The Daily Office and reading Scripture as the Church

George Weigel has highlighted the causes for the failure of an increase in Biblical literacy in post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism:

One of the disappointments of the post-Vatican II period has been the glacial pace of the growth in Catholic biblical literacy the Council hoped to inspire. Why the slow-down? Several reasons suggest themselves.

The hegemony of the historical-critical method of biblical study has taught two generations of Catholics that the Bible is too complicated for ordinary people to understand: so why read what only savants can grasp? Inept preaching, dissecting the biblical text with historical-critical scalpels or reducing Scripture to a psychology manual, has also been a turn-off to Bible-study.

It is an excellent summary of how too often in contemporary Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism the Church has forsaken reading Scripture as the Church in order to conform to the Academy's reading of ancient Hebrew and Christian texts.

What aids the Church in retrieving the practice of reading Scripture as the Church?  The praying of the Daily Office has a significant role to play here.  In his Preface of 1549, Cranmer emphasised the need for the Daily Office lectionary to restore the patristic practice of reading Scripture in the light of salvation history:

These many years passed, this godly and decent order of the ancient Fathers hath been so altered, broken, and neglected ... that commonly when any book of the Bible was begun, after three or four chapters were read out, all the rest were unread.  And in this sort the book of Isaiah was begun in Advent, and the book of Genesis in Septuagesima; but were only begun, and never read through.

Cranmer here reaffirms the ancient practice of reading Isaiah in light of the Incarnation and Genesis in light of the Cross and Resurrection.  The meaning of Isaiah is not to be found in the Academy's examination of the contexts of First, Second and Trito-Isaiah.  The meaning of Genesis is not to be found in the Academy's determinations on the relationships between the Yahwist, Elohist and Priestly sources.  It is, rather, in the Church's reading of Scripture in the context of the liturgical year's Christological centre that we understand Isaiah and Genesis.

All of which suggests the theological significance of the communal and - where necessary - individual praying of the Daily Office.  Here the Church's Babylonian captivity to the Enlightenment and the Academy is undermined.  Here the Church learns to read and inwardly digest Scripture in light of Incarnation, Cross and Resurrection.