Finding and Seeking: Ethics as Theology, vol. 2

by Oliver O'Donovan

Reading of Scripture proceeds on the basis that this text has been received, with all its remoteness and all its nearness, with its immediate appeal and its strange distance, that it has been received from a source that cannot be ignored, and that it cannot simply be taken up in any way and from any point of view that happens to strike us, but must be read interrogatively by a community that looks to it for its identity. In the church’s worship the lectern is at the center. No act is so fundamental to its catholic identity as reading. This is not to devalue preaching, singing, prayer, let alone sacramental act, all of which find their authorization through reading — and if we hesitate over that, we may be reassured by the good sense of Thomas Aquinas, for whom the word is the “form” of every sacrament.