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October 1 - October 27, 2024
Transfigural interpretation follows the way the biblical words run across or beyond figures to the realities those figures foreshadow and anticipate.
trans-figural—
Neither Provan nor Collett makes explicit appeal to divine authorial intentionality in their respective explanations as to how the words of the Bible run past the limits of what their human authors could have known at the time of writing.
“canonical process” approach,
They have meaning and significance because they are the idiom in which God acts and speaks.
My claim, then, is twofold: (1) divine authorial intent comes into focus in canonical context, and (2) this canonical intentionality is synonymous with God’s trans-figural intent.
totus sensus:
It is a matter of attending to the particulars and the big picture simultaneously.
The 2008 Jerusalem Declaration affirms that the Bible is to be “read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.”
The trans-figural dynamic is horizontal, not vertical: there is an important difference between the salvation-historical eschatological movement and the Platonic upward movement.
Trans-figural interpretation therefore reads for the literal sense, construed as the sense of divine authorial discourse.
The medieval quadriga
“When the eschatological sense of Scripture is taken as the first of the spiritual senses . . . the historical dynamic of the drama between God and his people under the Old Testament and the eschatological tension between the present and the not-yet in the New Testament can tie Biblical studies and systematic theology together.”
The spiritual sense on this account is the eschatological fullness of the literal sense.
grammatical-eschatological
Grammatical-eschatological exegesis is therefore better able to give a thick description of the Bible’s literal sense.
To read literally, then, according to the divine author’s intent, is to read trans-figurally,
attending to the way the letters run across the canon from their original historical situation and referent to their eschatological fulfillment.
The literal sense is grammatical, in accordance with the letter, when read in an eschatological (redemptive-historical) frame of reference, in canonical context, for the divine author’s trans-figural intention or plain canonical sense.
The key takeaway: Scripture’s literal sense necessitates a properly theological interpretation and a hermeneutical strategy that aims to follow the divine figuration where it leads.
grammatical-eschatological exegesis or the trans-figural sense, something very much like these
The Reformers represent the catholic reading tradition of the church in a Protestant key.
“Pentecostal plurality,” the idea that it takes many exegetical methods, and many interpretive communities from different times and different places to achieve a plenary understanding of Scripture.
The Reformers cast off the external finery of medieval allegorizing, not its beating heart.
Unlike Provan, however, I give more credence to how the Reformers actually read. Whereas Provan thinks the Reformers’ practice of literal interpretation did not always live up to their principles,167 I tend to think the reverse: the Reformers’ readings display more unanimity than their hermeneutical principles. They show more than they can tell: their exegetical practice displays more agreement about what literal interpretation is than they could articulate.168 This chapter,
Trans-figural biblical interpretation is not a novelty but a revival of a practice that is as Protestant as it is catholic.
Whereas Nicholas of Lyra saw a “double literal sense”
However, more than anything else, it is Oecolampadius’s insistence that Christ is the scopus or goal of Scripture, which he takes from the Greek patristic theologians (and Erasmus), that makes him my mere Christian hermeneutical patron saint.
Oecolampadius’s formula—“Scriptura scopus Christus” (“The scope of Scripture is Christ”)187—is a theological vision statement.
We read the word of God to come face-to-face with the Word of God.
“christoscopic.”
Christoscopic reading is another way of describing what I have termed grammatic-eschatological exegesis:
No book can be interpreted as if it stood outside the Bible.”195 I am hard pressed to think of a clearer endorsement of reading in canonical context than that.
Calvin’s own comment on Galatians 4:22 is telling: “A mystical interpretation of this sort (anagoge) was not inconsistent with the true and literal meaning.”
Calvin’s anagoge, in contrast, usually pointed to Christ and New Testament realities, which was the traditional role of the allegorical sense.”
“This is an anagoge—that is, once we have held to the literal sense of the prophet, we can then easily pass over to the spiritual kingdom of Christ.”
This is but another example of reading trans-figurally for the literal sense. What I have been calling grammatical-eschatological exegesis has Protestant precedent.
Bucer therefore had to display all his reformed catholic interpretive powers in his 1550–51 lectures on Ephesians at Cambridge University, in which he moved seamlessly from philology to Christology, demonstrating his humanist and his catholic credentials by giving equal attention to exegesis and theology.
He insisted that to read Scripture rightly we must pray to and listen for the Spirit “as conscientiously as possible.”
Paul’s aim (scopus) “is the increase of piety, not only in knowledge, but also in practice, both among the Ephesians and ourselves.”
Bucer’s lectures on Ephesians serve as a poignant reminder and encouragement: it is possible to do theology in partnership, not competition, with exegesis; it is possible to do theology in the university in a way that serves the church.
For all these reasons, Bucer’s Cambridge lectures on Ephesians represented, for a brief moment, what it might look like to combine in one person what I have here described as two contrasting reading cultures: the scholastic and monastic.
The Reformers themselves disputed the nature of the literal sense and interpretation.
“The literal sense is not so much that which is derived from proper words and not figurative . . . but that which is intended by the Holy Spirit and is expressed in words either proper or figurative.”
We must neither confuse nor conflate the sensus literalis (literal sense) with the lit tera (literalistic sense), the way the words run under authorial direction with the surface grammatical meaning.
Henri de Lubac was one of the few who thought, as I do, that the transfiguration had hermeneutical significance.
“He doesn’t merely rationally believe that God is glorious, but he has a sense of the gloriousness of God in his heart.”
comments, “Jesus’ transfiguration moves thoughts both backward and forward in time: it is a replay of Sinai and a foretaste of things to come . . . the mount of transfiguration was, for the evangelists, including Matthew, a second Sinai, where a miracle of old was repeated.”
The answer is yes, because Jesus’ transfiguration is that image and event that encapsulates, grounds, and justifies the apostles’ transfigural reading of the Old Testament.
“refraction.”
