Letter and Spirit: From Written Text to Living Word in the Liturgy
By Scott Hahn. Doubleday (New York, 2005). 238 pp., $21.95.

If the Reformation established the principle "Scripture alone," conservative American Protestantism has too often turned the Bible into a magical book, absolutely inerrant, with an infallibility most Catholics would not dream of claiming for the pope.

While this was never the intention of the 16th century reformers, this "Free Church" perspective of the Reformation's "left wing," isolated from the Church and its interpretative tradition, particularly its liturgy, shapes the ways many conservative evangelicals understand both biblical interpretation and church. The popular "Left Behind" series is only one example.

Scott Hahn's new book, "Letter and Spirit," eloquently illustrates how the texts of Scripture originate in the worship or liturgy of the community while the liturgy itself became the ordinary place for its interpretation. Even the debate over what was to be included in the canon was a debate about what texts could be read at Mass. Thus Scripture and liturgy cannot be separated without loss to the meaning of the Scripture itself.

Hahn's argument throughout the book revolves around three terms which were key to early Christian exegesis: economy, typology and mystagogy.

---Economy, from the Greek oikonomia, refers to the mysterious divine plan for salvation through which God communicates himself and his life.

---Typology is a method of interpretation, dear to the fathers of the Church, which sees in the figures and events of the Old Testament signs that will be fulfilled in the New. Thus for Paul, Adam is a type of Christ (Romans 5: 14) and for the author of 1 Peter the flood is a "type" of the saving waters of baptism (1 Peter 3: 21).

---Mystagogy means the "doctrine of the mysteries," the commemoration and explanation of the mysteries of Christ's life in the sacraments, thus making them known and extending them through time. Hahn quotes Robert Taft's apt expression, "Mystagogy is to liturgy what exegesis is to Scripture."

Equally important is Hahn's emphasis on the "actualization" of Scripture in the liturgy, a key point in the important 1993 document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, which uses this concept to balance a sometimes exclusive emphasis on a strictly historical-approach to the biblical text.

A strength of this book is Hahn's ability to unpack and explain in depth biblical and liturgical terms. He shows how anamnesis means not just remembrance or memorial, but an actualizing the mystery, making present by recalling. Parousia, which means "presence" or "coming," is too often reduced to Christ's coming in glory at the end of time, but in the early Church it was used to indicate Christ's eucharistic presence, what Catholic theology would speak of as the "real" or "substantial" presence of Christ. Tradition means the Church's living memory of Jesus and the apostles' teaching, most alive in the liturgy which is the Church's living memory.

This is a profoundly Catholic book, showing Scripture's roots in the liturgy and the liturgy's potential for interpretation and evangelization. Though accessible to more popular audiences, it is also a scholarly the work which draws on Catholic, Protestant and Jewish scholars to illuminate an issue of increasing importance in the area of biblical hermeneutics. I recommend it highly.

Jesuit Father Thomas P. Rausch is the T. Marie Chilton Professor of Catholic Theology at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles.