From the Archives: "Scripture in the Assembly: The Ancient and Lively Tension"

Each month, our blog features articles from the archives of Liturgy. Our goal is to share the wisdom from decades past so that we might celebrate the work and insights of these excellent ministers and scholars.

This essay sheds light on why scripture reading and preaching in the Christian assembly ground the people’s faith not only in Christ but in the liturgy as a source of that faith.

Given the twenty-first century practice in many churches of reading only one text from the Bible for the preacher to expound, Gordon Lathrop asserts that the whole Bible serves as the primary source of faith in Christ because of the tension created by old language making present the one we worship: a crucified man. His would be a reason to set forth in the assembly a text from the Hebrew Bible, one from the New Testament’s Epistles, and a Gospel reading, in order to offer to the worshippers the full range of faith orientations found in the Bible.

Selected Quotes from

“Scripture in the Assembly: The Ancient and Lively Tension”

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The ancient Christian community assembled to read the old scriptures of Israel. And it remembered Jesus Christ. By that juxtaposition a remarkable thing happened. No matter what else the old church did, it treasured the old books, received them, honored them, read them, gratefully, carefully interpreting them according to whatever principles of interpretation were available.

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To read the scriptures in the Christian assembly, the gathering on Sunday, the gathering in the name of Jesus, is at once to honor them and to create a crisis, a tension in their meaning.

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There is a substantial liturgical deposit in the New Testament books –– in prayers and hymns and kerygma and baptismal and eucharistic allusions.

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Precisely because we who desire to say and hear God faithfully and to experience salvation now still find in the communal reading of scripture the living exercise of that tension between "tradition" and the presence of the crucified, the reading of scripture in the assembly is the primary source for the church's recovery of this principle by which the church can interpret the whole of scripture, the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. That principle is this: honesty with the language spoken in days gone by and its literal meaning, but at the same time, always the quest for what in that language will speak, do, preach, teach, drive Christ, i.e. preach and present the tension of faith –– this crucified man is Christ. And such a presentation of the center of the scripture will, in turn, renew our sense of the liturgy.

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All the scripture, says the liturgy, is put in our mouth so that we may sing Jesus Christ.

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The Roman governor Pliny was right –– and right to be scandalized: at dawn the Christians sing a song to Christ as to a God. To sing to this crucified one, to call this one Christ, to call this Christ God, and to order the day to him, such is Christian worship.

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Gordon W. Lathrop has taught liturgy at Wartburg Theological Seminary, the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, Yale Divinity School, and the Virginia theological Seminary. His books from Fortress Press include the trilogy Holy Ground (2003), Holy People (1999), and Holy Things (1993), as well as the The Four Gospels on Sunday (2012), The Pastor (2006), Saving Images: The Presence of the Bible in Christian Liturgy (2017), among others.

Lathrop, G. “Scripture in the Assembly: The Ancient and Lively Tension,” Liturgy 2, no. 3 (1982): 21–24.

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