When we read Scripture as Christians it isn’t a matter of simply finding all of the neat little literary nuances, or distilling all of its inner-logical reality for all its worth; in other words, for the Christian reading Scripture is not an intellectual exercise alone. To read Scripture for the Christian, first and foremost it is a participatory event wherein we are encountering the viva vox Dei (living voice of God); an event from moment to moment that is transforming us from ‘glory to glory’. John Webster says it this way,

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.[1]

All too often, I think, reading Scripture becomes a casualty of academia. Indeed, even as Webster notes, the academic intellective has its place, and done from the right motives can be fruitful; but the terminus of reading Scripture for the Christian, I would contend, should be to know God and Him crucified. Reading Scripture, because it brings us into direct contact with God in Christ by the Spirit, ought to have the impact of making us look more like its author and less like the words that shape the profane world we inhabit in this time in-between.

This understanding fits well with what Thomas Torrance calls Dialogical Theology, or with what Barth calls Dialectical Theology. The emphasis is upon the notion that God continues to speak to His sheep, and His sheep know His voice; they know it by the Holy Spirit’s ministry of magnifying Christ, and understanding that Scripture’s voice only finds one when it breaks off in its reality in Christ as the mediator between ‘God and man.’ This might seem too ethereal to really accept as “critical theology,” but in fact it is the sort of theology we see Jesus living out Himself throughout the Synoptics and the Gospel of John; we see Jesus in a constant mode of prayer to the Father. If the Christian wants to be a growing disciple and theologian of Jesus Christ, then they cannot do anymore or less than their Master did; they need to be in a constant and lively dialogue with their Father through prayerfulness in their daily lives.

This sort of dialogical theological life might seem like a legalistic burden, but it only becomes that if we think wrongly about the ground of our lives. If Jesus is the ground and condition of our very being as human, then we seek our reliance and con-versational life from His life for us. It is here, in the resurrection power, that the Apostle Paul writes of, that we have resource, strength, and motivation to live in this life of pariticipatio Christi; a life enthralled with the majesty of the tremendous of God’s Triune life as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

[1] John Webster, “Hermeneutics in Modern Theology: Some Doctrinal Reflections,” Scottish Journal of Theology, 336.