“My words shall not pass away”
“We have here no continuing city,” Hebrews reminds us, “but we seek one to come.” In a litany of figures from the history of Israel, that is what “those who died in faith,” he says, looked for but did not receive, though trusting in the promises of God. What they ultimately looked for was not simply a return to the promised land after exile, he suggests, for “now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly.” I have been thinking about these words in relation to today’s readings because they belong to the strong doctrine of the Scriptures and to a way of thinking the Scriptures, a way of reasoning through the signs to the things signified.
The Scriptures are what Paul here identifies as “whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning.” He is actually speaking about the Hebrew Scriptures but the idea extends to the whole of the Scriptures, to what Christians understood several centuries later as the Old Testament and the New Testament, or simply the Bible. The Bible is really a library of books written over a vast range of years and centuries by many different hands and in many different voices. What gives the Hebrew Scriptures a kind of unity? Even more, what gives the Bible in its various forms a unity? I think Paul’s sensibility is deeply true, “they were written for our learning,” literally for teaching in the Greek, for our doctrine in the Latin.
What thunders forth to us on the Second Sunday in Advent is the profound idea, first, that things are written for a purpose, and, second, that the purpose is our learning. It is the idea of things being made known that are capable in some sense or other of being grasped by us. Therein lies the challenge and the necessity of thinking the Scriptures, pondering the images through which we enter into an understanding of the things of God. What thunders forth in today’s Gospel is the powerful idea that the words of God “shall not pass away.” They are eternal. What does that mean except that through the passing forms of human thought and experience, through the ups and downs of history, something everlasting and universal is known for thought? “That we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.”
The theology of the Epistle and Gospel is captured in Cranmer’s Collect. It expresses a fundamental truth not only for Anglicans but for orthodox Christians in every age. It speaks to the centrality of the Scriptures for the understanding of the Faith and for the hope that the Scriptures open to us, “the blessed hope of everlasting life,” the idea that we are made “partakers of the divine nature,” citizens of “an heavenly city” all the while we are “strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” It articulates an essential attitude of approach to the reading of the Scriptures: “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.”
The Scriptures have come down to us through traditions of interpretation which are based upon this principle of the centrality of the Scriptures. But insofar as they are for thought, there is the necessity of our engagement with them. What is that engagement? It is our seeking to enter into the meaning of what is written and proclaimed. That doesn’t mean that the Scriptures are simply there for us to interpret in any way we might choose, as if, proverbially, the Scriptures were but a nose of wax to be twisted and turned in whatever fashion at any time. Or to put it in modern parlance, there is ‘your truth’ and there is ‘my truth,’ and hence no truth, or the reduction of the Scriptures to ‘this is what it means to me.’ That leads really to a kind of meaninglessness.
We receive the Scriptures. It is through the thinking of those who have gone before us, in Wycliff’s lovely phrase, with “the mind of Christ,” or as our Anglican divines would put it with “the mind of the Fathers,” that we enter into an understanding of the Scriptures and begin to learn from them. The Scriptures are nothing less than “a doctrinal instrument of salvation.” That is to say, they open us out to what belongs to the truth of our humanity as found in the truth of God. Such is revelation, the mediation of God to us about our life with God and in God. We don’t read the Scriptures for information, collecting up bits and bytes of data; rather they are there for our learning and our understanding.
That doesn’t mean that there are not legitimate and different interpretations of various Scriptural passages. The history of theology is full of such examples as well as examples of misinterpretations that fall outside the unity of the Scriptures, heretical views, as it were, which are really partial truths held as absolute and thus mistaken. One of the earliest heresies and struggles in the early Church was Marcionism. Marcion took exception to most of the Hebrew Scriptures and great chunks of the Christian Scriptures and simply cut them out. Why? He couldn’t reconcile what he thought about the God of the Old Testament with the image of Christ. That tendency reoccurs over and over again. Richard Dawkins, for instance, regarded the God of the Old Testament as the most horrible figure in all literature, prompting Rabbi Jonathan Sacks to observe, ‘Oh, I see you are a Christian Atheist!’ But what gives the Scriptures their unity and truth? What holds together different but legitimately different approaches to the texts? It is and can only be the truth of God in what is revealed for thought.
Augustine, for example, in the second last book of the Confessions notes about six or seven different but perfectly possible ways of understanding the opening verses of Genesis, what he calls “this diversity of true opinions.” They are all contained within the overarching concept of creation as coming into being all at once (omnia simul) which, of course, we come to grasp only bit by bit, as parts within a whole. Just as creation is ex nihilo, out of nothing, meaning without any kind of pre-exisiting materiality, so too, creation is also a nihilo, meaning that is kept from falling into nothingness by its being in God. The point is concisely made by Fr. Crouse: “all existence is in the Word of God. ‘He spake and it was done.’ All is divine utterance: ‘He commanded, and they were created.’ All things are in and by God’s word; there is nothing else there … no dark and doubtful element, no ‘errant cause’, no truculence of nature.” I would like to extend that view to the Scriptures themselves.
This all speaks to a high doctrine of the Scriptures in terms of what is revealed and known about God and ourselves. What then is the difficulty in terms of our reading the Scriptures? Simply ourselves. “I am a problem unto myself,” Augustine says in an oft-repeated phrase. What he actually says is that “in the sight of God, I am a problem unto myself”.
It is a question about the forms of our thinking. A scientific or historical approach to the Scriptures is incapable of grasping what is substantial and universal. It reduces the Scriptures to a mere assemblage of things from which we might choose this or that according to our interests and agendas, focusing on one thing at the expense of anything else and losing sight of the wonderful ways in which the Scriptures engage us in a conversation with God and nature and with our humanity but only within that larger sense of the purpose and intent of the Scriptures. Debates between creationists and evolutionists miss the point and are largely irrelevant to the Genesis accounts and only illustrate the problem of reading our modern assumptions back into the text. In the Christian understanding, it is not too much to say that Jesus, as John himself puts it, is the exegete of God. It is the only time that word is used in relation to God, to God being made known to us.
The sixteenth century Reformations brought the Scriptures into a new light in part through translation into the various emerging languages of early modern Europe. There was a remarkable confidence on the part of Cranmer and other Anglican divines that the Scriptures are not to be a closed book but open for all to read. The remarkable confidence is that they could and can and must be read for understanding, a confidence in the creedal teachings that come out of the Scriptures and which return us to them in a pattern of understanding. I love the image of bibles being chained to the lectern, not just so that people couldn’t run off with them but more significantly that we don’t run off in the vanity of our imaginations about what the Scriptures teach.
We are given through the Scriptures themselves and through the interpretative traditions by which they have come to us ways of making sense of the difficult parts of Scripture. Andrewes’ observes that God often speaks to us in a human way, “speak[ing] to us our own language, and in our own terms, so to work with us the better”; in short, for our good and the good of our understanding. He “choosest of purpose, that dialect, that character, those terms, which are most meet and most likely to affect us.” Hence “where we thus find affections [or emotions or passions] attributed to God, our rule is ever to reflect the same affection upon ourselves which is put upon Him; to be jealous over ourselves, to be angry or grieved with ourselves for that which is said to anger or to grieve God.” It is a nice digest or summary of the classical and orthodox approach to the reading of the Scriptures in the life of the Church. And only so might we be less a problem to ourselves and in the sight of God.
Advent is really about the whole pageant of God’s Word coming to us. Today’s readings speak of the now and the then. Luke speaks of the so-called end times, the eschaton, but our ‘meantimes’ are also our end times and the same question arises about how do we read the signs of the times? Even more, how do we read about the hope and love of God revealed in the witness of the Scriptures to God as Trinity in and through the sacrifice of the Word made flesh who is Christ crucified? What thunders forth is the wonder and the majesty of God coming to us in judgement and mercy bringing hope “with all joy and peace in believing.” We are to “abound in hope, in the power of the Holy Spirit,” and all because “my words shall not pass away.”
Fr. David Curry
Advent 2, 2024