Go Figure!

Figuration in Biblical Interpretation

Walters

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781498275712
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Without turning naively to the past, scholars and preachers of the Old Testament are once again making use of figuration--something the church had always done until the modern period. This enlargement of method comes about partly out of disappointment with the exclusive use of historical methods, for to read the Bible theologically for the guidance of its present readers requires more than historical description. The 2006 Tyndale Conference on Biblical Interpretation, held at Tyndale University College in Toronto, Canada, focused on "figuration in biblical interpretation." The authors are the conference keynote speakers, Christopher Seitz and Ephraim Radner, as well as Tyndale faculty members in philosophy, history, Bible, and theology. There are also a few additional invited papers illustrating figural interpretation. This volume is a window onto the current hermeneutic ferment within biblical studies, and its title is an invitation to sample and share the excitement!

1

History, Figural History, and Providence in the Dual Witness of Prophet and Apostle

Christopher R. Seitz

At one point in his discussion of the wickedness confronting the prophet Habakkuk—“How long, O Lord?”—and the nations dispatched by God (Hab 1:2–11), Calvin refers interchangeably to the Babylonians and the Assyrians. It is not that he misunderstands a fundamental historical distinction with which we are familiar. It appears as though he wishes to draw upon accounts of obvious hubris and in assessing the evil rapacity of the Chaldeans in Habakkuk his mind naturally moves to the Rabshakeh’s bombastic address on behalf of the Assyrian king in 2 Kings 18–19 (reproduced in Isaiah 36–37).

Assyria and Babylon are for Calvin figures of the selfsame divine purpose, whatever one might understand by their discrete locations in historical time. In the context of Habakkuk, where these nations replace one another in swift and agonizing fashion, Calvin is more tuned to figural history than another species of history that will emerge, in the next centuries, with a fresh acuity: a referential, punctuated history, to which the Bible is somehow externally related. It bears reflection that Calvin has no book in his library called “The History of Israel” or for that matter “The History of the World.” There is no external account of “history” other than what the Bible reports, in the character of its own presentation. Calvin knows that the Babylonian empire came after the Assyrian because the Bible reports this fact quite plainly, and understanding the “historical” fact is crucial for understanding figural history under God’s providential disposing and linking.

In time this new species of “history” would be painstakingly reconstructed, on the basis of the Bible’s plain sense reference to it; by recourse to other accounts of ancient sequencing becoming available; and more importantly, as in time it was grasped that the Bible’s relationship to an independent (punctuated, referential) account of “history” was no longer straightforwardly to be assumed or defended (as when challenges were leveled by the opponents of Christianity and Judaism, as from time to time had occurred). The Bible’s temporal framework and “history” became different things, sometimes complementary and compatible, while at other times, as seen by those now within Christianity and Judaism, antagonistic and incompatible, even deceivingly so.

Defenders of a hard compatibility between these two kinds of history often unwittingly fought an “away game” with poor and ill-suited equipment, as there did not seem to be another way to think about the Bible’s account of time and sequence except before a new court and jury which appeared to know something quite intimidating and threatening. (One thinks of the struggles of E. B. Pusey in his effort to salvage Daniel or the Minor Prophets against a new kind of account of their plain, now meaning historical, sense.) Perhaps the greatest fallout in all this was not the adoption of a defensive posture, or an inability to think about “history” along other lines. Even greater than this, it could be argued, was the loss of a vast network of internal associations within canonical scripture: literary, theological, and temporal, all at the same time. That Amos contained the same first lines with which Joel ended now no longer functioned in any natural, configured sense. A very complex account would have to be given that would enable the interpreter to accept a very late date for one book (Joel) and an early one for the other (Amos), even as the literary citation of the first (Joel) appears without any obvious interruption in the second (Amos). As Hans Frei showed in his penetrating account of the rise of historicism, what was true within one testament, then also became true with a vengeance as one crossed from Old to New and tried to understand the investment the second testament had in the constitutive, providentially ordered conceptuality of prophecy and fulfillment, and the material use of the Old Testament in the New.

The difficulties with constructing an external history of Israel or of the New Testament period ought not to be minimized, and that reality began to make its pressures known especially in the early history of the Old Testament. But the project was undertaken with high seriousness and the results are now before us in manifold textbooks. It is doubtful that this phase of inquiry into the Bible was avoidable, and it is questionable whether avoidance was desirable. The Bible exists in time and the events it reports, the people it shows as inspired, the audiences that first heard and the editors that received and shaped—these are historical realities in the providence of God. We fail to appreciate them only at the expense of God’s own historical figuring. At issue is not this.

The sheer complexity of the historical project was especially felt when one attempted to describe in detail the genesis, development, gestation, and consolidation phases of the process of the Bible’s coming-to-be, correlated now on the grid of a new historical time-line. This is not a limitation in and of itself, so long as one keeps the project focused on all phases of so-called historical development; that has however proven difficult to do. In consequence, it has been difficult to honor both the final form of the material as a piece of historical work, over against this or that previous phase of development, much less to see the final form as a distinct commentary on the character of history as all previous levels bequeath this. This also means that the text’s final form and the earliest reception history of the material, as breathing one and the same historical air, is sundered, or seen only for its eccentric descriptive potential. Discontinuities are identified, and selections made concerning the true periods of value and inspiration. Though one can see little evidence of an earliest phase of reception history that insisted on the literary unity of Luke-Acts, for example, and the necessity of reading the books together, it continues to be argued that the construct Luke-Acts must be given priority as a configured and intentional work. The discussion of the limitations of this view is now forthcoming, and one can see the way in which specific nineteenth- and twentieth-century understandings of the historical task almost invariably meant a devaluing of the history of reception.

One reaction to this complexity had been a questioning of the so-called disinterested objectivity of the historical project. If readers are imposing meaning through this historical evaluation, choosing one outcome or one phase of development over another, why not set readers free to be the arbiters of meaning as such, and cut loose the so called “historical intentions” said to be there for our discovery in the first place?

Another alternative has been to find interesting all manner of literary associations in the synchronic form of the material, and to reject any developmental picture as relevant to this associative world. The Book of the Twelve is used to analyze the character of God, as one moves from book to book. Did anyone intend such a reading? Did editors or canonical forces work on the material in such a way to make this the critical lens on reading the Minor Prophets? Can we see evidence in the literary history of the Twelve that such a final form reading was what they had in mind, and if so, what is the evidence for that?

It is important to consider the contribution of figural reading with these questions in mind. It is certainly possible to engage in an analysis of the Bible that gives priority to literary associations. But a figural reading is concerned with time, every bit as much as the thinner version of historical reading is. Figural readings attend to the providential character of inspired writing and editing, in all phases of this work: both within the OT itself and then as the elected witness is filled to full by the work of Jesus Christ and then opened for the church’s theological reflection across two testaments, into the present time, and as the church awaits the final consummation of promises and figures set in motion in the elected and enlarged witness of “prophet” and “apostle.” It is the conviction of this author that our most recent phase of “historical reading” has been an enormous benefit, but its potential has been shortchanged. Now that we are better able to grasp the way in which the canon has developed through time, it should be even more the case that we understand the hermeneutical and theological implications of the final form of the text and the two-fold character of Christian Scripture, Old and New, Prophet and Apostle.

My own sense of the matter is that the person working the hardest to conjoin historical and theological work (“how Israel thought about YHWH”) and then to harness this descriptive historical and theological evaluation with an account of God’s work in time, including the witness of the NT, was Gerhard von Rad. He it was who tried valiantly to retrieve the term “typological” and link it to the sprawling historical enterprise of Introduction, History, and Biblical Theology. But it required the providential extensions of the original kerygma, revealed as phases in a tradition-historical development, to be manifestly misdrawn, as the traditions moved toward their NT fulfillment. What then, other than as vestiges of a movement whose telos necessitated a bending and mis-drawing of what had gone before, was the witness of the Old Testament, as the per se witness it was von Rad’s concern to honor? Though he was not alone in recourse to typology as a means to give some sense to the two-testament world of association in Christian Scripture, now after the rise of historically thin readings, his work was the last major effort to see in typology a species of what had previously gone under the label of “spiritual sense” (allegory and figural reading both) now to be conjoined to the German interest in tradition-historical movement. And since his time, as an integrated labor of historical, literary and theological inquiry, such efforts have all but ceased.

The matter is not altogether different when one picks up the project from the other end. The OT’s theological value is either determined by what the NT says about it, or by what kind of history-of-religion or tradition it hands on, finally to be adapted and transformed in the NT or the “religion of Christ followers” (whatever term is now salonfähig). Prophecy and fulfillment are seen as retrospectively comprehensible realities only, or prophecy is so tied to prediction that biblical studies is forced into a defensive posture in the manner of Pusey, and the figural potential of the OT as a whole is reduced to tracking a human agent predicting something and that is either being truly fulfilled on the terms of the seconding witness, or not.

Again, what is at stake in figural reading is the theological conviction that God the Holy Trinity is the eternal reality with whom we have to do, both Israel and God’s adopted sons and daughters in Christ, and this has ontological as well as economic implications for our reading of the two-testament canon of Prophet and Apostle. Jesus Christ can comment on, fulfill, transform, and commend the Law only to the degree that he is its giver in the OT. The Holy Spirit, the rule of faith tells us in its earliest form, “spake by the prophets.” The God who raised Jesus from the dead is not a newly revealed “Abba,” in Jesus’s revelatory experience, but the Father who dwells in eternity with the Son, and by the Holy Spirit interprets the cross and empty tomb and Easter all at the same time.

Reading the Old Testament according to the Rule of Faith, then, is reading it as did the earliest Fathers before the formation of the NT canon: as declaring the will of the One God, who in the latter days spoke finally and truly in the Son, the same Holy Spirit inspiring both testaments of deed, word and witness. The twofold witness of Prophet and Apostle is configured, and the church reads the scriptures in this same way so that she might understand her own place in the judgments of God, obey the commands of Christ, and lean into the promised consummation of both prophetic and apostolic witnesses.

The overreach of historical reading, then, threatened to dismantle or obscure the ontological Trinity in the name of appreciating the development and temporal movement of scripture, seen either as history-of-religion or the history of tradition. One can see the legacy of a certain species of progressivist historical conceptuality, brokered by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history of ideas. But does this developmental understanding connect well with the ontological claims of especially the Scriptures of Israel? In the Early Church, this witness functioned to declare the full counsel of God, in promise, law, moral injunction, figure, and indeed in a doctrine of creation said to be inherently Trinitarian in character. The second witness confirmed that this understanding of the Old Testament—call it figural—was true to its deepest character, as word both to Israel, and in Christ, a prophetic word to the church.

A proper understanding of history, on the other hand, will surely press on to appreciate the per se witness of Israel’s scriptures as a word to the past, from the past, which nevertheless always contained the seeds of its own extension. The literal and figural senses were therefore historical and spiritual at one and the same time, as St. Thomas and others before him understood this. Modern figural reading wants to appreciate the highly specified character of historical time underscored by this most recent phase of the church’s and academy’s reflection, but then to reattach this evaluation to the two testament canon’s own mature appraisal, in its given literary shape, of just what time means under the Triune God’s disposing. Figural reading is then historical reading seeking to comprehend the work of God in Christ, in Israel, in the apostolic witness, and in the Holy Spirit’s ongoing word to the church, conveyed now through this legacy of Prophet and Apostle, Old and New Testament, the two-testament canon of Christian Scripture.

Part One

Studies in Interpretation

2

Go Figure

Narrative Strategies for an Emerging Generation

Keith Bodner

I would like to begin this essay with a quotation, and those familiar with Ephraim Radner’s recent book Hope among the Fragments will recognize it immediately: “The sweetest and most sublime occupation for a theologian is to search for Jesus Christ amid the sacred books [of Scripture].”1

As an aspiring theologian, I can certainly endorse this statement. But meanwhile, I have to earn my daily bread as a simple biblical scholar, one who plies his trade in the dust and clay of Semitic languages, putative historical context, literary criticism, and radio-carbon dating (along with an urbane avoidance of anything with the fragrance of politically-incorrect supercessionist sentiments).2 One of the more significant pedagogical challenges during my time as a professor of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament in an undergraduate teaching context involves the quotation extracted from Radner’s book, especially since my students have often asked, “So, how does one go about that task?”

For a good number of youthful students, such a task is easier done than said, and some will quickly point to a passage such as Daniel 3, and with Nebuchadnezzar, will leap to their feet in amazement: “Were there not three men that we threw into the furnace? Behold...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: History, Figural History, and Providence in the Dual Witness of Prophet and Apostle
• Part One: Studies in Interpretation
• Part Two: Studies in History and Theory
• Afterword
• Select Bibliography