Defining Holiness

 

Ephraim Radner, Leviticus (London: SCM Press, 2008), 204.

Figural practice as a five-fold movement

From Ephraim Radner, Figural exegesis and the Anglican tradition

Figural practice can be imaginatively described as a five-fold movement: sowing, tending, gathering, sorting, and enjoying. There is nothing inevitable about this imaginative framework, of course, although it does have the advantage of having some scriptural resonance. In sowing, a biblical word is cast into the soil of the Scriptures and allowed to resonate, collide, scrape, and wander. In tending, there is a deliberate effort to let this seed do its resonating work — time, prayer, reflection, study. In gathering, the reader (ultimately the Church) consciously collates the accumulated connections and associations the original word or words have taken on. These become a fund or treasury, and at this point are most clearly given over to documentation. With sorting we come to the articulated effort to make sense of this collation. This is the stage we associate with theology or homiletics, dogmatics or controversy. Finally, in scriptural delight, the reader (and Church) turns all this work to God, and returns to prayer, considering the nurture the word has offered, and praising its speaker and person.

Figural Reading in the Anglican Tradition

The Living Church website recently run a series on Figural Reading in the Anglican Tradition. It consisted of the following posts published between 14 March and 20 June 2017:

Introductory essay by David Ney, “The bare reading of Scripture and Anglican hermeneutics

First, I will suggest that being a community gathered around the Word of God is central to Anglican identity. Second, I will argue that, historically, to speak of Anglicanism as a community gathered around the Word is to speak of the prayer book tradition and the way it orders the communal reception of God’s Word. Finally, I will suggest that this ordered reception breeds a particular response to Scripture: the prayer book’s juxtaposition of “bare” Scriptural texts commends figural reading.

David Mason Barr, The accessible Word in Anglicanism: Tyndale and Scripture’s figures

Nate Wall, ‘Interpret thine own work’: Figural reading with George Herbert and John Donne

Jeff Boldt, The Anglican approach to Christian apologetics: Joseph Butler’s biblical cosmos

David Ney, William Jones: Scripture makes the world speak

Dane Neufeld, Defending the complex witness of Scripture: Henry Mansel (1820-71)

George Westhaver, Spiritual renewal, Scripture, and the Oxford Movement: The vision of God

George Westhaver, The Oxford Movement’s sacramental interpretation of Scripture

George Westhaver, Oxford Movement exegesis and sacramental ontology

Cole Hartin, The ‘fitness’ of Scripture: Richard Chenevix Trench

Jeff Boldt, Lionel S. Thornton: The 20th century’s lonely figural reader

Jeff Boldt, Lionel S. Thornton and Scripture as ‘the divine mind’

Ephraim Radner, Figural exegesis and the Anglican tradition

From the final essay:

The different articles have emphasized that the individual interpreters had their unique approaches to figural interpretation, but they all approached their craft from a particular standpoint: As members of the prayer book tradition they received the “allness” of Scripture, and their particular figural practices therefore must be seen as particular responses to this allness. In this final post, I will suggest that these figural practices are far more than merely idiosyncratic responses to Scripture’s breadth. These practices help us to see that, for Anglicans and non-Anglicans alike, the Christian interpretation of Scripture has little to do with the division between subject and object that modern critical studies take for granted. Instead, Christian readers are drawn into the Scriptures, unveiled for who they are, and, through the integrative reach of the divine Word, transformed. When pursued in common, the figural interpretation of the Bible finally refashions and transfigures the Church as a whole.