Barth conceives of the Bible as the Word of God, placing it between the Son above and with preaching below as three “forms” of the Word.

Origen thinks of the Scripture in the continuum of the body of Christ: “The Logos becomes intelligible to us…in His historical, resurrected, and eucharisted body, in his ecclesiological body (whose members we are), and in His body as Sacred Scripture whose letters are animated by His living Spirit” (Origen in Classics of Western Spirituality, xii).

The Church only comes into Barth’s consideration in its form of preaching – its own self-critique? – as the lowest form of the Word. For Origen – if the order of von Balthasar’s list is to be trusted – the Church is closer to Christ as his body than the Scripture (although granted that the three form one sacramental whole).

I am somewhat perplexed with how Scripture gets to be called the Word for Barth. You paraphrase him by saying that it gets this title because it testifies to the reality. But isn’t this a kind of confusion of the finger and that to which it points that Barth so railed against? It seems there is a missing step in the argument – it is not enough to note the Bible’s testimony to the Word to justify approaching it as a form of that Word.

For this reason I prefer the Balthasarian paraphrase of Origen. The Church is the body of Christ because it is mystically grafted onto Christ by the Spirit. The Scriptures are Christ’s body because they are the Church’s self-expression by the power of that same Spirit. Self-expression not as an obsession with its own humanity, but self-expression as that which it truly is: humanity conjoined to God by God. The canonical corpus is the self-expression of humanity incorporated into God’s resurrected-because-crucified corpse. Origen’s scheme justifies a Christic appellation for Scripture in a way that Barth’s does not.