Latif Haki Gaba

Martin Schalling's great hymn "Lord, Thee I Love with All My Heart," was one of the hymns to be sung during the distribution of Holy Communion yesterday at my church. And while ordinarily I favor only good eucharistic hymns being sung during Holy Communion, I make exception for certain hymns that do not strictly fall into that eucharistic category. "Lord, Thee I Love" is such a fine prayer to Jesus that, though it contain no explicit doctrine of the Holy Supper, it might as well be called a eucharistic hymn. Consider a line like this from the first stanza, "I pray Thee ne'er from me depart," which could almost be an alternate version of a line from the Anima Christi. Or consider the refrain with which the first and second stanzas culminate: "Lord, Jesus Christ, My God and Lord, my God and Lord." It is as though the communicant were standing with Saint Thomas before our Eucharistic Lord, risen from the dead and showing us the marks of His

Twenty-first century Christians of every stripe, as well as scholars with or without any faith at all, assume a Bible that is divided into thousands of distinct verses. They think and operate with those divisions as of second nature. It is considered axiomatic that to learn a Bible passage is to learn to cite its book, chapter, and verse, and sometimes even half verse. In written form these citations follow specific rules of style. And with oddly clinical precision, some preachers even include these references in their preaching, as though they were citing case law, or maybe canon law. As I say, thinking of the Bible in this way is now axiomatic. Axioms are useful, but ought to be examined and questioned anew in each generation. For too long we have forgotten this. The fact that our bibles today are atomized, disintegrated, hacked, into thousands of little pieces, is largely due to the efforts of Robert Estienne, who published his work in the 1550s. There were attempts in this dir