Just as the last piece I quoted from Webster, this piece focuses on the aspect of sanctification as definitive for the Christian as he/she reads the scriptures. Webster in his book “Holy Scripture” elaborates on this focus, and for that I would commend it to your bibliography. In the quote below, Webster is underscoring that, basically (oversimplified) the text reads us more than we read it; since this is the place that God has decided to confront and encounter us. It is through this process of dynamic interplay between God and his people (us), that he confronts our sinful patterns of idolatry and theology of glory; one of the many reasons, why it is so important to simply read scripture! It is only as we are sanctified through divine encounter, with Christ, that we are continually made ready for him as his bride; in other words, we need to be washed, we need to be sanctified on a daily basis—this is the point that Jesus is making here,

1 It was just before the Passover Festival. Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. 2 The evening meal was in progress, and the devil had already prompted Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, to betray Jesus. 3 Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; 4 so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. 5 After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him. 6 He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” 7 Jesus replied, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” 8 “No,” said Peter, “you shall never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.” 9 “Then, Lord,” Simon Peter replied, “not just my feet but my hands and my head as well!” 10 Jesus answered, “Those who have had a bath need only to wash their feet; their whole body is clean. And you are clean, though not every one of you.” 11 For he knew who was going to betray him, and that was why he said not every one was clean. 12 When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. “Do you understand what I have done for you?” he asked them. 13 “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am. 14 Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. 15 I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. 16 Very truly I tell you, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. 17 Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them. John 13:1-17 (NIV)

It is through encounter with him, and now each other, in him; that we continually are washed anew. If anything this should challenge us to be reading and meditating upon scripture without ceasing! I think we settle too quickly for the rubbish and titillation that this world has to offer; in fact it is this that we need to be washed of. I take what Webster offers below as a theological account of what I just wrote above.

First, the reader is to be envisaged as within the hermeneutical situation as we have been attempting to portray it, not as transcending it or making it merely an object of will. The reader is an actor within a larger web of event and activities, supreme among which is God’s act in which God speaks God’s Word through the text of the Bible to the people of God, as he instructs them and teaches them in the way they should go. As a participant in this historical process, the reader is spoken to in the text. This speaking, and the hearing which it promotes, occurs as part of the drama which encloses human life in its totality, including human acts of reading and understanding: the drama of sin and its overcoming. Reading the Bible is an event in this history. It is therefore moral and spiritual and not merely cognitive or representational activity. Readers read, of course: figure things out as best they can, construe the text and its genre, try to discern its intentions whether professed or implied, place it historically and culturally — all this is what happens when the Bible is read also. But as this happens, there also happens the history of salvation; each reading act is also bound up within the dynamic of idolatry, repentance and resolute turning from sin which takes place when God’s Word addresses humanity. And it is this dynamic which is definitive of the Christian reader of the Bible. [[John Webster, “Hermeneutics in Modern Theology: Some Doctrinal Reflections,” Scottish Journal of Theology, 336]

And here Webster, just following, quotes T. F. Torrance which makes even more clear what he has just stated:

. . . Or, again, a modern Reformed theologian, T. F. Torrance notes the inseparability of biblical revelation from the larger framework of reconciliation between God and sinners:’… the Word of God comes to us in the Bible not nakedly and directly with clear compelling self-demonstration of the kind that we can read it off easily without the pain and struggle of self-renunciation and decision, but it comes to us in the limitation and imperfection, the ambiguities and contradictions of our fallen ways of thought and speech, seeking us in the questionable forms of our humanity where we have to let ourselves be questioned down to the roots of our being in order to hear it as God’s Word. It is not a Word that we can hear by our clear-sightedness or master by our reason, but one that we can hear only through judgment of the very humanity in which it is clothed and to which it is addressed and therefore only through crucifixion and repentance.’76 [T. F. Torrance in Divine Meaning. Studies in Patristic Hermeneutics (T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 1995), p. 8. cited by Webster, p. 337]

What a challenge to us. Do you read scripture?