Kindle Notes & Highlights
Just as there is no pure nature (pura natura), so there is also no pure history (pura historia).
that the church fathers were deeply invested in reading the Old Testament Scriptures as a sacrament, whose historical basis or surface level participates in the mystery of the New Testament reality of the Christ event.
thoroughly Christocentric preaching without a whiff of moralism
Throughout this book I refer to the Hebrew Scriptures as the “Old Testament,” even though this is a somewhat anachronistic designation, since the church fathers only knew of the “Scriptures.” Cf. Allert, High View of Scripture? Still, the term “Hebrew Scriptures” is unsuitable because the church fathers often used the Septuagint or a Latin translation as their Scriptures, and so for the sake of easy reference I have thought it best simply to use the term “Old Testament.”
Robin Parry, in his recent book The Biblical Cosmos, makes exactly this point, arguing that for the Old Testament everything in creation is in some way sacramental.
“Creation participates in this divine Life just as it participates in Being, Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. So in some analogical sense all things, even rocks, have some sharing in life, albeit at a very far remove from the divine Source.”1
What biblical interpretation does, on Origen’s explanation of it here, is to move from the visible event to the “mystical and hidden things.” The events in the desert did occur—Origen displays no suspicion about the historical narrative—but they did so in order to portray hidden, mystical things.
Origen’s logic is unmistakably anagogical: he believes that we are to “mount up” (ascendere) from the created order. The language of ascent (anagōgē) is dear to the Alexandrian theologian.
Over against the dualistic metaphysic of modernity, a sacramental reading of Scripture helps us recover an integrated vision of reality, one that is centered on Jesus Christ as the true reality (res), in which all created things (sacramenta) hold together.
The purpose of the Psalter, claims Gregory, is “not to teach us mere history, but to form our souls in accordance with God through virtue.”72
Origen, in his book On First Principles, famously distinguishes three levels of reading: the first—the literal reading of the “flesh of the scripture”—is for the “simple”; the second—edification in line with the “soul of scripture”—is for people who have made “some progress”; and the third—which gives us the hidden mystery of the “spiritual law”—is for those who have become perfect.76
