A Liturgical Hermeneutic

Thus far in this series on bible interpretation called “hermeneutics’, I have addressed the need for our western culture to relearn “humility” in bible interpretation, as well the need to focus on “obedience” as a means of better interpretation. The last point that I would make in this short series is that we also need to rediscover “liturgical interpretation.” I have found that the best summation of this approach comes from the pen of Bishop Kallistos Ware.

He writes:

“As an example of what it means to interpret scripture in a liturgical way, guided by the use of it at church feasts, let us look at the Old Testament lessons appointed for vespers on the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25^th. They are three in number… All are to be understood as prophesies of the incarnation from the virgin. Mary is Jacob’s ladder (Gen 28:10-17), supplying the flesh that God incarnate takes when entering into the world. Mary is the closed gate who alone among women bore a child while inviolate (Eze 43: 1-4). Mary is the house which Christ the wisdom of God takes as His dwelling (Pro 8: 22-30). Exploring this manner of choice of lesson for the various feasts, we discover layers of biblical interpretation that by no means obvious at first reading.”

While it should never be said that the plain meaning of words: phrases, clauses, and the like are of no consequence, it should also be said that the plain meaning is simply the first layer of meaning to be explored. The reformation was not incorrect in calling for a restoration of the plain meaning of the text; that was truly necessary in its day because for the most part it had been lost to the inventions of medieval preachers. However, the sad outcome was that as the liturgies were tossed out, so were the second layers of understanding exposed in the liturgies.

The liturgical cycle of the first millennium are not a mere option, they are a real necessity because they contain within them the deepest levels of biblical understanding.

An Obedient Hermeneutic

In this next treatment of bible interpretation I would like to consider the role of obedience in our hermeneutics.

In Gen 12:1 we read, Now the Lord said to Abram…

The very 1^st thing worth noting is that the church of Christ believes and teaches that it is not only possible for God to make himself known & experienced by persons, but rather that it this is precisely the thing that God loves & intends to do.

God desires a situation wherein his creation lives before him at all times, & not only with God’s awareness of the creation's presence, but with the creatures equally aware of God’s presence.

At the same time we should also note that we are not told exactly how this voice of God came to Abraham, that is a mystery.

We know this, somehow, God revealed himself, & somehow Abraham heard rightly; so let me start again from vs 1:

12:1 Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. 2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

2^nd, please notice that this conversation seems to be a monologue; I say it seems, but we cannot be sure that this was the whole conversation.

After all we do not know where Moses learned the content of this meeting (maybe Jewish elders, maybe Egyptian books, maybe direct revelation), however, we can be sure of this; this is the part of conversation that the Spirit wants the church to know.

The point of the conversation is that when God speaks to Abram he tells him you GO! & then as you GO, I WILL; in fact, God says I WILL 5 times.

You GO, & I WILL show you where, I WILL make you a great nation, I WILL bless you, I WILL bless those who bless you, I WILL Curse those who do not.

When God causes himself to be experienced by Abraham, & any person, he first commands a following or a work of faith, & then when we follow, HE ACTS before our eyes.

Notice what we read in vs 4:

4 So Abram went, as the Lord had told him … 7 Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.”

As Abraham went, God began to Act, & to come to Him more & more. Abram left & god reveals himself again & tells him where he is going- To your offspring I will give this land.”

And as Abraham is strengthened he turns to God more and more, now Abraham begins to go before God

So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him.

8 From there he moved to the hill country on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east.

And there he built an altar to the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord. 9 And Abram journeyed on, still going toward the Negeb.

When God speaks, if we listen, we follow, only then does He speak more, & the more He speaks, the more we can follow, & the further we are drawn into the life of God.

Interpreting the bible has everything to do with hearing God speak and following his commands so that we might further understand, no following results in no understanding.

Humble Hermeneutics

Before we begin a serious comparison between the ancient methodology of bible interpretation and that of the present, I want to emphasize the pressing need for humility in our day. Specifically, our need to rediscover humility in bible interpretation. It is due to our lack of humility that many are misled by the darkness both within us and outside of us. Thus, it is here that we might learn a thing or two from the dessert fathers.

The devil appeared to a monk, disguised as an angel of light, and said to him, “I am the angel Gabriel and I have been sent to you. But the monk said, see if you have not been sent to someone else; I am not worthy to have an angel sent to me. At once the devil vanished.

There is a tendency in contemporary bible interpretation to set aside the reality of our own limitations, and to presuppose that God is speaking to us and revealing something unique to us individually. Those two tendencies possess just enough error to be spiritually unhealthy. Surely God is speaking to us through his divine word, but never in isolation from the rest of the church. This means that whenever we deduce a meaning of a particular scripture, our conclusion cannot differ from that which others have received (all the way back to the beginning). If there is disagreement about a text, then we carefully consider the outcomes of debates, synods, councils, &C…. It may also very well be that the church has not given a strict conclusion about particular text, and we too must learn to hold a view any interpretation of those texts as private and not universal interpretations. However, when the church speaks with one voice, it is incumbant upon us to grow into that understandng and forsake our own. It is spiritual pride that leads a person to say, this has been revealed to ME, and no one else!

Like the monk in the quote above, we must learn to view our private interpretations and revelations with a great deal of suspicion, and the way to do so is by elevating the one voice of the church above our own. When we do this, those demons of interpretation quickly vanish. Those who pretend to speak with authority, yet whose voice is not aligned with the whole church (all the way back to the beginning) have probably bought into a similar false and demonic vision as that of the monk in our quote. The mindset that should prevail in us is one that sees the one voice of the church as greater than our own.

Salvation According to the Fathers

One Word

There is one body and one Spirit- just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call- one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. Eph 4: 4-6

The oneness of our faith and our God has been the main focus of every post thus far. I have stressed that there can be no internal or temporal changes within the godhead. This means that God cannot change His mind about anyone or anything, and that the persons of the godhead cannot think differently, they must all be of one mind. See: “One God, One Mind, One Mission.”

I also stressed the oneness that can exist between our One God and mankind. We saw that scriptural witness is that it is not only possible, but necessary for persons to participate in the work or energy of God, and that it is through this participation that we are restored to the image and likeness of God, see “Energy and God.”

In the next series of posts I would like to compare and contrast this one God of the ancient church, and this one salvation to that of the contemporary western church by the way that the two treat the interpretation of scripture. I intend to compare the way we in the contemporary west understand the scriptures as compared to those who came before us. My goal is to make plain the reality that scriptural interpretation is the church’s gift to mankind, and to point out what happens when individuals set their personal interpretation against that of the undivided church. There is only one God, one faith, and one word!

No prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. 1 Pet 1:20-21

Life In God

The Nicene confession has enshrined the fact that all things were made through Christ. Consequently, through the Creed - Christ, the Apostles, the Church Fathers, and the Church Councils teach us that the cosmos are the stage upon which the Triune God enacts a great drama of communion by sharing the divine life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with persons who are not God.

At the heart of this divine act of creation, we find God’s desire to make room for created persons in the communion of the uncreated Persons of the Blessed Trinity through an adoptive participation in Christ. In short, God has made a way to share himself with those whom He has created, and thus He has constructed all things to facilitate that end. This truth should help us conclude then that the whole cosmos exist with the stage for communion with God in mind. The cosmos are designed then as a means of entry into this interrelationship God by way of an adoption by one who is part of the Trinity, the Son, and our Lord Jesus Christ. The point being that while we all walk around on the stage we call the cosmos, we never enter into the ongoing play as full participants until we become united to Christ by adoption. In other words, there are the stage hands and the actors, and the actors are those in who are in Christ.

The proclamation of the gospel is the doorway which opens the path that leads to this adoption, and thus to participation in the divine drama. By believing the gospel and thus believing that God not only is, but as the Psalmist says, that He is a rewarder of those who seek (look for) Him, we become not stage hands but true actors and participants in the life of the Trinity which allows us to know God.

It is this participation in the life of God that gospel presentation must expose to those of us in the west who have heard of another kind of salvation. The gospel should expose to us that salvation is a life lived in the drama which we know as the life of the Trinity. It is that life alone which enables us to know God experientially, and that life alone which restores us to the reason we were created.

Noetic Mystery

The universal belief of all Christians is that the “one faith” originates with God the Father, becomes available to mankind through Christ the Son, and is apportioned to persons by God the Holy Spirit. However, ask the question, "for what purpose?" or, "what is this faith inteded to produce?" And the answers start to diverge. St. Paul tells the Ephesians:

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ- by grace you have been saved- and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. Eph 2: 4-7.

According to St Paul, the purpose for this one faith is to enable us to experience God both in the present through Christ, and in the age to come through Christ. The goal of this faith is nothing less than to produce our participation in the life of God through Christ, and thus a participation in mystery. The church uses the term mystery because we have no words that adequately convey what it means to know and be known by God, this experience is something that can only be poorly described. The term for this kind of knowledge attained by our description is called cataphatic knowledge.

The goal of faith goes beyond catapahtic knowledge to noetic knowledge. Through noetic knowledge the God of mystery made known by the fullness of experience, and by the intimate interaction that can only occur between one person and another person. When this is reality is understood our theological debates take on a completely different tone. Can we debate God with someone who does not know God? Obviously not, however, many Christians have fallen no the trap and they have done so because they believe that they can make a better argument for their points than those who do not know God. Perhaps they can make a better argument, however, the problem is that no amount of knowledge transmitted by a debate can produce intimacy with another person, especially when it comes to the God who is mystery.

The sum and substance of Christianity’s one faith is the personal experiential knowledge of the mysterious God. Why do we believe? We believe because we know God and are known by God. What do we believe? We believe what God has said. All of this shifts the emphasis from the intellect to the noetic knowldge regarding a mystery. Not that the intellect serves no purpose, it does, but its importance is small by comparison.