The Bible in Worship

The presence of Our Lord in the written Word, the Holy Scriptures, is real, but different, not only in degree but kind, from His Presence in the Holy Communion, for the presence of the Lord under the form of bread and wine is an objective and mystical Real Presence of His True Body and Blood, a Presence which is unique in salvation history and unlike any other presences of Christ in His Church. There is an analogy between Christ in the Scriptures and Christ in the Holy Sacrament. To be sure, Our Lord is alive and active in the reading of His Word written, and He communicates, conveys His Word to us in Scripture as the one true Word, the Logos, Himself the living Word of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. One could even say that His operation in the proclamation of the Scriptures has a sacramental quality, which sanctifies us as we hear the Word proclaimed. But Christ's operation in the reading of the Word is on a different level from that found in the Holy Communion, for under the Eucharistic elements Our Lord is present to us, not merely by grace and virtue, but in His very Body and Blood, His human nature and His divine nature, in a way we cannot explain and yet which is Real. We use a corollary to explain why the Church treats the Scriptures with intentional reverence and respect. The Church is herself the great Sacrament of Christ, and she applies the sacramental principle in every aspect of her worship, including the use and reading of the Bible: our outward and visible signs demonstrate the inward and spiritual realities experienced and received in our worship.

The use of physical gestures in honouring the Holy Scriptures goes back before us to the Old Covenant, when the Bible was enthroned in the synagogue in a special place, was handled only with the greatest care, and its reading accompanied by prayer and acts of reverence, a sign of the community's love for and devotion to the Scriptures. We Christians of the Apostolic Tradition have 'baptised' and inherited those ancient Jewish signs and gestures, like so many others, and use them in our liturgical worship. The prime example for orthodox Christians would be the Gospel procession, wherein the Service Book containing the Holy Gospels is processed on special occasions into the midst of the congregation and is surrounded by the Cross and candles, which are used in the procession and the reading of the Gospel to honour the Word and presence of Jesus in His Scriptures. In some churches, incense is used for precisely the same reason, offered to God in honour of His Word. On rare solemnity, the Scriptures are sung, not only to add a level of intensity or clarity to the reading, but to express the sanctity and heavenly origin of the Word of God proclaimed. These are customs which we traditional Anglicans have inherited from the earliest Church and share with other Churches, East and West, which also derive from the Apostolic age.