It’s tempting, perhaps at times necessary, to say that Jesus, not the Bible, is the Word of God. But to do so is to risk missing the subtler, surer christological and doxological point, which Michel Henry helpfully discerns:
By “Word of God,” we mean first of all the Scriptures… This language can be called a “word” because it can take the form of a sonorous utterance and also because, according to what is evident in the significations that it conveys, it is addressed to someone. All the same, the word of the Scriptures bears a distinctive characteristic: it is not merely addressed to someone, to us men, but it is addressed to us by God. Understanding the word of the Scriptures is possible only if the divine provenance of this word is perceived at the same time as it is. This is why the text of the Gospels (to which, lacking time, we will limit ourselves) displays a constant attempt at legitimization, making reference to other sacred texts, to the Prophets whose confirmation, or something like it, they give themselves out to be. The most categorical affirmation of the divine provenance of the evangelic word resides in the quotation marks that punctuate the story. In these instances, it is Christ himself who speaks; it is the very word of God that we hear—and that is so because Christ is defined as the Word of God. Organized around this divine Word, the evangelical text as a whole is transformed, dismissed from its linguistic station, banished from its properly textual place toward its divine referent: not only the words spoken by Christ, but his acts—washing feet, remitting sins, resurrecting the dead.1
The logic here is crucial: the Scriptures become the Word of God because of who Jesus is and what he did. Indeed, all things are word and become Word because of him. As St Paul says, “Christ is all and in all” (Col. 3.11). Needless to say, the “alls” in Paul’s praise must include the selection of texts we call sacred scripture.
For Henry, the Scriptures are for us, essentially, an outworking or manifestation of Jesus’ life. They are the Word of God, he argues, just because of the infinite “listening” that is Jesus’ eternal Sonship, his begotten-not-made, being-beyond-being oneness with the Father and Spirit, which creates the communion of all things. That, finally, is the heart of the heart of the doctrine of inspiration, in particular, and the doctrine of creation, in general.
That means inspiration, like all creation, is essentially Eucharistic. In the act of Thanksgiving, things become what they most truly are by becoming other than they could ever be on their own, apart from their having been offered-up by God to God through us. This experience is the key to understanding our existence. In Henry’s words,
How can we not notice that, in the words that report the institution of the Eucharist, a strange displacement occurs. That which must be preserved in memory is not exactly words, not even those that relate the institution of the Eucharist: “Do this.” From the beginning, with unexpected force, the text designated another place besides its own, the one where something like “Doing”’ happens.2
What are we doing when we do what Jesus told us to do? We’re not just re-enacting something he once did. We’re daring to do now what he alone could have done once-for-all. We’re taking his place, in a sense, enacting his Messiahship, acting as Son. Grappling with how that’s possible, and why God would want it for us—well, that’s what theology is for. Deep waters? Sure. But we’re made to be out of our depth. And thanks to the Spirit, the Scriptures draw us out into the deep.
Michel Henry, “Speech and Religion: The Word of God,” in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 217-241 (217-218). I do have one quibble with what Henry says here. As Bradley Jersak puts it, while it may be true that we think first of the Bible when someone speaks of the Word of God, in reality it is that Word in a Christian sense only if Jesus is who the apostles believed him to be. In other words, Scripture cannot hold first or last place because whatever it is it is because of the one who is in himself the First and the Last.
Henry, “Speech and Religion,” 239.
Wow … deep waters for sure. Thanks I am seeing this now in a boarder sense.
I've often felt wary on an emphasis on Scripture as the Word of God. In the charismatic evangelical circles I run in it's often employed in literalist terms that make Jesus ancillary/subservient to the written text, and therefore not the one speaking and conditioning it. It then becomes nothing more than a tool for serving one's own piety. I often here folks talking of the 'living word' but only in the sense that their reading of the scriptures feels alive because it confirms their biases, they rarely find it unsettling, they rarely find it seems to change. But we have to lay the scriptures at the feet of Christ, not vice versa, only in that sense with risen and ascended Jesus as the one who utters it, is the word living. That's when I find it changing, it's not just words on a page but a whole swirling vortex of meaning that cuts as it embraces. This has really helped bring clarity and settle my unease, so thank you +Chris.