We are obliged, therefore, to say that whoever speaks that which is foreign to religion is using many words, while he who speaks the words of truth, even should he go over the whole field and omit nothing, is always speaking the one word.
Origen
What follows is hardly original, and it probably isn't interesting. Yet, it needs to be repeated. It needs to be memorized. The Word of God is not the Bible. The Bible is the written, and edited, testimony to the Word of God, who the Bible itself declares quite clearly is Jesus Christ.
At the end of the day, we Christians need to read the Bible, as we do all things, in Jesus Christ (to paraphrase T. F. Torrance). Even as we disagree over trifles like liturgical practice, or a detail in our thinking on the sacraments, we need to be held fast by the reality that the Spirit that gives life to the words on the page (which are, as St. Paul noted, quite dead) is the Spirit of the crucified and risen Christ.
Anything else isn't reading the Bible. Anything else is just crap. Anything that does not give life, that does not bear the fruits of the Spirit, that does not, in the end return our thoughts and our hearts and our lives to Jesus Christ isn't returning to that one word that defines all the other ones.
