Subject for further reflection: Christ’s encounter with His two disciples on the road to Emmaus gives the paradigm for our worship. First, as they walk, Christ expounds Moses and the Prophets, “opening their minds” to understand how the Scriptures show it necessary “that the Christ should first suffer and then enter into glory.” Then, as they sit down to supper (“Stay with us!”), the Lord “opens their eyes” in blessing and breaking the bread, and they learn Who it was that unfolded the Scriptures to them: “Did not our hearts burn within us…?” The order is always thus: Hearing ushers us on to seeing; the Word guides us to the Table; the Scripture prepares us for Eucharist.
Questions the “historical method” might ask about the “laws of leprosy” in Leviticus 13–14: What was this disease, actually? The same as what we know as “leprosy” today or different? Multiple diseases? Surely the same pathogen does not affect humans and garments and structures — are these different sorts of molds? What is the cultural logic of hygiene that generates these regulations?
Questions a literary-theological approach might ask: Why is the leper who is “covered head to toe” in his disease pronounced clean? Why must the unclean leper dwell outside the camp? Why are the defilements of skin, fabric, and structure all referred to as “leprosy”? Why is the cleansing of leprosy accomplished through a sin offering and a burnt offering? What exactly is being “cleansed”? Why does it require a full-body shaving? What are the analogies between humans and houses? The significance of clean garments? How can one make atonement for a house?
I’m sure everyone else has already noticed this, but in Exodus 29:38ff the twice-daily (morning & evening) lamb offering in the Tabernacle is offered with bread and wine:
A few stray observations, with no particular ordering:
The “bread” is composed of flour and oil. One might object that as described it is not bread yet but merely a sort of flour-oil paste. However, this is of course a burnt offering: the bread is baked, as it were, in the fire, as it is being offered.
There is, of course, no leaven in this bread. The Passover (which of course involves the sacrifice of a lamb) is followed by the seven-day Feast of Unleavened Bread, on the first day of which all leaven is cleaned out of every Israelite house. There is no permanent regulation of which I am aware that prescribes leaven the rest of the year. But the collocation of lamb & unleavened bread recalls this festal season. Dare we infer: the Tabernacle exists in a sort of permanent Passover state, or is indeed a kind of permanent Passover?
The bread and wine are offered with the lamb. They are not substitutable with the lamb, but are its essential accompaniment in sacrifice.
Similarly, the description of the daily offering as a “sweet savor” comes not in reference to the lamb, but to the lamb with the bread and wine.
The covenant language of the LORD’s presence with Israel, “meeting” her and “speaking to” her, sanctifying the Tent of Meeting by His presence, dwelling among her and being their God, is not novel to this passage — but its reiteration in connection with the daily sacrifice is, shall we say, suggestive.
The “grain and wine and oil” of, say, Joel 2, are all present here: the signs, by the fruit of the earth, that the nation is blessed and enjoying abundance.
To get (potentially) fanciful: Flour symbolically combines various Scriptural images of judgment, death, and resurrection. A kernel of wheat falls to the ground and “dies” so that the plant may “bear much fruit” (John 12). The wheat must be threshed to separate the chaff (which is to be burned unto destruction) from the kernels. The kernels are then ground up to make flour; one thinks of St. Ignatius’ image of himself, preparing for martyrdom, as the “pure wheat of Christ.” Oil, then, is associated with the Spirit; while wine stands everywhere for blood and thus also for judgment.
More on leaven: In 1 Corinthians 5, when St. Paul is instructing his wayward congregation to expel the man who has his father’s wife (a kind of symbolic, if not necessarily literal, incest), he appeals by analogy to… the sequence of Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread. “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed; therefore let us celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” In expelling notorious evildoers, the churches honor the once-for-all Passover of Christ by keeping a permanent Festival of Unleavened Bread.
“‘Take away therefore the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has much, more shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him who does not have, even that which he has shall be taken away.’” (Mt 25)
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit, he takes it away. And every branch that bears fruit, he cleanses it, that it may bear more fruit.” (Jn 15)
Athanasius’s debate with the Arians was a lectionary-based discussion, if not explicitly, a least in a very practical way: it had to do with how the full range of the Scriptures in their apprehended juxtaposition disclosed the truth of God. I believe that Athanasius’s discussion is, on that basis, more credible than the Arians’, because it is more comprehensive of the texts of the Scripture as they are made to perdure side by side. In our own day, it is such contiguity in temporal extent that has drastically shrunk. To that degree, the triumph of Arianism lies in the thinning out of the figural word, and thereby the dropping out of texts as divinely referring in their meaning and power. Heresy is the deliberated withering, far more even than the purported contradicting, of the Scriptures.
— Ephraim Radner, Time and the Word: Figural Reading of the Christian Scriptures, 233
Addendum:
The notion that Christian theology is to be seen as concerned with the mystery of God, the trinitarian God who loved us in Christ and calls us to participate in the mystery which he is, suggests to me that the main concern of theology is not so much to elucidate anything, as to prevent us, the Church, from dissolving the mystery that lies at the heart of the faith—dissolving it, or missing it altogether, by failing truly to engage with it. And this is what the heresies have been seen to do, and why they have been condemned: the trinitarian heresies dissolve the divine life, either by reducing it to a monadic consciousness, or by degrading it to the life of the gods; the Christological heresies blur the fact that it is in Christ that this divine life is offered to us—that it is through him and in the Spirit that we know ourselves to be loved by God himself—and do this either by qualifying the fact that God is who Jesus is, or by qualifying the fact that what Jesus is is truly a man; heresies concerning man’s divinization are no less insidious, as they blur the fact that we are truly loved by God in Jesus and are called to respond to that love, and that in thus loving and being loved we are drawn into a real communion with God.
— Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay in the Nature of Theology
“And Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they were in his eyes but a few days because of his love for her. And Jacob said to Laban, ‘Give me my wife, for my days are fulfilled, that I may go in unto her.’ And Laban gathered together all the men of the place and made a feast.” — Genesis 29:20f
“But forget not this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow concerning his promise, as some count slowness, but is long-suffering toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” — 2 Peter 3:8f
“’Hallelujah! For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns. Let us rejoice and be exceeding glad, and let us give the glory to him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his wife has made herself ready. And it was given to her that she should array herself in fine linen, bright, pure.’ For the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints. And he says to me, ‘Write: Blessed are those who have been invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.’“ — Revelation 19:6–9
Though it now seems like a fairly obvious point, probably already made somewhere by St. Augustine or the like, it has never before today struck me what is the nature of the basic contrast between the false seed of Adam, represented by Cain and his son Enoch, and the true seed, represented by Seth and his son Enosh.
Cain, cast away from the gate of Paradise and alienated from the ground, goes off and establishes a city — which he names for his son, linking the future of his line metaphorically and literally to human civilization (which begets agriculture, technology, and culture). Enoch, it is worth noting, means something like “dedicated” or “disciplined.” As a result of Cainite man’s alienation from the world through sin, he dedicates himself — not unfruitfully, in a way — to the civilizing practices of building, making, growing, and so forth, that will “discipline” the world towards his ends. Nevertheless, since these attempts at civilization began in Cain seeking to escape the consequences of his brother’s murder, they will inevitably tend towards and end in Lamech’s celebration of a young man’s murder.
But Seth stays, it seems, with his father and mother at the gates of Paradise, and continues to worship the true Creator rather than dedicating himself to overcoming creatureliness. And this is just what Enosh means: man, as frail and weak, mortal, yet relationally bound. Sethite man “remembers that he is dust” and “calls on the name of the Lord” — the only name that can deliver from death.
In John 12:41, the narrator of the Fourth Gospel remarks, “Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him.” There is no question that the referent of the pronouns “his” and “him” is Jesus. Similarly there is no ambiguity about the episode in which Isaiah “saw his glory”: it is the vision of Isaiah 6 in which the prophet sees the Lord “high and lifted up.” (The quotation from Isaiah 6 which immediately precedes this verse all but proves this.) John is making a simple exegetical point, with weighty theological ramifications: when Isaiah saw the Lord, the Lord he saw was Jesus, the Logos, the eternal Son, in his eternal heavenly glory.
(John also clearly believes that the “suffering servant” of Isaiah 53 is likewise Jesus; but that is a point upon which to expand another time.)
This helps to clarify what, from the trinitarian perspective of the New Testament (yes, I said it!), is the exact nature of the testamental discontinuity — and continuity. It is not that the Old Testament exclusively reveals the Father as God, while the Son is previously “unknown” as also being God. (A fortiori regarding the Spirit!) Neither, therefore, is it that God was known as One in the Old Covenant, and is now known as Three in the New, and these must somehow be reconciled by a complicated theological grammar. Rather, John’s remark implies that when the One God has been seen and heard and worshipped in the Old Covenant, it is as the eternal Son that He has been seen and heard and worshipped. The Logos is always characteristically the one who makes the invisible God visible — audible, perceptible, thinkable, knowable. (Consider John 1:18: “No one has ever seen God.”) There is for John thus, at the divine level, an absolute continuity of both revelation and worship between the covenants. The discontinuity — and therefore the scandal — of the New Covenant is merely (!) that God the eternal Son is revealed and worshipped as a man: “the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us.” This is the scandal which is too great for the Pharisees in the passage to accept — “to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”
The key question for critics of “theological interpretation of Scripture”: Does “non-theological interpretation” of Scripture exist? It is normally claimed that the historical-critical mode of interpretation, in opposition to various religiously motivated modes, provides a set of “scientific” tools to establish the original meaning of the text in question (or the meaning now hidden underneath numerous redactional layers), so as to lay a surer foundation for future reflection upon the text. (Set aside, for a moment, the recognition that rather than producing a unified, scientific account of the Bible’s meaning and origins, the historical-critical mode has provided only a far more fragmented and scrambled picture, or rather set of pictures, than existed in the supposedly pre-critical age.) Essential to this mode is the assertion (which, at a certain level, I accept without controversy) that the history of a text’s, or idea’s, development and effects is absolutely critical to understanding its meaning. Now turn this question to the historical-critical mode itself. It has a history, and a distinctly theological history at that. Its developers and proponents had beliefs, complex beliefs indeed, about God, the Church, the Bible, and the like — living when and where they did, how could they not? Those beliefs affected their work, as their work affected their beliefs, in a constant hermeneutical spiral, affecting the directions given to their intellectual passions and the sorts of resolutions they found satisfying — how could they not? Can the historical-critical mode — or any mode of interpretation of a text which confronts one with questions about God (and is there any text which does not?) — really then be called “non-theological”?
