Word Upon Words: The Sacramentality of Scripture As Expressed in Augustine and Speech Act Theory

Word Upon Words: The Sacramentality of Scripture As Expressed in Augustine and Speech Act Theory

By Miller, Benjamin, 2020 -- "Is the language of Scripture abstract, compared to the presence of Christ in the eucharist? Does divine presence and self-disclosure become more abstract just because it occurs in the realm of language rather than in physical things? My thesis came about because I wanted to push back against the subtle notion I sense that the inspiration of Scripture is somehow less “real” and less divinely “present” than the eucharistic real presence. My way of criticizing this notion is to articulate the Bible’s inspiration, its capacity to bear the Word of God, sacramentally. To make such a claim, I am compelled to examine how language itself functions to articulate that the Bible, a kind of Christian language, functions sacramentally. My framework to discuss how language theologically functions in such a way that it can bear divine presence concretely is to use Augustine, who expressed the presence of God in Scripture and the sacraments with a rich theology of signs, and speech act theory, a philosophy used by some theologians stating that words can enact what they perform. Together with the heritage of modern Christian theologies of Scripture, I can argue that the language of Scripture bears the divine Word in a way that bears a real presence. God is present in Scripture the way God is present in baptism and the eucharist: as a living Word that joins to the human, creaturely elements of speech and text and genre, as breath makes bone join to sinew." -- Introduction, p. 1-2

Miller, Benjamin

Virginia Theological Seminary

5/9/2020

© Copyright Benjamin Miller, 2020.

PDF

Text