"The Face of God for Now"

The title of this blog post gets its name from the title of the third chapter in The Spirit of Early Christian Thought. As with a previous blog post, the occasion for me writing about this is that I have missed yet another meeting with my Bible study during which we were supposed to discuss this chapter in Robert Wilken's book. Since I'm the one who recommended this book to our Bible study in the first place, I feel some sense of guilt for not being able to be there to discuss it. Also, it seems like a good exercise to blog through books like this one.

What I love about Wilken is that he reports on how early Christians thought, without assessing the relative merits of their ideas. This chapter, in particular, dealt with ideas which appear to me to exist in tension with one another. I'll explain momentarily.

The chapter deals with how the early Christians dealt with Scripture--"the face of God for now." No doubt about it, the early Church took Scripture very seriously. But the way in which they took it seriously is fascinating. The context in which they read Scripture was very different from ours. Ours is an era in which the Bible is now the most widely distributed book in the history of the world, and the Bible has greatly shaped our culture. For the early Christians, Greek and Roman thought was the setting into which the Bible came as something new.

"The Bible," Wilken says, "formed Christians into a people and gave them a language." [Emphasis mine.] The thing Wilken focuses on is not primarily the doctrines and information about the world that Christians could gain from the Scriptures, but rather the way it shaped their vocabulary, their imaginations, and how they thought about living.

There are two big ideas that seem to me to be held in tension throughout this chapter on how early Christians used Scripture. On the one hand, there is the idea that the Bible is tied to history; one cannot divorce it from its original context. On the other hand, there is the idea that the Bible speaks allegorically, which seems to imply that the Bible can, in fact, take on new meaning in new contexts. When you state these two ideas as I have, they appear to be contradictory. Wilken doesn't address this tension directly, but the chapter contains clues that he has a very nuanced approach to Scripture in mind.

I think it's worth digging into this a little bit, because it is not a simple matter to read Scripture. Early Christian interpretation of the Bible was not one-dimensional, and I suppose there were as many reasons back then as there are now to puzzle over the meaning of Scriptural texts.

As one of the headings indicates, the Bible became for the early Church "a single story." This did not happen without some struggle, as this section of the chapter indicates. "Some Christians, notably Marcion and the Gnostics, believed that the Old Testament was a book about a lesser God who... had nothing in common with the universal and loving God who had sent his son into the world." In response to this, Irenaeus argued that "the Bible was a single narrative whose chief actor was God." Hence,

The Bible is a book of events with consequences, not only for those who lived through them or were influenced by them, but for all men and women. Its meaning turns on the history it records, whether it be God's creation of all things at the beginning of time, the sin of Adam, the giving of the Law to Moses, Christ's birth from a virgin, or his Resurrection on the third day.

This point seems to feed into the first idea I highlighted above, that the Bible is tied to history. You cannot take away the Old Testament, because the Bible demands to be read as a continuous exposition of the history of God's plan. You cannot remove any part of Scripture, because it is all tied together.

But in itself, the "one story" idea is a slight departure from the modern understanding of a strictly "historical" reading of the Bible. A modern historian approaching a biblical text would probably first divorce it from the continuous narrative of Scripture, try to put it in its own historical context, and interpret its meaning in that way. The early Christians would not have done this, and in that sense one could argue they were not fundamentally tied to the "original meaning" of the text, as in the meaning the author had in mind when writing it (assuming the author was a product of his own time and place).

The following section is titled "The Inevitability of Allegory." Citing Origen as the first example of how Christians interpreted the Old Testament, Wilken writes,

In a homily on the book of Exodus he observed that Saint Paul had shown Christians "how the church gathered from the Gentiles ought to interpret the books of the Law." The text he took as exemplary was 1 Corinthians 10.... Paul's interpretation of the Exodus and the wanderings of the Israelite in the desert, says, Origen, differs from the "plain sense" of the text.... Origen proposes that the several examples by Paul should be taken as models to guide Christians in their interpretation of the Old Testament.

Here we see that the Bible is somewhat divorced from its historical context, quite on purpose. Wilken makes this point even stronger with this statement: "Interpretation has to do with context. As moderns we are so accustomed to think of context as literary or historical that we forget that the words of Scripture come to us in many ways." How can this be reconciled with the idea that the Bible "is a book of events with consequences," whose "meaning turns on the history it records"?

Perhaps the point on which these two ideas hang is that the Bible is "a book about Christ." Christ is the goal of all the history of Israel, and he is the focal point of all human history since his death and resurrection. All Scripture should be interpreted through the lens of Christ; that is, we ought to have in mind that every passage is somehow about him. Even if this requires getting away from the "literal" meaning of the text.

Is this a solution to the problem of interpretation? It's a step, but I don't see how it can be a full solution. For then the question becomes, how far can we go with this? It seems natural to interpret the Old Testament in light of the New, since in the New Testament we have eyewitness accounts of who Jesus was and what he taught. Yet how far can the Old Testament be bent out of its natural shape before it breaks? This concern played a big part of the Reformation.

I think there's another step we should take toward faithful interpretation of Scripture. Let me bring back that quote I used near the beginning of this post, but now with different emphasis: "The Bible," Wilken says, "formed Christians into a people and gave them a language."

The thing I always find so unfortunate about our interpretation of Scripture is that we so often fail to interpret it with the goal of forming Christians into a people. It's fine if we're all hesitant to give up our various interpretations of Scripture; no one seriously committed to faithful interpretation will just roll over for the sake of unity. But sometimes it appears that we simply have no intention of uniting Christians through Scripture. Many traditions appear quite intent on using it to divide themselves from the rest of us.

This is me dealing with these issues, not Wilken. But in reading this chapter, I can't help but try to work through the difficult questions of biblical interpretation. I like where Wilken ends up, though, which is something that every Christian tradition can agree on:

For early Christian thinkers the Bible, finally, was a book about how to live. God's Word is not something to be looked at, but acted on. Saint Bernard, the medieval mystic, said it well: the interpreter must see himself in that which is said.

Indeed, "You will progress in understanding the Holy Scripture only to the degree that you yourself have made progress through contact with them."