RECLAIMING THE BIBLE FOR THE CHURCH Rokert WO. Ucnton te I have organized my remarks under no fewer than six headings. Under the first is a disclaimer. I fully participated in devising the title for this conference. Yet I must begin by rejecting one suggestion it might make. ‘The historical-critical scholars are not holding the Bible captive out there: there has been no conspiracy to kidnap the church's book nor need we mount an expedition to rescue it. It is of course true that "historical-critical" reading of the Bible was in part devised as a weapon against the faith. It is also true that the dominance of this reading in mainline Protestant and now in most Catholic seminaries, as it has worked out, has created a situation iri which we think we have to ask the heathen what our book says. But there is no intrinsic reason why historical-critical reading must function as a weapon against the church, or why we must suppose pagans know best how to do it. ‘ The fault that mandates this conference is in us and not in our stars. If we need to reclaim the Bible, it can only be because we are uncertain in our claim to it. If I may address this gloriously mixed as- sembly as somehow "the church," the first thing I have to say is: the4 2 Bible must necessarily be there for us any tiite_we need it. For the unitary book we call the Bible exists only inside the church. iB be + The volume wei: J'the’tiible is a collection of documents. The various tradents and auith?s who produced these various documents did not’ intend them as coritributions to a composite volume - the project perhaps: of an editor at Thomas Nelson. The single book exists because and only because the church has for her own purpose assembled a Witertain selection of documents from the very ancient ‘Near East and from lx. ofirst-century Mediterranean antiquity. “documents impose themselves on the church; Catholicism emphasizes that It 18 the church that recognizes the exigency. I mean only to make the . _ “lGpte point pré-supposed by and included in both emphases: the “Setiirch’put this collection together. * As to the purpose for which the church put the Bible together, “I watit to state this also in the most simple-minded and ecumenically in- disputable form. It is in service of her calling to speak the gospel that the church needs to have the one book, composed of these and no other documents, that we call the Bible. God gives her the book in service of her calling to proclaim Israel's God and the one he raised, as a message of salvation ‘to the world and in appeal and praise to God.roa Where the-church’s