In this strange time in our nation’s history, with the general bewilderment as to what has gripped our neighbors, our churches, or perhaps our family, no explanation seems adequate. The culture wars, the extremes of political correctness, the deconstruction of gender, the concern for the life of the unborn, are not to be dismissed, but neither is the seeming failure to recognize evil, or the willingness to deploy evil for the supposed greater good. Clearly a form of despair and desperation is at work. The center is not holding, especially where that center is presumed to be biblical. To the degree that the Christian faith has played a key role (e.g., Christian nationalism, religious fanaticism), the disagreement among Christians is fundamental. Clearly, there is a sharp divide over the meaning of the Gospel, the meaning of the Bible, and the identity of God. That is, the political and social crisis is a reflection of an even more deep-seated theological despair and crisis. The most fundamental question concerns the very identity and meaning of Jesus.
While it may seem that evangelicals, or those who hold to biblical inerrancy and the “authority of the Bible” are taking the high road in regard to faith, could it be there needs to be a literal and metaphorical “coming to Jesus”? That is, the evangelical notion that the Bible and correct Bible reading provide the cure to every disagreement and heresy, is not only missing the primacy of faith (or in terms of the early church, the primacy of the Gospel), but the nature of faith and the primacy of Christ. A faith given over to cultural and political pragmatism – the deployment of evil for the greater good – may have missed the central idea/ideal of the Christian faith, attaining to the perfection of Christ. So, in this moment of political turmoil reflecting a deep theological crisis, I propose a foundational and simple shift, a literal coming to Jesus as the basis of the harmonizing center of the Bible and the Christian faith.
The founding premise of Scripture is set forth by John: “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has exegeted Him” (John 1:18). The revelation of Christ precedes and makes possible the writing of the New Testament and the formation of the canon of Scripture. There would be no canon of Scripture apart from its formation around the work of Christ. It is not just that Christ precedes Scripture, but faith in Christ (the “rule of faith”) precedes and is the means of exegeting Scripture (and in particular was the early church’s means of incorporating the Hebrew Scriptures into the Christian canon of Scripture).[1] This means that the reality of Christ not only precedes Scripture, but precedes the unfolding political and cultural realities of our day.
The primacy of Christ implies an exegetical method which is not primarily historical, literal, or attached to a book. That is, if we take this passage (John 1:18) literally, this means the rest of Scripture must fit this fact. The primacy of Christ is the means of Scripture and its interpretation, and apart from this primacy the letter is bent in every direction (e.g., Jesus the warrior, the upholder of national and cultural interests). The Old Testament is filled with conflicting images, which if given equal weight (and literality), displace the literal fact of Christ as exegete. Christ brings together the sign and signified, enfleshing meaning, such that to make Scripture the foundation of meaning is to set the sign afloat, separating it from it from its signified. A biblicism or sola scriptura which does not recognize Scripture as derived from Christ has taken images of violence and warfare, images of sacrifice and law, or simply interpretations of history, and imagined that Christ must be made to accommodate this order. Rather than recognize the images of God in the Old Testament as requiring Christ, requiring the Gospel, requiring that all of the Bible be read in the light of faith in Christ, the Gospel and Jesus are made subsequent to and conditioned by the Old Testament and by universal violence (only dispelled by the peace of the Gospel). The necessity of violence, the necessity of scapegoating, the necessity of a Janus-faced God, means that Jesus is used to support the worst sorts of fascism, Zionism, and nationalism.
In other words, the tradition of the Church for its first fifteen hundred years has been abandoned.[2] As Origen, the first to write a handbook on interpretation put it, “If you want to understand, you can only do so through the Gospel.”[3] It is the meaning of this “through the Gospel” that has been lost. What Origen meant was that the Gospel makes the Bible the Word of God for each of its contemporary readers. The analogy of faith, or the rule of faith or, to say the same thing, the Gospel, is a hermeneutic or interpretive lens which unveils the meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures (among many other things). As Paul explains to the Corinthians, “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (I Cor. 15:3-4). Paul is referencing the only Scriptures he knew, the Hebrew Bible. Apart from these events in the life of Christ, it would be hard to locate such things in the Scriptures, but given the reality of the life of Christ, the Scriptures become a means of understanding these events and these events unveil the meaning of Scripture. As Robert Wilken describes, contained within the early church’s exegetical method there was “a complete and completely unified dogmatic and spiritual theology.”[4] Christ is a revelation which inspires Scripture, and this revelation constitutes the center of Christian thought. Apart from this center, it is not clear Christian thought survives.
To reduce it to an allegorical reading may be to miss the presumed spiritual reality and difference Christ makes. According to Paul, Christ is the true Subject of the Old Testament: “For I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea; and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and all ate the same spiritual food; and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them; and the rock was Christ” (1 Co 10:1–4). Paul goes on to make his readers the primary recipients and beneficiaries of this spiritual reading: “Now these things happened as examples for us” (10:6). It is not that those who experienced these events are left out of the picture: “Now these things happened to them as an example,” but the writing is “for our instruction, upon whom the ends of the ages have come” (10:11).
Origen, follows Paul and the early church, in seeing all things in light of Christ, giving rise to a spiritual reading of the Old Testament, but more accurately, giving rise to a spiritually centered reading of all reality. In Origen’s view, like the Apostle(s), there is no Old and New Testament, but there is one revelation who is the Alpha and Omega, the First and Last, and this all-encompassing revelation brings about the unity of all of Scripture. Origen illustrates this through the Mount of Transfiguration: it is always the Old Testament, Moses and Elijah (on the Mt.) who bear witness to Jesus. It is the glory of Gospel reflected onto the Old Testament, but when the spectators lift their eyes, they see only Jesus. As Herve du Bourg-Dieu deploys Origen’s imagery:
The cloud has been lifted, and as Moses and Elijah disappear, Christ is the only one that can be perceived. Because the shadow of the law and the prophets has departed, the true light shines forth in the blazing beauty of the Gospel. For when the shadow of the law and prophecy, which covered the minds of men with its veil, recedes, both can be found in the Gospel. For although there were three of them, they have become one.[5]
If one is only looking at history, the letter, the Scriptures, rather than Christ, then law, prophecy, Moses and Elijah and the Old Testament appear as a multiplicity, but in Christ (and understood spiritually) they are none other than the teaching of the Gospel. In Origen’s imagery, all things, including the unity of revelation in the cosmos are exegeted through Him, but this interpretive strategy is not for the simple or undisciplined.
As Peter Martens describes, in Origen’s conception “ideal scriptural interpreters embarked upon a way of life.”[6] All of Origen’s training and energy was geared toward his way of life as an interpreter. In Eusebius biography of Origen, scriptural study occupied him for all of his life, from his conversion. This constitutes a life, as the interpreter’s response (his living it out) is also part of the interpretive process. Martens’ project is to demonstrate how it is that Origen’s interpretive method can only be understood as part of his biography (he is an exegete). As De Lubac argues, Origen’s exegesis could not be disentangled from “a whole manner of thinking, a whole world view … [a] whole interpretation of Christianity.”[7] But this would seem to be the proper goal of every Christian exegete.
Perhaps even this needs to be taken one step further, in that the original exegete, Jesus Christ, is the mind toward which the biblical exegete is striving. The exegetical task, is a life task in which salvation is being realized, as one puts on the mind of Christ. According to Martens, the exegetical life “when seen as a whole, made this life both expressive of, and in continual search for, salvation.”[8] Scripture is for the cure of the soul, the fulfilling of the pursuit of salvation in attaining the divine likeness as one arrives at the unifying image of Christ.
In a long section in his commentary on John, Origen makes the case that the Word of God is singular: “The complete Word of God which was in the beginning with God is not a multitude of Words, for it is not words. It is a single Word consisting of several ideas, each of which is a part of the whole Word.”[9] As long as one is hung up on the multiplicity of words and images in Scripture, she has not attained the singular Word. Those who do not attain to the singular image, even if they are declaring words about truth, according to Origen, are stuck in letters and words and miss the unity and harmony of the singular Word:
. . . but because of disagreement and fighting, they have lost their unity and have become numbers, perhaps even endless numbers. Consequently, according to this understanding, we would say that he who utters anything hostile to religion is loquacious, but he who speaks the things of truth, even if he says everything so as to leave out nothing, always speaks the one Word.[10]
As Origen goes on to argue, Christ is mentioned throughout Scripture, in the Pentateuch, the prophets, the Psalms, and “in all the Scriptures,” as Christ testifies sending us back to the Scriptures, “Search the Scriptures for you think you have eternal life in them. And it is they that testify of me” (Jn 5:39).[11] Origen finds this singularity testified throughout Scripture. In his commentary of John (Jn. 12:12-19) for example, “Jesus, therefore, is the Word of God who enters the soul, which is called Jerusalem, riding on an ass which has been loosed from its bonds by the disciples.”[12] The ass, in Origen’s explanation is the Old Testament, set loose by the teaching of the disciples (the Gospel), so that these things might be received into the soul.
For Origen, the Bible constitutes a singular book, with a singular message in spite of the variety and types of writings, because it is written for salvation:
For the whole book contains the ‘woe’ of those perishing, and the ‘song’ concerning those being saved, and the ‘lamentation’ concerning those in between. But John, too, who eats one roll on which there is writing ‘on the back and the front,’ has considered the whole Scripture as one book, which is thought to be sweet at the beginning, when one chews it, but which is found to be bitter in the perception of himself which comes to each of those who have known it.[13]
Fitting with his notion that the Bible is a singular book, Origen believed it ultimately had a single author. Origen, like modern interpreters, held that the intent of the original author is important, but unlike modern interpreters, he assigns authorship directly to God (while taking into account the fleshly and soulish parts of Scripture). The goal, even in the details of the law, is to achieve the mind of God revealed in Christ. With Paul he argues “All Scripture is inspired of God and profitable.’”[14]
Scripture is profitable in Origen’s imagery as food for the soul and as medicine to cure the root human sickness: “each individual, insofar as he perceives himself healthy and strong, takes in all these things, which are the words of God, and in which there is different food according to the capacity of the souls.”[15] Readers are like sheep that feed and water on such “profitable” pastures that have “saving power.”[16] He also compares Scripture to almonds which consist of three parts: the bitter and hard outward shell, followed by a second protective layer, but only in its third layer does it feed and nourish the one who eats it. So too Scripture has a bitter shell (like the flesh), a second layer (on the order of the soul), and only at its center is it spiritually nutritious. Only “in the third place you will find hidden and concealed in the [law and the prophets] the meaning of the mysteries’ of the wisdom and knowledge of God’ [Col 2:3] by which the souls of the saints are nourished and fed, not only in the present life but also in the future.”[17]
Likewise, he compares Scripture to a medicinal herb. In his Homily on Psalm 37 he says God “prepared remedies for the soul in the words He has sown and scattered throughout the divine scriptures, so that those who are brought low by some illness, as soon as they sense the first inkling of sickness or perceive the prick and pain of a wound … they might seek out an appropriate and fitting spiritual discipline for themselves, drawn from God’s precepts, which might bring them healing.”[18]
Scripture, exegeted in Christ is nothing less than the means to advance human salvation.[19] Church and society are plagued by a soul sickness aggravated by a contentious and violent religion. A return to the unifying person of Christ as exegete is the singular cure for this crisis of despair.
[1] This is the argument of Origen in First Principles, 4.1.6.
[2] Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis; The Four Senses vol 1, translated by Mark Sebanc (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998) see the Forward by Robert Louis Wilken, ix.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid, xi.
[5] Quoted in De Lubac, 235.
[6] Peter W. Martens, Origen and Scripture: The Contours of the Exegetical Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xi.
[7] H. de Lubac, Histoire et Esprit: L’Intelligence de I’Ecriture d’apres Origene (Paris:
Aubier, 1950), transl. A. E. Nash and J. Merriell, History and Spirit: The Understanding of
Scripture according to Origen (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 295, 194. Cited in Martens, 7.
[8] Martens, 11.
[9] Origen, Commentary on John books 1-10, translated by Ronald Heine (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989) 5.5, p. 163.
[10] Commentary on John, 5.5 p. 163.
[11] Commentary on John, 5.6 p. 164..
[12] Commentary on John 10,174, p. 295.
[13] Commentary on John, 5.7, p. 165
[14] Commentary on John, 1.16, p. 35.
[15] Hom Num 27.1.1-2 and 27.1.5/GCS 7, 255.22-256.1 and 257.10-12. Cited in Martens, 199.
[16] Phil 11.1/SC 302, 380.4-13. Martens, 199.
[17] Hom Num 9.7.3/GCS 7, 64.7-10. Cited in Martens, 199.
[18] Hom 1.1 Ps 37lPrinzivalli, 256.11-248.21. Cited in Martens, 200.
[19] Martens, 200.
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