Understanding Scripture equips the saints

At More than a via media I came across a great post on the communal nature of learning how to understand Scripture. Two pieces of the article struck me as particularly important:

"catechesis, corporate reading of Scripture, preaching, liturgy. It is in this context - of catechesis, engaging preaching, liturgy and sacraments which proclaim the saving history of the acts of the Triune God - that I, that we come to understand Scripture."
- Richard Hooker

"Reading is a Christological business ... the reading of Scripture is a collective enterprise, a task of the whole communion of saints, in which every generation participates. Together with the Biblical authors we may read their past readers, and if we take the canonical text seriously as the fulfilling of the law, we shall not imagine that good reading could be set in partisan opposition to them. All serious reading of the canonical text has in view the catholic horizon".
- Oliver O'Donovan



I have been pondering Alisdair MaCintyre's call for a new St Benedict as a means to create local community that has a Rule (a way of making sense of identity)that can preserve and build up virtue in the midst of the dark ages. Scripture, as understood within the Church Catholic, is the Rule by which the parish church grows into itself. Let's be clear that Scripture is not a rulebook (but rather our story), instead as the community opens up the Scriptures together in the context of the Church Catholic with all of the past teaching, the sacraments, sound preaching, etc. then we have the capacity to move into our new identity as called out by the Triune God and we make space for the perpetual growth of all the saints throughout God's One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.