Biblical interpretation

It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out. 

Proverbs 25:2

         God conceals things. He hides himself on a donkey. We are to entertain strangers because they might be angels. Jesus taught in parables. Why doesn’t He just tell us what He wants us to know out rightly? Anglican theologian Ephraim Radner gets to this question in his book, Hope Among the Fragments.

     There are so many powerful ideas in Radner’s book that I’ll have to get to later but for now I see this as most important to our current year of Bible reading and Theology of the Body. Radner states in his chapter on “Sublimity and Providence”:

Pascal goes even further in identifying the specifically scriptural search of identifying and understanding biblical figure as a key element with the actual change from concupiscence to charity. His celebrated discussion of the “hidden God” is, in fact, lodged within his attempt to explain the character of scriptural figuration as a spiritual discipline.

Pascal claims that the Bible as a whole is swathed in semidarkness and half-light of figures in order to humble and, if necessary, condemn human beings who cannot give themselves over to the work of grace…Figurative speech is itself an image of the cross. 

The “humbling of pride” becomes the context of faithful scriptural reading, which is a continual process of submitting oneself to the realities of crucified desire in the face of a humanly rejected divine love whose character upholds the universe (pages 101-2).

You have to start looking for Christ in the humble stuff of this world and Christ in all of the Scriptures or you won’t find him. As my daughter answered me as to the reason for parables, “He’s not just going to give us information—He wants a relationship with us.”

     I can tell which posts people like on this blog through the statistics. So the reason I see this ability as such a need for us is that people aren’t interested in posts titled The Genesis Jeopardy!, which actually has what I believe to be some of the greatest revelations I have ever had from God. Yet they are interested in exegetical posts, for instance. But we have to become treasure hunters to experience the glory of kings.

     The New Testament also show us this. Paul says to the Corinthians, ”But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise” (1 Cor 1:27). Jesus quotes Isaiah when he talks about the purpose of teaching in parables in Matthew 13 as does Paul to the Jews in Rome: “You will indeed hear but never understand, and you will indeed see but never perceive” (Acts 28:26). That crazy last book of our Bibles is somehow entitled in verse one, “The revelation of Jesus Christ.” And Christianity itself is the unveiling of a mystery.

      This type of biblical interpretation is also consistent with a Pesher interpretation of Scripture used by the Jewish Essene community at the time of Christ and before. Pesher is the “exposition of texts that sees eschatological fulfillment of them in the current era, the explanation of mysteries in the revelation. The Qumran community of the Dead Sea was known for reading the Old Testament this way; they thought they were in the end-time community of fulfillment” (Darrell Bock, “Use of the Old Testament in the New” in Foundations for Biblical Interpretation, p. 101). Scripture is multi-layered and we have to look beyond the surface to see Christ there and hear Him speak to us. Or as Radner states, "If these texts and the histories they enclose belong to God, then we must expect some basic obscurity in their composition and referent, an obscurity born of the profound mystery that is God's own life given in Christ and his cross" (p.99).

      I like what our rector taught one Christmas. He said something along these lines, “If we learn to see God in a manger, we’ll learn to see him everywhere.” We have to start looking for God in mangers and homeless shelters and the foolish things if we truly want to know the life found in relationship with Him. We can't just look for Him in the "wise" and the "beautiful." I was excitedly showing my son how a scene in The Princess Bride was like Christ and the Church and he exasperatingly said, “Mom, you see Christ everywhere!”(see Deut 6:7).  I do want this to be true. As we begin to see Him in His forms around us and in Scripture the Church will say with the character of Grandfather in the movie, "That day she was amazed to discover that when he was saying 'As you wish,' what he meant was, 'I love you.'”