Sola Scriptura Question: Word vs word?

[Anthony_V]

I’m in the course of reading Hans Urs von Balthasar’s (hereafter HUvB) Explorations in Theology, Vol I: The Word Made Flesh.

His way of writing is very interesting in that he uses words themselves as the stepping stones to connect ideas. So there is the question of the contrast between the [super]nature of the Word (as God the Son, etc.) and the [super?]nature of the word (scripture).

Scripture is the word of God that bears witness to God’s Word. The one Word therefore makes its appearance as though dividing into a word that testifies [scripture] and into a Word [Jesus Christ] to whom testimony is given… The testifying word is the sequence of scripture from Genesis to Apocalypse which accompanies the progressive revelation of the Word [the Body of Christ–the Church?] in flesh and which reflects it as if a mirror(1)–a function which distinguishes it from the former Word.

(1)In this distinction, we part from many Protestants. Scripture is not identical with revelation. And although it is truly God’s word, it is so only in the mode of testifying to his revelation. Scripture is in fact only the mode of God’s self-witness in words, while there are besides other modes of his self-witness.
Explorations in Theology, Vol. I, HUvB

All [bracketed] additions are mine.

Both Protestants and Catholics (also Orthodox, but I don’t want to introduce too many variables) agree that divine revelation happens through the manifestation of God in finite instruments as sacred mystery (AKA dogma). Such could be said of both scripture and the Church. How would a Protestant reconcile the fact that the Church, as the Body of Christ manifest in the human element and inspired by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, is not an organic source of general divine revelation? Certainly there is the priesthood of the regenerate believer, etc., which inspires the person to understand and read scripture, but if the Church is constituted merely by private revelation, how is it also the extended manifestation of the incarnate Word in time as the Body of Christ? Or is it rejected that the Church is the Word in the same way that it is the Body of Christ? Or rather, to use a Christological parallel, is it rejected that the unconfused and noncompetitive union between the dual natures of Christ is extended into the pairing of the Word with the inspired human element of the Church (Rev 19:7; 2 Pet 1:4)?

 

[capablanca911]

The NT Greek clears things up. There is God’s Word (rhema literally utterances) and Word (graphe literally writings) and the Logos which can be used for the Person of Christ or the entire deposit of Divine Wisdom.

Scripture is not the Logos in the first sense (obviously) or the second sense: because some Divine Wisdom exists outside of Scripture.

Prots simultaneously think that the entirety of revelation is found in the writings while simultaneously believing that there is divine wisdom outside of the Bible.

That, and they believe we have always been at war with East Asia.