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October 1 - October 27, 2024
Paul’s Christian reading of the Old Testament inasmuch as it touches on his interpretive aims and methods, as well as providing a concrete example of his hermeneutic.
“transitory”)
“the eschatological knowledge of God through personal encounter,”
The veil is hiding neither the termination of the old covenant nor its fulfillment in Christ (things the author of Exodus could not have known); rather, the veil is “rendering inoperative” what would have been that glory’s inevitable end or negative result:
“If an opening were to be made in the grave of Moses, the entire world could not endure the light.”
It stands to reason that Paul would be preoccupied with the light of Christ given his own conversion experience, suffused with “a light from heaven, brighter than the sun” (Acts 26:13; cf. 9:3; 22:6, 9, 11).144
proclamation of the gospel to a world in darkness.
recessive glory,
“God removes and displaces what is transient to make way for better and abiding things.”
Paul sees Moses’ veil as signifying the barrier that stands between the covenant people and the glorious covenant promise that God will dwell in their midst (cf. Exod 25:8).
The veil therefore indicates the limited access to God’s glorious presence that marks the Mosaic stage of the economy of light. In this respect, the veil over Moses’ face served the same purpose as the curtain in the temple that cordoned off the holy of holies.
The real contrast between letter and spirit plays out in terms of their differing degrees of glory (doxa), a term Paul uses eight times in the span of just five verses (2 Cor 3:7–11).
Comparative glory was precisely the issue between Paul and his Corinthian opponents.
Rome.
As we have seen, the light on Moses’ face is refracted, filtered through the old covenant and the medium of the veil. In contrast, Paul ministers with unveiled face (3:16).
Moses saw only the back of God; Paul met the risen Christ, God’s very image, and “only through Christ is [the veil] taken away” (3:14).
The excessive glory of the new covenant has everything to do with the new frame of reference that is part of Pauline already/not-yet eschatology.
It is a difference in the economy of light: Paul is writing to those upon whom the illumining Spirit has been poured. His similarity to Moses, the mediator of the glorious old covenant, is thereby qualified by an even greater dissimilarity, the “how much more” glorious ministry of the new covenant, a function of the eschatological gift of the Holy Spirit.
What, then, is Moses’ veil? Paul’s “spiritual” interpretation of the veil is an extension of its literal sense: an impediment to right seeing/understanding. The veil—the way in which a stubborn attachment to an obsolete frame of reference and earlier stage in the economy of light limits one’s access to the transformative power of God’s glory—is what Christ removes or renders inoperative.
In Heinrich Bullinger’s words, “The veil is the letter, indeed, that dullness of mind, disbelief, and ignorance of Christ.”172
In an interesting wordplay, Paul says the veil that annulled the glory of the old covenant is itself “annulled” (katargeō, again) in Christ (3:14). The negation is negated thanks to the progress of redemption in the economy of light: “The veil is real for those who are not ‘in Christ,’ but the veil has been abolished for those . . . who have embraced . . . the ‘unveiled’ hermeneutical guidance supplied by the apostolic preaching.”
Paul has not been reading backward after all:
According to Robert Wilken, the church fathers did not need to allegorize the New Testament because “it speaks directly about Christ. . . . The spiritual meaning of the New Testament events is the literal meaning.”
de Lubac, the situation with the Old
We have already established that the Old Testament does speak about Christ.
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is to read for the glory of Christ in the letter of the text, a glory that was always there, though veiled.
The “letter” that kills is the untransfigured literal sense, which veils the light of Christ. The “spirit” that gives life is the transfigured literal sense, the sense unveiled by the Spirit, which the light of Christ illumines.181
Bates’s
As we have seen, Jesus’ transfiguration did not change what he was (“the whole fullness of deity”—Col 2:9) but more clearly disclosed it. Similarly, to read transfigurally does not change the meaning of the Old Testament by reading back something that was not originally in it, but discerns more of what was already there.
Paul reads the story of Moses’ transfiguration both forward and backward—much like the transfiguration itself, which looks back (to Moses and Elijah) to see forward (to Christ’s exaltation).
Paul provides a transfiguring interpretation of what those figures originally meant, putting them in a frame of reference that renders more explicit the intrinsic, though veiled, glory they had all along.
If we would read the Bible as Christians, with Paul, we must read with unveiled faces, hearts, and minds—in a word, transfigurally.225
Christoscopic interpretation does not look for Christ in every detail of Scripture (in contrast to some forms of Christocentric preaching); rather, it situates every passage in relation to the overarching story of Christ, his suffering, and his glorious kingdom, which, as we have seen, is the climax to the all-encompassing story of the triune communication of divine and supernatural light.
trans-figuring interpreters read forward as they trace the economy of light across the biblical figures to its ultimate referent; transfiguring interpreters read backward as they employ their unveiled referent, Christ, to light up the chamber dimly lit.
No matter the direction, transfigural reading attends to the divine discourse that makes of the many texts a unified canonical Scripture.
prayer. Theological interpretation of Scripture more closely resembles dialogue with its living divine author than it does an operation performed on dead letters.
“Far from being an objective, neutral method, the practice of historical criticism was always bound up with ideological, religious, and political concerns, especially those prioritized in the European Enlightenment.”
Contextual exegesis “explicitly integrates thinking about the contextual situatedness of the reader.”52 For example, postcolonial
Both read the Bible day & night But thou readst black where I read white.
To paraphrase Noll’s tragic conclusion: it was left to those consummate biblical interpreters, the Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Sherman, to decide how the Bible would henceforth be read. To the victors go the interpretive spoils!
Esau McCaulley’s Reading While Black is an important cri de coeur
propose instead that we adopt the posture of Jacob and refuse to let go of the text until it blesses us.”
In short, he realizes that interpretive communities must not pursue their own narrow interpretive interests only. “The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs,”
Perfect love for the biblical text must cast out interpretive fear. Not every difference need be divisive. Some differences are salutary, allowing us to see more colors in the white light of Christ that shines forth from the text. Wise readers will honestly acknowledge the limitations of their own contexts: “Some of the habits that we readers from the West . . . bring to the Bible can blind us to interpretations that the original audience and readers in other cultures see quite naturally.”
By way of contrast, faithful reading involves both discerning what the text means (our interpretation) and the more difficult task of discerning ourselves in relation to the text (our lived response). It is one thing to read about Jacob, quite another to read the story of Jacob as our own.
One of the encouraging recent developments in biblical hermeneutics has been the attempt to recover, and reintegrate, a spiritual concern—for the spiritual sense of the text, the spiritual condition of the reader (the two go together), and the work of the Holy Spirit.
Reading Pneumatically
We saw how God’s speaking creation into being (“Let there be light”) was but the opening salvo in an ongoing light show that culminates in Jesus’ transfiguration.