The Making Common of God: Augustine, Oliver O’Donovan, and Reading Scripture with Love

Abstract

Augustine holds that Scripture finds its telos in enabling us to love rightly. By examining Augustine’s interpretation of the Psalter, this article traces the dynamics of this textual teleology and then elaborates upon it through Oliver O’Donovan’s notion of making common. That is, a community is constituted by communicative actions of sharing that flow from and are ordered to a common love. Within the communication of Scripture, we are brought into a space of shared significances and meanings with God that he has made common with us because we love most what he loves most, namely himself. God’s acts of making common include not only his speaking to us, but also, as a function of Christ’s priesthood, his speaking for us.