By Dr. Scott Hahn

Reading the Bible from the heart of the Church - I've taken that as a motto in recent months. Today, a friend asked me to explain what I mean.

The phrase can have many meanings, all of them true. It suggests the dispositions we should have when we approach the Scriptures. We are trusting children of God and of the Church, our mother. We read the sacred page within a community that's larger than our local Bible-study group. Our "study group" is the communion of saints, the voices of Catholic Tradition, the great cloud of witnesses from all of history. Our guide is the Holy Spirit, working through the Church's Magisterium.

I mean all this when I urge people to "read the Bible from the heart of the Church."

But, most importantly, I mean that we should read the Bible in its natural and supernatural habitat. We should read the Bible in light of the liturgy.

The Bible and the liturgy were made for one another. That statement would have seemed self-evident to the apostles and the Church fathers. There were no printing presses in their day, and very few people could afford to have books copied out by hand. So people did not so much read the Scriptures as absorb them, mostly in the Mass. The Mass itself is a stunning compendium of scriptural texts, and it has always included extended readings from both testaments.

In the early Church, the Bible was considered a liturgical book. Indeed, the canon -- the official "list" of books in the Bible -- was originally drawn up to limit the texts that could be used as readings in the Mass.

But the connection goes back even further than that. For the scriptural texts themselves presume the context of the Mass. The apostles and evangelists seem to be writing with liturgical proclamation in mind.

If we read the Bible as they wrote it, we'll read it from the heart of the Church. And that heart is eucharistic. It is the heart of Jesus.

The Pontifical Biblical Commission put it well in its 1993 document The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church: "it is above all through the liturgy that Christians come into contact with Scripture...In principle, the liturgy, and especially the sacramental liturgy, the high point of which is the eucharistic celebration, brings about the most perfect actualization of the biblical texts...Christ is then 'present in his word, because it is he himself who speaks when sacred Scripture is read in the Church' (Sacrosanctum Concilium 7). Written text thus becomes living word."

That last line packs a lot of punch. "Written text thus becomes living word." Maybe I'll take that as my motto next month. It, too, could serve as a motto for the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology. Our goal is simple but urgent: The Center promotes biblical literacy for lay people and biblical fluency for the clergy - with life-transforming results for all!

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Summer 2004