All Thy Lights Combine

Figural Reading in the Anglican Tradition

David Ney, Ephraim Radner

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781683595540
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

We do not simply interpret God's word. His word interprets us. Figural interpretation has been a trademark of Anglican devotions from the beginning. Anglican readers—including Tyndale, Cranmer, Hooker, and Lewis—have been figural readers of the Bible. By paying attention to how words, images, and narratives become figures of others in Scripture, these readers sought to uncover how God's word interprets all of reality. Every verse shines the constellation of God's story.Edited by David Ney and Ephraim Radner, the essays in All Thy Lights Combine explore how the Anglican tradition has employed figural interpretation to theological, Christological, and pastoral ends. The prayer book is central; it immerses Christians in the words of Scripture and orders them by the word. With guided prayers for morning and evening, this book invites readers to be re--formed by God's word. Become immersed in the riches of the Anglican interpretive tradition.

CHAPTER 1

AN INTRODUCTION TO FIGURAL READING IN THE ANGLICAN TRADITION

EPHRAIM RADNER & DAVID NEY

When English speakers think of the power of biblical language, they often summon up memories of that great monument of historic Anglicanism, the Authorized King James translation (KJV). Within the remembered sounds or simply written sentences of this great monument to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century English lie the echoes of, it is sensed, a mysteriously great language. Ann Wroe recounts her first hearing, as a British Catholic, of a reading of the KJV at university:

I was around 20, sitting in St John’s College Chapel in Oxford in the glow of late winter candlelight, though that fond memory may be embellished a little. A reading from the King James was given at Evensong. The effect was extraordinary: as if I had suddenly found, in the house of language I had loved and explored all my life, a hidden central chamber whose pillars and vaulting, rhythm and strength had given shape to everything around them.1

Much about these memories is just their grasp of something that seems gone. When, in 2011, the 400th anniversary of the KJV was celebrated, a spate of articles and books on the translation appeared, most of them addressing the specifically literary influence of the text. They noted with praise the tradition of sonorous eloquence, the vivid Saxon terminology, and the lyrical and sometimes mysteriously violent rhetoric set in motion by the KJV that seemed to order English prose and poetry for centuries, from the KJV’s own origins in the language of Tyndale and the Book of Common Prayer, to Donne to Melville. But the 2011 laudators also offered eulogies to the translation in the modern sense of tributes for what is lost and dead, a way of speaking and imagining the world that is no longer ours. Our contemporary language, it was often noted, seem pallid by comparison, weak and ineffectual.

The power of biblical language is generally viewed in our day as literary. Cultural or cognitive potency is what is at issue, something bound up with the way words and their ordering shape the individual and collective consciousness. No doubt the seventeenth-century translators of the KJV were sensitive to this important character of biblical speech, framed in a particular language or vernacular. But what governed their own presuppositions about the text that they translated, and that only thereby elevated the resonance of their English sentences, was their more fundamental conviction that the words of the Bible themselves held power to shape the world of nature, the world of men and women, bodies and spirits together. Scripture words could do this precisely because they are God-given, and in this divine origin encompass all creation: when “God said,” so it was. This is why, in Wroe’s description, the words of the Bible can “give shape to everything around them”: not because they are linguistically well framed, but because they frame all things. As Adam Nicolson writes, contrasting the King James Bible to Shakespeare’s King Lear, “everything in Lear falls apart, everything in the King James Bible pulls together; one is a nightmare of dissolution, the other a dream of wholeness … it absorbs and includes.”2

It was out of this conviction, and (more properly for those of faith) out of the reality on which this conviction resided, that English Christians, and especially the Anglican tradition that comprehended most of them until the nineteenth century, produced the rich, variegated, and astonishingly illuminating scriptural interpretation that this volume seeks to introduce. What is here called the “figural” reading of the Bible is but the practiced version of that conviction of Scripture’s power to provide and reveal the wholeness of God’s world and history, and to absorb and include all aspects of actual life within the formative power of God’s own life, most clearly given in Christ Jesus.3

The goal of figural reading was, to borrow a phrase from the great Anglican poet George Herbert (1593–1633), to come to know “how all thy lights combine / And the configurations of their glory!” Figural readers hoped to uncover the way that God’s creative work integrates all reality by showing how particular parts of Scripture—God’s own words—interlock with others, often across times and books and characters, through similitude, resonance, and moral form. Most Christians are aware of the figural connection between Adam or David and Christ, drawn not only by New Testament authors but elaborated upon extravagantly over the centuries in liturgy, homily, poetry, and image. But the figural readers of the Bible were not only invited but, given their understanding of the Bible, driven to see such connections in all the corners of the scriptural text, from those dealing with flowers or beasts to those dealing with conquest and destruction. The figurated Scripture told them what the world looked like, not only in terms of human imagination, but in the very mind of God. Figural reading, then, revealed and reveled in the truth.

Figural readers receive biblical words in canonical context and pay special attention to the way these words acquire theological and especially christological import, referring to these realities by taking into their meaning related words and texts. Scripture words, sentences, narratives, and images thus become figures of other words, sentences, narratives, and images—and finally of divine truths themselves—through their variegated use and linkages. The lexical range of “figural reading” overlaps with that of terms such as typology (where one event or person prophetically pre-figures a later event or person) and allegory (a looser mode of theological reference) and thus occupies a place within broadly conceived categories such as spiritual interpretation or theological interpretation. Because of its interest in particular objects and bodies depicted in Scripture and in their relationship with other referents, figural reading can sometimes rightly be opposed to spiritualizing tendencies in the history of biblical interpretation. But for the purposes of this volume, “figural reading” will be used generously as a broad category which includes the premodern modes of interpretation of the medieval quadriga as well as other historic theological interpretations of Scripture generated from reading the Bible according to its wider canonical interrelationships.

Like those for whom the King James Bible has become a relic from a bygone age, Christians of the modern West often study the figural reading of Scripture as one gazes upon an artifact in a museum. Students are still taught about the medieval quadriga, a term that conjures up the four wheels of a chariot. The quadriga referred to the fourfold senses of the Scripture that any text might hold: the literal, the allegorical (matters of Christian faith), the anagogical (matters of Christian hope), and the tropological (matters of Christian love).4 The latter three senses are usually designated as “figural,” and many modern Protestants (and now Catholics too) assume that they were left behind with the Reformation. Often the assumption that figural reading is premodern is accompanied by a value judgment: it is taken to be the mode of reading which is practiced by primitive Christians. Yet recent history suggests that it is resilient and reasserts itself even as scholars and preachers try to stamp it out.

The first early modern translator of the Bible, William Tyndale (on whose work the KJV is largely based), is famous for his Reformation rejection of complicated allegorical interpretation. Yet, as we see in David Mason Barr’s chapter on Tyndale, he was a thoroughgoing figuralist in his own way, largely because only by reading the Bible figurally could he make sense of Britain as belonging to God. The same can be said of Thomas Cranmer, a radical Protestant in some respects, but whose composition of the Book of Common Prayer in fact established figural reading as a central part of Anglican Christian faith. Preachers and poets, including Puritans and Catholics both, followed Cranmer’s lead well into the era we associate with enlightened social progress. Precisely this learning has, over the centuries, fueled the most focused devotion, sublime poetry, powerful conversionary preaching, vigorous political activism, and robust missionary outreach. The purpose of this volume is to trace some of these fruitful lines of witness.

THE MISSIONARY NATURE OF FIGURAL READING

In the late eighteenth century, a former African slave, Ottobah Cugoano, now a devout Anglican in London, wrote the first large-scale English language political denunciation of slavery by a black man. Cugoano pursued his ferocious argument through a self-conscious understanding of Scripture’s figural framework that drew on patristic but less remotely on Anglican hermeneutical perspectives of the Old and New Testaments in their conjunction. In his view, divine goodness and power could be discerned by the oppressed and suffering only in these terms.5 Cugoano’s Anglican figuralism found its American enunciation in the astonishing moral witness of nineteenth-century African American teachers like Maria W. Stewart, as we see in Marion Taylor’s chapter on female interpreters. Today, figural reading still finds a home in the West. In particular, it continues to take up residence in places far from the halls of power among those who are keenly aware of their need for God’s efficacious word. It is perhaps on this account that figural reading is energetically pursued in non-Western contexts today. It is particularly important to the growth of the movement which may yet prove to be the most consequential development in the history of Christianity, global Pentecostalism.

Many of the indigenous Christians responsible for the staggering growth of Christianity in non-Western contexts received the Scriptures from Westerners. They also received from Westerners various modes of interpreting the Scriptures, including figural reading. Watchman Nee (1903–1972) is arguably the most influential Chinese Christian writer of all time. His work had a direct influence upon the exponential growth of house churches in China at the end of the twentieth century, and his over sixty volumes of devotional and theological writings have been translated into dozens of languages. Nee was a great figural reader of Scripture. Nee’s figural approach to the Bible is an inheritance which was passed on to him and which he, in turn, passed on to others. He interpreted the Bible figurally at least in part because “the single most important personal influence on the development of Nee’s theology,” Margaret E. Barber (1866–1930), taught him to read Scripture in that way.6 Barber had arrived in Foochow, China, in 1899 as a church planter for the Anglican Church Missionary Society. While she eventually became an independent missionary, Barber had received the Bible and learned to interpret it through the mediation of the Prayer Book in the bosom of the Anglican Church.

Like many figural readers, Nee finds a justification for his figural approach in Paul’s words to the Corinthians: “Now these things happened to them as an example” (1 Cor 10:11 ESV). “The Bible,” says Nee,

records the history of the Israelites as an example to us. It is for the purpose of our edification. Although there is an outward difference between God’s work in the Old Testament and His work in the New Testament, they are the same in principle. The principle of God’s work is the same today as it was in the past.7

Types and figures are, for Nee, the means of drawing out the continuity of God’s work across time. Thus, for example, Nee insists that

The whole book of Exodus is a type of our salvation from the world. The Passover is a type of the breaking of bread. The crossing of the Red Sea is a type of baptism. The murmuring and sojourning in the wilderness are types of God’s children in their various conditions. The living water is a type of the Holy Spirit.8

These types or figures, as well as many others, are, in Nee’s mind, the handles he needs to present the text of Exodus to modern Chinese readers as both Christian and edifying. Through figural reading, all that transpired in the book of Exodus between God and his people is received by Nee as tokens of God’s love, God’s means of ministering to his people today.

As Nee emphasizes, figural reading is teleological or directed toward a particular aim. The authors of this volume all explore how figural reading has been employed by Anglicans to allow the scriptural text to do a particular theological or pastoral work. This work is sometimes explicitly communal and sometimes almost strictly devotional, but it always seeks to bring the truth of God to bear upon the lived experience of believers. The Anglican figural readers in this volume all affirm with John Donne (1572–1631) that the interpreter must search the Scriptures as one searches a wardrobe: “not to make an inventory of it, but to find in it something fit for thy wearing.”9 The figural reading of the text is an extension of vernacularization, the missionary work of Bible translation and distribution.

This volume’s teleological emphasis might be taken to indicate that figural reading is strictly a matter of applying the text rather than interpreting it. But an easy distinction between interpretation and application will not abide. Since the groundbreaking work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and other mid-twentieth-century philosophers of language, readers have become increasingly aware of the reciprocal nature of textual engagement. While interpreters interpret texts, texts also interpret them. And while interpreters apply the texts they interpret to their own contexts, they do not merely do so subsequently. Textual engagement is always a process by which the newness of the text is received by interpreters, brought to bear on what they already know, and thus applied. At the root of Anglican figural reading, after all, is the conviction that the scriptural word is, on its own accord as being a divine word, powerful in itself—a word that draws out interpretative judgments from the reader.

It is appropriate to speak of interpretation as the process by which the text is applied anew and thus absorbed by the world. Yet because texts work upon interpreters and direct them in particular ways, it is also appropriate, in Nicolson’s description of the KJV’s language, to speak of interpretation as the process by which texts absorb the world. As the late ecumenical theologian George Lindbeck noted in The Nature of Doctrine, texts that are received as canonically authoritative are inherently disposed to do such work. As communities immerse themselves in these texts, the texts come to define the way they see the world. As Lindbeck puts it, “A scriptural world is thus able to absorb the universe. It supplies the interpretive framework within which believers seek to live their lives and understand reality.”10 Figural reading continues to be energetically pursued around the world because the scriptural world is able to “absorb the universe.” As communities receive the Scriptures, they inevitably adopt Scripture words as the means of redefining their contexts and their experiences. For Lindbeck, this work is a gospel work by which God works through his word to transform communities into the likeness of his Son, and it is thus that figural reading is mandated.

The community-building power of figural reading is particularly important to note. To receive, interpret, and pass on the Bible is to receive, interpret, and pass it on midstream. As communities receive the Scriptures and pass them on to others, communities pass on a new vocabulary of Scripture words—Words such as God and Jesus, of course, but also words like “sinner” or “redeemed.” But before they pass these words on, they absorb them and are absorbed by them. Communities develop new identities which become part of the sacred deposit they pass along. It is thus that words such as “sinner” and “redeemed” are transmitted not merely as Scripture words but as words that describe the Christian witnesses themselves. Indeed, such words are passed on quite intentionally in the hope that those who receive the Scriptures will also receive them as self-descriptors, for those that do so receive an inheritance, a sacred and ancient trust which precedes them and which they will also, God willing, pass along to others.

Passing on the faith is not the same as playing a game of hot potato. Christians do not stand in a stationary position as they pass faith along and then idly look on as others do the same. They are shaped by and mysteriously drawn up into that which they pass along. “For what I received,” Paul says, “I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3 NIV). Paul gifted his converts with a particular doctrine, namely, that “Christ died for our sins.” This gift was given in the Scriptures and thus given in the giving of the Scriptures themselves. Notice, however, that in giving this doctrine and the Scriptures, Paul also gave an interpretation of himself. The Scripture-doctrine he passed on was that Christ had died for him, and Paul therefore gave himself to his converts as this “chief of sinners.” By searching the Scriptures, Paul had somehow found himself within them. And he believed that he had found the Corinthians there too, for he tells them that Christ had died not just for his sins, but for our sins. Paul is confident that as the Corinthians search the Scriptures, they too will find that they are named there as redeemed sinners—in the words about Is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: An Introduction to Figural Reading in the Anglican Tradition (Ephraim Radner & David Ney)
• Chapter 2: Scripture Words and the Scriptural Commonwealth: William Tyndale and Figural Reading (David Mason Barr)
• Chapter 3: The Archbishop’s Hand: Thomas Cranmer and Figural Reading (Ephraim Radner)
• Chapter 4: The Poetics of Law: Richard Hooker and Figural Reading (Torrance Kirby)
• Chapter 5: Making Song with the Psalms: Mary Sidney Herbert and Figural Reading (Laurance Wieder)
• Chapter 6: God’s Way with Words: John Donne and Figural Reading (Nathan Wall)
• Chapter 7: Ecclesiological Unity and the Enlarging of Scripture: Richard Sibbes and Figural Reading (Julianne Sandberg)
• Chapter 8: The Scripture Mysteries: Charles Wesley and Figural Reading (John R. Tyson)
• Chapter 9: The Multiplicity of Scripture Words: William Jones of Nayland and Figural Reading (David Ney)
• Chapter 10: The Mirror of Faith: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Figural Reading (Jeffrey W. Barbeau)
• Chapter 11: “The Feeling of Infinity” and Parochial Life: John Keble and Figural Reading (Maria Poggi Johnson)
• Chapter 12: Christ Came Not to Destroy but to Fulfill: Female Devotional Interpreters and Figural Reading (Marion Taylor)
• Chapter 13: Lord, Bid Me to Come unto Thee on the Water: Henry Mansel and Figural Reading (Dane Neufeld)
• Chapter 14: Let Us Kneel with Mary Maid: Christina Rossetti and Figural Reading (Elizabeth Ludlow)
• Chapter 15: A Richer Mythology: C. S. Lewis and Figural Reading (Judith Wolfe)
• Chapter 16: The Whole Bible: Lionel Thornton and Figural Reading (Jeff W. Boldt)
• On the Daily Office
• The Order for Morning Prayer Daily throughout the Year
• The Order for Evening Prayer Daily throughout the Year
• Lectionary
• May
• September
• Contributors
• Scripture Index
• Old Testament