The Bible is written by Jesus, to Jesus, about Jesus.…We should, therefore, read confidently expecting to find Jesus as we read.

You are what you eat, said St Augustine.

Well, he said ‘you become what you consume’ in the context of teaching on the Lord’s Supper. Nevertheless, the point is important. Consumption of the Supper has a formative effect into Christlikeness. The how and the why might be interesting, and I suspect Augustine and I part company somewhat in that explanation, but nevertheless the principle is vital.

Marshall McLuhan famously said that we become what we behold. Paul says that’s its by beholding Jesus’ glory that we become like him (2 Corinthians 3). Kevin Vanhoozer argues, along those lines, that the way Augustine spoke about the Lord’s Supper is therefore the same for reading the Bible.

For Vanhoozer, reading the Bible theologically involves seeing Jesus in his glory in the text in a transformative manner. This is a significant thread of the thesis of his Mere Christian Hermeneutics.

We might want to ask what it means to read the Bible theologically: I’d want to answer that it’s an attentiveness to both what the text says about God and to the literary form that it says it in. In other words, theological reading is (or includes) orthogonal reading.

Vanhoozer answers simply that to read the Bible theologically is to attend ‘to the divine address for the purpose of knowing God in the face of Christ,’ (319). In other words, choosing to read the Bible with the purpose of meeting Jesus in the pages. There is an expectation that when we meet Jesus in the text, we will be transformed.

That’s what successful preaching is: offering us Jesus in the text so that we meet/eat/see him and are changed by that encounter. Vanhoozer says all Bible reading should, ultimately, have the same end. I agree.

It isn’t as simple as deciding to read in that way and then doing so, it isn’t as simple as the words of the pages just changing us as we let our eyes passively run over them, if it were Mere Christian Hermeneutics would not be a complex book.

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