The Future of the Word Quotes

“When we escape into a book, become absorbed into it, are magically transported, nothing becomes more visible, upon our return, than the edges that confine, the inescapable problems, the unabsorbable fact, the intransigent present. They become only so much more visible as under the x-ray—the indomitable ribcage, the recalcitrant tumor. Reading is thus primarily an acknowledgment that escape is fundamentally impossible. To read for escape, or stress relief, or relief of some other kind is, at bottom, rife with longing.”
― Tiffany Eberle Kriner, The Future of the Word: An Eschatology of Reading

“Jonathan Tran, in the traditions of Paul Ricoeur and Stanley Hauerwas, has written about how God’s forgiveness and restoration of the world within salvation history changes the way we understand our own narratives. He writes that “we tell our stories within the story of God’s self-giving forgiveness,” for God’s forgiveness is in fact a renarration, a putting of our stories within God’s story: and “when God forgives, he re-narrates our stories . . . for restoration” with an eschatological goal in mind.[”
― Tiffany Eberle Kriner, The Future of the Word: An Eschatology of Reading

“With the word, God spoke the world into being, and in the death and resurrection of the word of God, God speaks forth the making new of all things. Likewise, in our own contexts, utterance, the speaking forth of the word, is a powerful avenue for the cultivation and keeping of the text, a making new, of time and place. Utterance is a saying or telling of a text, reissuing it in space or time. Quotation, in part or in whole; the conscious thinking of a text, planned or spontaneous; printing and reprinting: utterance is both a function of preservation and a making new, as contextual differences renew the word and world in the iterations of the text.”
― Tiffany Eberle Kriner, The Future of the Word: An Eschatology of Reading

“The fact that we fail at seeing these things, that our interpretations may perpetrate violence against a text, and so on, is only more evidence of the Lord’s grace is granting us participation in the love of the Trinity, through existence and in the body of Christ. That same grace is offered to us who are granted the privilege of literacy. Meaning-making through reading, after all, is another testimony of the attributes of the invisible God being clearly seen in what has been made (Rom. 1:20). That we fall into idolatry is undeniable—in reading and the rest of life: the image in Romans of exchanging “the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles” is as aesthetic and poetic as it is magic and earthen (Rom. 1:23). It harkens back to the idolatries of both noninstrumental and instrumental reading discussed in the introduction. God will bring the entire cosmos into the beloved community of the new creation through the purification and repurposing work of judgment—as idolatry and violence and sin and death become the nothing to which they have always pointed. God’s judgment will differentiate those who seek the glory of God from those who seek the nothingness of their own glory. But text may be cultivated by anyone; its becoming gives glory to the God of all meaning-making regardless. The special office of the reader in the body of Christ is the express veneration of the word—is, in short, praise.”
― Tiffany Eberle Kriner, The Future of the Word: An Eschatology of Reading

“Two things are important to note here. The first is that God’s creation is by the word in relation. “The Word was with God and the Word was God” stresses the Trinitarian nature of creation. The fellowship between the persons of the Trinity, what some have called the perichoretic dance, is inter-reception, which involves motion or action. Because God is love, God is interactive in the Godhead. Creation ex nihilo is a production of their active, expanding, and plentiful fellowship: the Trinity’s love creates. When the Trinity’s love expands outside of the Godhead and God creates, the fellowship extended to creation does not subsume the creation into the Godhead, but rather, expands God’s love outside of himself. As Athanasius writes in Contra Gentes, “[H]e envies nobody’s existence but rather wishes everyone to exist in order to exercise his kindness.”[3]”
― Tiffany Eberle Kriner, The Future of the Word: An Eschatology of Reading