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The Scriptures as Word of God

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2024

Richard Kehoe O.P.
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The Scriptures are God’s Word spoken. They are not simply word about God, or about his Word or about his saving work. They are his Word, and therefore his work: for his Word is creative; what it says it thereby does. (In Hebrew, Dabar means both Word and matter, affair, etc.) The words of Scripture do not point to what God does; they are what he does. And it is necessary not so much to follow their guidance as to participate in their Mystery. So it is, analogously, of a creative work of art. For example, a poem does not refer to something apart from itself which one must apprehend: it is something, into which one must enter.

In the words of Scripture a mystery of creation is contained. They are intrinsically creative. And what is there already created is the mind of the Prophet who utters them. For the prophet is one who conceives the Word of God in his mind (in his ‘heart’), by the power of the Spirit, and brings it forth, utters it. He possesses, that is to say he is really possessed by, the Word of God. The prophetic utterance of the Word of God involves a divine work of creation; it means that the Word of God has in some sense become incarnate.

What happens in the divine history, of which the Scriptures are not just a record but an embodiment or a sacrament, is to be compared to what happened in the very creation of the world. The mystery there displays the chaotic material of life being moved over by the Spirit and so enlivened that it becomes responsive to the Word of God and out of the womb of chaos the cosmos is born.

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 27 , Issue 321 , December 1946 , pp. 453 - 460
Copyright
Copyright © 1946 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

Footnotes

1

Originally a paper written to provide raw material for discussion; and reproduced here without alteration.

References

2 For in another sense, in a material sense, Tradition may be taken to represent all the body of theological truth formed through the ages which is not to be found explicitly in the Scriptures. But in reality it is Scriptural, and does not formally constitute a separate source of divine truth.

3 Of Mary we read how, when she had conceived and given birth in the 8eah to the Word of God, she then took ‘all these words’ into her heart. pondering them.… The ’heart‘ is the very deepest and truest self, not attained except through sacrifice, through death.