As I explained in Lógos Part I and Part II (which I do recommend reading before this, if you haven’t), “the Word of God” is another name for the Logos, the second Person of the Trinity, who became incarnate as Jesus Christ. But odds are that you’ve more often heard the term “the Word of God” used in reference to the Bible.

Speaking from my own experience, until a couple of years ago I associated the phrase “the Word of God” exclusively with the Bible — and I suspect that this is the case with many others, as well. This is likely due in large part to the fact that, here in the West, we live in a culture which has been heavily influenced by Protestant Christianity.

Non-Catholic Christians generally hold to the doctrine of Sola Scriptura — “Scripture Alone” — which originated with Martin Luther in the 16th century. To put it simply, it is the belief that the Bible is the sole infallible source of authority for Christian faith and practice. I suspect that this belief is what has lead to the phrase “the Word of God” being used in common speech to refer chiefly — if not exclusively — to the Bible; those who reject the authority of the Church would naturally end up placing a greater emphasis on the authority of Scripture.

But does this mean that both Jesus Christ and the Bible are the Word of God — and if so, how can we make sense of this? In order to clarify the matter, I’d like to examine how the Catholic Church understands the phrase “the Word of God” in light of its Scriptural use.

A Symphony of the Word

Since he has already given an explanation that is so theologically rich, allow me to share some excerpts from the papal letter of Pope Benedict XVI titled Verbum Domini — “The Word of the Lord”. Pope Benedict wrote this letter in 2010 as a follow-up to the Synod on the Word of God, held in 2008, which was a gathering of select bishops for the purpose of discussing the role of the Word of God in the life and mission of the Church.

Here’s the first excerpt:

We now need to consider what the Synod Fathers affirmed about the different ways in which we speak of “the word of God”. They rightly referred to a symphony of the word, to a single word expressed in multiple ways: “a polyphonic hymn”. The Synod Fathers pointed out that human language operates analogically in speaking of the word of God. In effect, this expression, while referring to God’s self-communication, also takes on a number of different meanings which need to be carefully considered and related among themselves, from the standpoint both of theological reflection and pastoral practice.

As the Prologue of John clearly shows us, the Logos refers in the first place to the eternal Word, the only Son, begotten of the Father before all ages and consubstantial with him: the word was with God, and the word was God. But this same Word, Saint John tells us, “became flesh” (Jn 1:14); hence Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, is truly the Word of God who has become consubstantial with us. Thus the expression “word of God” here refers to the person of Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of the Father, made man.

This is key to understand: the term “the Word of God” refers in the first place to the Logos, the Son of God, who became incarnate in Jesus Christ. He is the one and only eternal Word of God.

But the Logos is also “a single word expressed in multiple ways,” as Pope Benedict says, so in what other ways is the Word expressed? He goes on:

While the Christ event is at the heart of divine revelation, we also need to realize that creation itself, the liber naturae [“the book of nature”], is an essential part of this symphony of many voices in which the one word is spoken.

We also profess our faith that God has spoken his word in salvation history; he has made his voice heard; by the power of his Spirit “he has spoken through the prophets”. God’s word is thus spoken throughout the history of salvation, and most fully in the mystery of the incarnation, death and resurrection of the Son of God.

Then too, the word of God is that word preached by the Apostles in obedience to the command of the Risen Jesus: “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to the whole creation” (Mk 16:15). The word of God is thus handed on in the Church’s living Tradition.

Finally, the word of God, attested and divinely inspired, is sacred Scripture, the Old and New Testaments.

So it’s not that we simply use the phrase “the Word of God” to refer to completely different things: Jesus, the Bible, prophesy, the teaching of Jesus and the Apostles. Rather, we call all of these things the Word of God because they are all, fundamentally, the same thing; they are all expressions of the same Word.

The Word In Scripture

To illustrate what Pope Benedict is saying, let’s look briefly at a few Scripture passages.

Genesis 15:1 says that the Word of God came to Abram in a vision, saying “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” There are many other similar verses where the Word of God comes to people and speaks to them. This is clearly a direct reference to the Person of the Logos, the Son of God.

2 Chronicles 36 speaks multiple times about “the word of God by the mouth of Jeremiah”. Jeremiah was one of the major Old Testament prophets, and what’s being referred to here are his prophecies. Again, this is just one of many places in Scripture where the term is used in this way, to refer to spoken prophecy. Prophecy is called the word of God because it is communicating the Logos — God’s Truth.

Then there are verses like Luke 8:19-21, which says:

Then his mother and his brethren came to him, but they could not reach him for the crowd. And he was told, “Your mother and your brethren are standing outside, desiring to see you.” But he said to them, “My mother and my brethren are those who hear the word of God and do it.”

The person being quoted here is Jesus Christ — and what does he use the phrase “the word of God” to refer to? Something that we hear, not something that we read; specifically, his own oral teachings. So the phrase is used by Christ to refer to something other than Scripture or himself, the Word Incarnate. 

And yet again, there are many other verses where the term is used in this way, referring to oral teachings — like in Saint Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians:

When you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God. (1 Thess. 2:13)

Paul is obviously referring to the oral teachings that the Apostles shared with the people of Thessalonica when they were there — and he’s equating their teachings with the word of God. This is because Christ passed these teachings on to the Apostles, and gave them the authority to pass the teachings on to others in his name.

A related verse is found in Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians:

So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter. (2 Thess. 2:15)

One Word

A quick note: you’ll see the ‘W’ in “Word of God” sometimes capitalized and sometimes not. This essentially ends up being a judgment call on the part of the one using the term, since both ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek — the original languages of Scripture — did not have distinctions between uppercase and lowercase characters. But because there is only one Word of God, whether the ‘W’ is capitalized or not you can be sure that the Logos is what’s ultimately being referenced.

Scripture clearly teaches us that the Word of God is communicated to us in multiple forms, and I think a good way of conceptualizing this is to reflect on what a word is, and how it can be expressed. A word is really a thought or an idea or a concept; it is an intellectual phenomenon which by nature does not have a physical form. But a word can be expressed in various physical forms, such as marks on a piece of paper; or a sound that I make with my voice; or bumps on a surface, as in braille; or hand motions, as in sign language. These shapes, sounds, gestures, etc. are methods of expressing words; and many different sounds, different shapes, different hand gestures, different materials, can all be used to express the same word.

The Word that God is expressing is the Logos — but, like our human words, this Word can be (and, indeed, is) expressed in multiple ways. In Lógos, Part I, I discussed how the Word is expressed through all of Creation. In Lógos, Part II, I discussed how the Word is expressed in the person of Jesus Christ through the Incarnation. And as Pope Benedict explains above, the Word has also been expressed through the prophets, through the Sacred Tradition of the Church, and through Sacred Scripture.

But to draw a distinction between Scripture and Tradition can be misleading, because in truth these two things are inseparable. So they are not really two different expressions of the Word, but one. This is because Scripture is part of Sacred Tradition. Christ didn’t leave us with a book and a Church; he left us with a Church, and the book developed out of this Church — and so is part of it.

A Living Word

Which brings us to the last excerpt I’d like to share from Pope Benedict’s letter:

All this helps us to see that, while in the Church we greatly venerate the sacred Scriptures, the Christian faith is not a “religion of the book”: Christianity is the “religion of the word of God”, not of “a written and mute word, but of the incarnate and living Word”. Consequently the Scripture is to be proclaimed, heard, read, received and experienced as the word of God, in the stream of the apostolic Tradition from which it is inseparable.

This is why Sola Scriptura is not only wrong, but unsustainable, because it severs Sacred Scripture from the Sacred Tradition out of which it came, and of which it is part. The Bible cannot be truly understood apart from the Church, any more than you could fully make sense of a branch that was severed from a tree. If scientists were to study a severed branch as though it were an independent creature, something that exists completely on its own, how far would they get? Would they be able to gain an accurate understanding of the nature of the branch?

The answer is obviously no, because the branch only makes sense when it is understood as an extension of the tree. And just like severing a branch from a tree kills the branch by cutting it off from its living source, so too does severing Scripture from the Church “kill it” by cutting it off from the living Tradition out of which it grew. This is why we’ve seen an explosion of thousands of Christian “denominations” as a result of the Protestant Reformation; when people try to interpret Scripture on their own, apart from the Body of Christ, they are inevitably going to go wrong — and in a collection of texts as massive as the Bible, there are nearly endless ways to go wrong.

This is why the Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms that to separate Sacred Scripture from the living Tradition of the Church renders it a “dead letter” — for we are cutting it off from the Holy Spirit, who is the true author of Scripture, and who animates and gives life to the Body of Christ, which is the Church. But in case you get the sense that I’m at all downplaying the importance of Scripture, the Catechism also says that “the Church has always venerated the Scriptures as she venerates the Lord’s Body. She never ceases to present to the faithful the bread of life, taken from the one table of God’s Word and Christ’s Body“ (CCC 103).

A Continuation Of The Incarnation

There is so much more to be said about this — I am not at all trying to make it seem as though I’ve given a full argument for the authority of the Church, or against Sola Scriptura. This is a significant topic, so it will need to be covered in multiple posts, and I do plan on writing a separate post soon arguing more directly against Sola Scriptura, and another one or two posts explaining and defending the Church’s living Tradition.

I hope that for now I’ve shed some light on the question of why we refer to both Scripture and Jesus Christ as “the Word of God” — but I also hope that I’ve given you a helpful glimpse at the complexity of the issue. While Christ and the Bible are both the Word, they are not the Word in exactly the same way. Jesus alone is the Incarnation of the Word, the only full and complete expression of the Logos.

The Logos is a living Word, and so it cannot be communicated fully through a non-living medium like words on paper. Calling the Church “the Body of Christ” is meant to represent the fact that the Church is, in essence, a continuation of the Incarnation; the Church is Christ “extending” himself into the world continuously, until the end of time. And so if Christ is the one and only full and complete Incarnation of the Word, then we can only receive and understand this Word fully and completely within the Body of Christ — the Church.

I look forward to digging into these issues much more deeply with you in the near future.

God love you.