““The fact that we fail at seeing these things, that our interpretations may perpetrate violence against a text, and so on, is only more evidence of the Lord’s grace is granting us participation in the love of the Trinity, through existence and in the body of Christ. That same grace is offered to us who are granted the privilege of literacy. Meaning-making through reading, after all, is another testimony of the attributes of the invisible God being clearly seen in what has been made (Rom. 1:20). That we fall into idolatry is undeniable—in reading and the rest of life: the image in Romans of exchanging “the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles” is as aesthetic and poetic as it is magic and earthen (Rom. 1:23). It harkens back to the idolatries of both noninstrumental and instrumental reading discussed in the introduction. God will bring the entire cosmos into the beloved community of the new creation through the purification and repurposing work of judgment—as idolatry and violence and sin and death become the nothing to which they have always pointed. God’s judgment will differentiate those who seek the glory of God from those who seek the nothingness of their own glory. But text may be cultivated by anyone; its becoming gives glory to the God of all meaning-making regardless. The special office of the reader in the body of Christ is the express veneration of the word—is, in short, praise.””
