take the place of? In many ways, not the old manuscripts so much as the church. And what I think we need to recover, summing up, some of my concerns here,

is the church as the primary vehicle of Holy Scripture? Now, that doesn't mean we stop producing physical texts. Physical texts always need it. But the point is that the primary vehicle is the church. In the same way, what's the primary vehicle of Hamlet? Is it the book that you pull off the shelf, or is it the performance on the stage? In the same way, the church, it seems to me,

is the primary bearer of the text. In an oral culture, words are encountered not in autonomous texts, but in speakers, ceremonies, and performances, in poets and singers, liturgies and plays, storytellers and orators, priests and public readers, politicians and philosophers. The primary vehicle of the word is the person and the community. While the apparent difference between human beings

and AI, as generally, the words might be diminishing, AI can generate a letter maybe better than you can, that difference between human beings and AI as creatures of the word, as bearers of the word, is categorical. There's no comparison. An AI can generate a poem. It cannot be a poet. You can be a poet. You can bear the word within you. And the church was always called to be the primary bearer of Holy Scripture. Holy Scripture is given to us, not just that we might have a book outside of ourselves to consult, but that we might be formed by it and become the bearers of the Word of God, that we might speak forth the Word of God. Evangelicals have typically

thought about Holy Scripture according to the mindset of literate modern people. Holy Scripture is equated with the physical object of our personal Bibles, which we study for knowledge of God. God, and we should. Yet Holy Scripture itself presents us with a more complicated picture. Yes, there are physical scriptural texts external to us. Very important that there are. It enables us to be challenged by these things that are outside of us. However, throughout the scripture, God is, does word, is progressively taking humanity itself as its proper vehicle. Also, for much of the history of the people of God, Holy Scripture was chiefly encountered, not, in the latent textual object

of a privately owned Bible, but in the living words of public reading and preaching, in hymnody, in liturgies, in the singing of Psalms, and in texts treasured in personal memory. Evangelicals also have been shaped

greatly by those technologies that have encouraged thinking in terms of the autonomous Bible, independent of the church. Privileging, for instance, the original reading as the historical grammatical reading, which is an important reading to come to terms with, rather than the spiritual sense, which is a reading that centers upon Christ, which prioritizes the meaning that the text

has as it is canonically, redemptively historically, and otherwise connected with Jesus. That, it seems to me, is the primary reading that the text should have, and maybe something that the modern form of the text can blind us to. I think about the fourfold reading, the fourfold sense of Holy Scripture popular in the medieval period. The quadriga, you have the literal, typological, the tropological, and the analogical interpretation of the text. The literal, which is closest to the way that we typically encounter the text, the ordinary, literary sense of the passage, it's often that of, for instance, the historical record.

The typological discovers Christ and his kingdom. figured forth in the text. The tropological offers moral direction and the analogical raises our gaze upward to heavenly realities and forward to awaited ones. Now as we think about scripture, it's that sort of text. It's a text in which we experience the risen, glorified Christ. It's a text in which we encounter a vision of God's future for us. We see heavenly realities figured forth within it. We see resonances over the course of its history and its literal sense is always straining towards these deeper spiritual senses.

That is what it means to live, as it were, in the vineyard or garden of the text, a text that is encountered primarily in the form, not of the labour of the study, but of the contemplation of the closet, the way in which you spend time deep in this text thinking about the things of God and searching prayerfully for its wisdom. We are to be formed as living words. It will be seen in various parts of Scripture. Paul talks about the Corinthian Christians as epistles of Christ.

Elsewhere, he says, let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. Colossians chapter 3 verse 16. Go through scripture and you could read the story of scripture as the word taking flesh. The law is given to us very much as this external word. Do this. Don't do that. Thou shall, thou shalt not.

And then it's encouraged to actually meditate upon it, to chew over it, to memorize it. Deuteronomy 6 to bind it upon yourself. So the first thing you see in the morning or at night is the scriptural text connected to your body. You mutter it while you're on the way and you talk about it while you're speaking with your children. It's something that is always part of your conversation and it gradually is metabolized. And the point is that it becomes part of you. And as it becomes part of you, it starts to result in a different relationship. Not just the you shall not, but delight, this expression of love, loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.

That's how you fulfill the law, not just by obeying external commandments, but by taking that law into you so that the law is written upon your hearts so that you are obeying it from deep within, from your emotional center, from your center of will and all these different ways. that it's put into your knowledge, your understanding, your will, all your affections are transformed by this text. Though to, for instance, the book of the Psalms. And it begins with this statement of the Blessed Man. The Blessed Man defined by meditation upon the word of God, upon the law of God day and night, and the way in which that law has become part of him. Elsewhere in chapter in Psalm 40, your law is in my heart.

I wise than all of my teachers, the psalmist says in Psalm 119, because he meditates upon God's law. And, oh, how I love your law, the sweetness of the law like honeycomb. All these descriptions represent a transition in the relationship with the text, not just external word to which you submit, but an internal word in which you treasure within, that you delight in, that has become part of you, it's metabolized. And so whether in meditation, in memory, or the expression of delight, that text is now part of the Psalmist. The Psalmist also talks about the way that as the text becomes part of him, it yields understanding and judgment. The person who has internalized the law of God has learned wisdom in judgment.

Well, the reasons why in the book of Deuteronomy I've been thinking about this over the last few days, the book of Deuteronomy has chapter 5, the Ten Commandments. the republication. And then in chapter 6 to 26, each one of those commandments in succession is broken down and explored in a relationship in various case laws. And those case laws help to refract the core principle. And as you learn to work between the two, you begin to understand the logic of it all, how these things relate. It teaches you literacy in the law, and it teaches you wisdom and judgment, because you begin to understand how those principles work. And so the wisdom literature, books like Proverbs, are about a new form of internalization of the law,

not just in meditation, not just in memory, not just in delight and love, but internalization in understanding and insight. Your eyes have been lit by the law, and you can look out in the world, and you can understand the reality that you see, because those principles are now in you, they're part of you. And so the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and elsewhere, you get this sense that this is someone who's meditated upon the teaching of his parents, meditated upon the teaching of the law, and now he's able to exercise rule. It's something that gives power and authority. Go further on, look at the prophets. The prophets have a different relationship to the word still.

Go to Ezekiel. eat this scroll. The word of God is eaten and taken into him. It becomes part of him. It's metabolized. Likewise, Isaiah, his lips touched with the burning coal so that he might bear the word of God. Jeremiah, his lips are touched. And so he is told that he will be able to pull down kingdoms and plant. He'll be able to establish new realities through the authority of the Word of God. When we think of authority in relationship to the Word of God, we usually think of authority exercised over us. But the prophets illustrate and authorities that the word of God can give to us that we can exercise that authority as God puts his words in our mouth. Go to the New Testament. Of course we see the Word made flesh in Jesus Christ. He is God's Word seen in human flesh. The Word became flesh and the whole beginning of John's Gospel is framing this. Jesus throughout the book of John, his words emphasize. He speaks and things happen.

He says, rise, take up your bed and walk, and the man instantly finds the energy and he finds the soundness in his legs that he's able to leap out. He speaks to the people to draw water from the pictures and they draw it and it's turned into wine. It happens in their hands. He talks to his disciples to bride out the bread and wine. They obey, bread and the fish.

They obey. and it's multiplied in their hands. Jesus' word makes things happen. Jesus' word comes to the dead Lazarus and gives him life, and he can come forth because Jesus has said so. Jesus' voice is the voice not just a voice of power, but a voice that declares presence when you have been away from someone for a long period of time,

and you hear their voice behind you. Your heart leaps. It's a source of joy John the Baptist talks about the voice of the bridegroom that he hears and he feels this joy John the Baptist leapt in his mother's room and he's still leaping for joy when he hears Christ's voice

later on as he bears witness John the Baptist gives us one sense of what the voice of the bridegroom means later on we see the voice of the shepherd the sheep know my voice and they follow the voice of Christ

to Mary Magdalene in the garden. She hears him addressing her personally. She recognizes the voice, and she turns and says, Rabbi. There's a sense that Jesus' voice can change things. It's powerful. Jesus is God's word in human person. And this word is a word that should inhabit each one of us. We are the vehicles of this word. No AI can do that.

No mere biblical text can do that. Of course, if you spend time in the biblical text, if you spend time in the congregation of the church and speak and learn and study this word together as you sing it forth, it becomes part of you and you become a vehicle of it. And this is what we're called to be as Christians. We are the primary vehicle of the text. We are supposed to be formed as epistles of Christ. We are formed so that we might bear this word richly within us. And as we do so, there's no technology that can displace this. Human beings are the highest technology of the word.

There's highest creatures and bearers of the word. Okay, so getting back to the topic of this, which is in part the modern academy. What does this mean for the modern academy in conclusion? Well, first of all, that the primary home of Scripture is the church and the life and the hearts of the people of God. And so however we understand the role of the Academy, it must be situated relative to that. Now, the Academy is a place where we can engage in all these activities that support and encourage that reading of Scripture in the Church and in the lives of Christ. in the church and in the lives of Christians. The Bible that you have that helps you to meditate upon God's word for yourself

is the product of the work of countless scholars and academics over the years. People who have studied the meaning of particular terms and compared it in different Semitic languages, for instance, people who have done archaeological work, people who have done translation work, people who have studied textual variants, all these sorts of things, have brought us this Bible. They have enabled us to study these things for ourselves. And so there's a place for the academy. There's a need for it. But it's never our first order engagement with the text. If you think the interpretation of scripture primarily occurs in ivory halls of the academy, I wish we had ivory courts.

We don't have ivory halls. But Agree towers, it will be great. great, but what we do have dingy offices. But in that sort of situation, we are doing something that's the support work for the real interpretation of scripture, which is when it's being preached, when it's being sung, when it's being performed, when it's being meditated upon, contemplated within the life of the people of God. Now, there's a sort of theology that you can do that has more of that character. If you read the church fathers often, you'll see that in them.

Read Augustine's confessions. He's engaging in contemplation. He's not merely talking about it. He's meditating upon the goodness of God. And the reality of classical theism, for instance, is not just a series of philosophical principles and some theology proper that he's engaging with. It's actual delight in God. It's actual prayer. That is the sort of theology that we should aspire to do. But our theology is for the sake of the indwelling of the Word of God in his people. The primary bearer and home of Holy Scripture is the church and the lives of the people of God, the place where Christological meaning and the transformative intent of the text can be most fully and perfectly expressed. Thank you.