This book review is on one of Dr. Scott Hahn's newest books, Consuming the Word. You find Dr. Hahn's personal website at www.scotthahn.com, where you can see a list of all of his works, as well as learn more about his work, his ministry, his wife, and having him come to speak at your Parish or event. You can also find the direct link to purchase this book on Amazon through this link: Consuming the Word, and you can learn more about the book on his website or through this link Image Books: Consuming the Word.
Consuming the Word:
The New Testament and the Eucharist in the Early Church
Dr. Scott Hahn
Image Books, 2013
If you don't know anything about Dr. Hahn, you are in for a treat with this book; if you've read everything he's ever written, you are once again in for a treat with this book! Dr. Scott Hahn is a professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, where he is the Fr. Michael Scanlan Chair of Biblical Theology and the New Evangelization, as well as being the founder and president of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Studies.
All of that aside, though, let's get on to this book, where you can see a great example of what made Dr. Hahn so popular. In this book, Dr. Hahn continues his look at the Eucharist in Scripture and what it is that made the Eucharist the center of the Catholic faith. Specifically, this book looks at the New Testament and the Eucharist in the early Church, and the way that they took their form. In the way that Dr. Hahn is so skilled at doing, he takes this incredibly difficult and dense topic and presents it in a way that scholars will benefit from; even more impressive, though, is that he presents it in a way that the ordinary and more or less uninformed Catholic can also benefit from. This book goes through the New Testament texts and the writings of the early Church fathers, explaining how the Eucharist became, or, as he explains, always was, the central part of the Christian life.
One of the most beautiful things that Dr. Hahn does throughout this book is to talk about the way that the New Testament (as we know it) took the name Testament. This word, he explains, comes from the word covenant, meaning an extension of kinship. or bringing a person into one's family through a relationship. What does this mean? What Dr. Hahn shows throughout a large portion of this book is that what that means is that the idea of the New Testament was to show the covenant which Jesus Christ had established with His Church in the Eucharist. For the Early Church, he shows, it wasn't about a group of texts which were known as the "New Testament," but rather it was about the Sacrament of the Eucharist, where these texts would be proclaimed to the people. The texts we know as the New Testament weren't a Testament to them; they were a Person, the Word, the person of Jesus who lived on through the writings of His followers. Testament, the word we use, came to be through the idea of this being a covenant, a relationship of the Word of God, the person of Christ, with His people.
The other main point which stuck out to me in Dr. Hahn's book was the very idea of the Word of God made flesh, Jesus Christ, and the way that we encounter Him in the Church today. In a beautiful way, Dr. Hahn spends a portion of this book explaining that for the early Church, and still for the Church today, the Mass is the place where the faithful receive the Word through Scripture and through Sacrament. What this amounts to, he explains, is to lead us to the full communion between God and man, the "marriage supper of the Lamb" (Revelation 19:9), where "the human family is 'divinized,' made to dwell with God, made full participants in the life of the Trinity." The Mass, Dr. Hahn shows us, is the place where this is lived out on earth, where we are brought into communion with the Father through His Son, the Word, whom we receive at each and every Mass.
If you are Catholic, Christian, or otherwise interested in the Eucharist and the way that it plays into the life of the Catholic Church, this is the book for you. At 146 pages it took me only 2 days to read this book, so if you don't have a lot of time it is perfect for you. If you are more theologically minded, parts of this book will be a review, but there will certainly be parts of this book which are new will help you in your journey of faith. If you are not theologically minded, this book, along with most of the corpus of Dr. Hahn's work, is a perfect way to bring you into deeper relationship with Christ through the renewal of your mind (Romans 12:2).
To close, I want to finish with the quote that Dr. Hahn finishes his book with, speaking of the way that we receive the Word made flesh, the promise of the Old Testament, explained in the New Testament, and alive in the Church today. May God bless any of you who read this!
"We live the dream of the prophets and the seers, we live the promise of the divine covenant, we are given the bread of angels, whenever we consume the Word."
"I received this book for free from WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group for this review as a part of their blogging for books program; you can learn more about this by visiting the program's website here Blogging for Books."
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