“Participatory biblical exegesis locates the
linear-historical details within a participatory-historical frame, a frame
established by God’s creative and redemptive work in history. Such exegesis is
ongoing whenever people presume that a biblical text about Jesus is about the
Jesus whom they worship in the Church, or whenever people suppose that the
local churches founded by St. Paul have a real analogue today. It is ongoing
whenever people pray, receive the sacraments, or ask forgiveness in the context
of the reading and teaching of Scripture, It involves an understanding of
historical realities, of our place in the history of salvation, that comes naturally
to the believer. Yet it is one whose justification has largely been lost and
needs reclaiming.” (6)
“As traditionally understood, the spiritual sense of
Scripture serves to go deeper into the infinitely rich dimensions of the
biblical realities.” “I hold that the literal sense itself possesses the
resources for bridging past and present, because of the literals sense’s
conjoined linear and participatory dimension. The literal sense of the divinely
ordained realities present and active in linear history (for instance, covenantal
Israel, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Eucharist, the Church) possesses a participatory-historical
dimension, since these diachronic realities expose how human time, already
metaphysically participatory in God, shares ever more deeply in the infinite
wisdom and love of divine action...I am aware that all the talk of metaphysics
(participatory and nominalist) and its exegetical implications may put off both
biblical scholars and theologians, for whom such discourse may be an
undiscovered country or an outmoded theory.” (7)
“...interpreters must seek in and through Scripture the
realities to which Scripture points. Yet these realities can only be sought in
and through the words of Scripture, in and through the messiness of human
history, into which linear-historical research can attain such valuable
insight. For its full flourishing, participatory biblical exegesis thus
requires not merely theological and metaphysical insights into God’s work of
creation and redemption, but also historical-critical procedure of hypothesis
and verification, as well as literary analysis. These approaches give insight
into the full fabric of the texts’ richly human aspects, which are both
participatory- and linear-historical. The integrity of linear-historical
research does not require bracketing the participatory reality of God’s
presence and action in history.
In short, historical reconstruction that recognizes that
historical reality is not solely linear, but rather is both linear and participatory
(in the triune God’s creative and redemptive work), will be illumined both by
linear-historical data and by participatory-historical ecclesial judgments
about the divine realities involved.” (13)
“When the participatory dimension of reality is lacking,
either anthropocentric readings of Scripture or, conversely, theocentric
readings that deny the human dimension altogether, take over. By contrast, in
participatory biblical exegesis one can integrate conceptually divine and human
agency. On the one hand, everything comes from the triune God, the one in whom
all finite things participate (metaphysically and
Christologically-pneumatologically). For biblical exegesis, this means that the
Bible is not ultimately about human beings, but rather about the triune God...On
the other hand, the participatory relationship means that God’s action and
human action are not in competition. In Scripture, the centrality of God’s
teaching does not displace the human writing, editing, transmission, and
interpretation of biblical texts, that is the human aspects of the text. These
human aspects, of course, are not solely linear-historical. The task of
appreciating the linear-historical “Messiness” of the biblical texts requires engaging
the human aspects in their participatory-historical dimension.” (14)
“Once one understands reality as participatory-historical
(providential and Christological-pneumatological) as well as linear-historical,
what aspects of patristic-medieval biblical exegesis might once again be found
valuable within contemporary biblical exegesis? Let this question stand as an
overarching concern of the present book.” (16)
