‘The Word of God taking up space’: Assessing the christological analogy for scripture

Abstract

This essay provides an assessment of the christological analogy for scripture, particularly for its usefulness in aid of a theological ontology of scripture. This analogy implies that scripture has something like ‘two natures’ – human and divine – like Jesus Christ has two natures. I argue that assessment of the analogy has been impaired by a lack of clarity in its application. On the one hand, the ambiguity relates to a tendency to apply the analogy for the (modernist) purposes of securing epistemic authority. On the other hand, I show that there are in fact three distinct forms of the analogy, each implying different things about the ‘twoness’ of scripture as well as its unity. After outlining the three forms of the analogy, I critically assess the unity they ascribe to scripture by means of the analogy.

A book of law or prophecy is the very Word of God taking up space.

–Robert W. Jenson¹

The central affirmation of christology is that the Word of God became flesh, so that when disciples see Jesus, they see God's own humanity.² The christological analogy for scripture invites us to make a connected claim for the church's book. What and who do we hear when scripture's words are read for our nourishment, formation, active worship and encounter with God? Human words? Divine words? Truly human words exceeding themselves in the theandric voice of Christ? One of the most commonly invoked versions of the christological analogy is derived from Karl Barth's theology of the word of God. Barth affirms that the Bible is a human book, written by human agents and authors, without denying that the book is also divine, the words of a divine author spoken with and through the human authors.³ The christological analogy, then, draws a comparison between the human and divine natures in Jesus and human and divine communication in the Bible.⁴

But what is this analogy suggesting about the ‘union’ of humanity and divinity in the Bible? Is the relation itself somehow analogous across the two cases, as if divine nature and textual nature are united in the Person of the Son in a manner similar to that in which divine nature and human nature are united in the incarnation? Or is it the duality of natures that is analogous rather than their unity; if so, does that leave the matter of their unity irrelevant or secondary? Part of the reason there seem to be such divergent assessments of the analogy is that it is not entirely clear what is analogous in the two cases. Several recent monographs on scripture voice criticisms of the analogy, and the criticisms tend to target a narrow form of the analogy connected with strict forms of sola scriptura, unqualified inerrancy and accounts of ‘meaning’ that isolate scripture from its ecclesial context.⁵ I am sympathetic with the concerns of these critics, and yet it is not clear that this critique applies to all forms of the analogy.

In this essay, I suggest there are three primary ways the christological analogy is formulated: a negative analogy, an authorial analogy and a multi-sense analogy. I argue that the three versions of the christological analogy depend on or explicitly articulate an ontology of scripture. Darren Sarisky has argued that accounts of ‘theological interpretation’ are incomplete without an account of ‘theological ontology’, by which he means ‘allowing theology to describe the realities involved in reading … mainly … the reader and the text’.⁶ His argument rightly alerts us to the fact that ‘texts’ and ‘readers’ are not ontologically self-evident realities, and that, without theological specification, unchecked assumptions will likely creep into our claims about exegesis. In this essay, I argue that the christological analogy serves a theological ontology of scripture by articulating something of the intrinsic unity of scripture. Consequently, after outlining the three different forms, I raise critical questions about the way(s) each analogy expresses the unity of scripture, concluding that the unity affirmed in the multi-sense analogy avoids some of the key problems of the other two forms.

Preliminary matters: the ontology of scripture and the christological analogy

In what follows, I am focused on the ‘ontology of scripture’. But it is not obvious that the christological analogy is always treated at the ontological level. So before proceeding, I need to distinguish my ontological approach to the analogy from a functional approach. When the analogy is functional, it is being used to secure a specific form of divine authority while aiming to acknowledge the human historical contexts involved in the production of scripture. This is a distinctly modernist deployment of the analogy, having roots in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and Benedict de Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. For Hobbes and Spinoza, identifying divine words was connected to true prophetic status and authority; and so correctly demarcating divine words from non-divine was necessary for distinguishing kinds of authority within their liberal-democratic visions – that authority rightly exercised by scripture and religious institutions (divine authority) on the one hand, and that exercised by political and public institutions (human authority) on the other. Divine authority is then given a narrowly specified context, restricted to the ethical and private, whereas human authority concerns public and scientific matters.⁷ This modernist reorientation seems to persist to the extent that theologians’ primary concern in theologies of scripture is its epistemic authority.⁸

The christological analogy is often coupled with extreme views on biblical authority, and especially inerrancy and determinate accounts of meaning.⁹ I interpret this as a hybrid functional-ontological use of the analogy. Several critiques of the analogy are directed at such extreme, inerrantist versions, and I am sympathetic with these criticisms, especially when they are motivated by concerns about the modernist, liberal-democratic background for reconceiving scripture as (primarily) an epistemic authority and by the desire for a more significant commitment to the role of the interpretive community in theological reading.¹⁰ In these latter approaches, the text's meaning and authority is bound to ways Christian communities perform the text. Can the christological analogy be re-visioned so that it contributes to an ontology of scripture as a performance of the world reconciled in Christ – a performance that the interpretive community participates in as it improvises on the text?¹¹ Reckoning with accounts of the unity of scripture entailed in the three versions of the christological analogies opens up possibilities along these lines.

Negative analogy

Now, let us consider the three different forms of the christological analogy. First, I present what could be called the ‘negative analogy’. This form can be found in many authors and could also be called a ‘heresiological analogy’, because it is useful for identifying false uses of the ‘word of God’ designation for scripture. Barth, for instance, suggested that some approaches to the Bible could be diagnosed as either docetic or adoptionist.¹² Peter Enns also appears to have this approach in mind, without naming specific heresies. In his view, the christological analogy reminds us that we are dealing with true humanity, which is always historically situated and particular. We should embrace this particularity in the way that we interpret the Bible and resist the assumption that the ‘divine message’ is separable from the human, historical worlds the biblical books depict and in which they were composed. Implicitly, then, Enns invokes the analogy to ward off a docetic approach to the Bible.¹³

What is especially noteworthy about this approach is its negative or ‘apophatic’ use of the analogy. On its own, this use does not directly imply a construal of a union between divinity and humanity in scripture, and this form could be used without claiming that there actually is an achieved union. Although Enns does not put it this way, one might map the human–divine distinction onto the narrow–broad distinction for exegesis. The narrow sense of biblical exegesis treats biblical interpretation as aimed primarily at the text's internal, historical sense, whereas the broad sense of exegesis includes theological and spiritual meaning and uses of the text as well.¹⁴ One might say that, as a slogan for interpretation, affirming the text's humanity licenses narrow exegesis, whereas affirming its divinity licenses broad exegesis. Again, this neither specifies the ontology that underlies the distinction, nor articulates the kind of unity that obtains for the humanity and divinity of scripture. Instead, the negative analogy is simply a denial that human words are incompatible with divine speaking, and, inversely, a denial that divine speaking is incompatible with human words.

Although this does not depend on a direct construal of the ‘union’ of human and divine in the Bible, we can still see it as positively rooted in the church's teaching on Christ, particularly to the extent that christological teaching involves a reassessment of the Creator–creature distinction. If God the Son can become flesh without alteration, abandonment or diminishment of the divine nature and without destroying, competing or confusion with the human nature, then divine transcendence itself is not competitive or contrastive, to put it in Kathryn Tanner's terms.¹⁵ God's transcendence is not opposed to creaturely being, as if it were the case that in order to commune with creatures, or to be incarnate as a creature, God must overcome or abandon divine transcendence. Although this ontological judgment extends to all our language about God, as well as to the doctrine of creation, it has a christological form: God is compatible with creation, and this is made dramatically explicit in the revelation of God in Christ.¹⁶ In turn, this means that even though the ‘negative analogy’ is more a denial than it is an affirmation of ‘union’, it is still rooted in the christological transformation of our understanding of God's compatibility with creaturely finitude.¹⁷

Authorial analogy

Karl Barth is the main advocate of the second use of the analogy, which I am calling the ‘authorial analogy’. While Barth also invokes christology to identify and reject false extremes, he goes beyond the negative analogy to think about the union of human and divine. The most extensive discussion occurs in the second part-volume of the Church Dogmatics, where Barth develops the doctrine of revelation as God's triune self-disclosure.¹⁸ We could imagine that Barth's christological analogy for scripture adopts a ‘from below’ posture while aiming to avoid an adoptionist conclusion. Starting from the true and irreducible humanity of the authors of scripture, Barth raises the question of how these human words can nonetheless be revelation. ‘Witness’ is the determinative concept.¹⁹ The Bible, as truly human words of truly human authors, bears witness to Christ and to revelation in and through Christ. By bearing witness to revelation, the Bible is revelation. God is both the subject and the object of revelation – that is, revelation is not only about God (as the object) but is also the exclusive act of God (as the subject). This means that insofar as scripture is revelatory, it is revelatory both as human words of witness to revelation (God as the object of revelation) and as God's word of self-revelation (God as the subject of revelation).²⁰ Barth uses the analogy to express the unity of scripture itself by means of the unity of God as the one subject and object of revelation in and through scripture's witness.²¹

There is no doubt that this analogy has much in common with the negative analogy and seems to be compatible with Enns’ broad use. Going beyond the negative analogy, however, Barth's use of ‘witness’ specifies how the human and divine are ordered to each other in their unity. The human authors in their particularity and diversity bear active witness to revelation; whereas the divine author of scripture is the revelation, which is only spoken through scripture insofar as God is the one speaking. The full force of this analogy, then, especially if, as Barth desires, it is to avoid adoptionism (i.e. the idea that God only after the fact takes up these human words and then uses them for divine purposes), requires an actualistic ontology. Barth puts it this way:

as the sign of the revelation which has taken place and does take place, and indeed, as we saw, as the sign posited in and with revelation itself, as the witness of witnesses directly called in and with revelation itself, Scripture, too, stands in that indirect identity of human existence with God Himself, which is conditioned neither by the nature of God nor that of man, but brought about by the decision and act of God. It too can and must – not as though it were Jesus Christ, but in the same serious sense as Jesus Christ – be called the Word of God.²²

That is, the christological analogy of scripture depends for its coherence on the unity of history and eternity in the concrete decision of God to be this human Jesus, as the eternal decision by which God is creation's triune Lord.²³ This divine decision holds the concrete particulars of history within God's providential act. The words of scripture, in Barth's analogy, are truly taken up by God as God's revelatory speech, but this is actualised in the divine decision to be this God for these people, and not as a retroactive acceptance of human words performed independently of that decision. The unity that the authorial analogy affirms in scripture is first and foremost the unity given by God's gracious decision to be Jesus Christ, in whom the human witness to revelation and the divine act of revelation unite.

Multi-sense analogy

The third analogy, the ‘multi-sense analogy’, is the oldest, and it relies on the patristic and medieval conviction that scripture has multiple senses: the literal or plain sense and the spiritual senses. The number of senses varies throughout history, but the typical line up in contemporary expressions consists of the literal, allegorical, tropological (moral) and anagogical (eschatological). The latter three, the allegorical, tropological and the anagogical, are the spiritual senses of scripture and are distinct from the literal.²⁴ In the early and medieval church, both the literal and the spiritual senses were invoked for exegesis, preaching and prayerful engagement with scripture, though the number and distinction amongst the spiritual senses were only codified in the medieval church.²⁵ Origen invokes a christological analogy for scripture to affirm the unity of the literal and the spiritual senses:

the Word of God, which was clothed with the flesh of Mary, proceeded into this world. What was seen in him was one thing; what was understood was something else. For the sight of his flesh was open for all to see, but the knowledge of his divinity was given to the few, even the elect. So also when the Word of God was brought to humans through the Prophets and the Lawgiver, it was not brought without proper clothing. For just as there it was covered with the veil of flesh, so here with the veil of the letter, so that indeed the letter is seen as flesh but the spiritual sense hiding within is perceived as divinity.²⁶

We might notice that here too the ‘negative analogy’ is not absent. The first point that Origen is making is that the Word is visible by virtue of his humanity, and this visibility can be encountered without recognising the hidden divinity. Just as seeing humanity without ‘understanding’ the divinity is an incomplete vision of the Word, so is it a false or diminished vision of the words of the Prophets and Lawgivers to see the letter without also understanding the hidden spiritual sense. In his reading of the Levitical codes, the subject of the homily quoted above, Origen affirms that according to the literal sense, scripture commands sacrifice from the people of God. But if those who are in Christ stop there, they have failed to appreciate the spiritual sense, which may change the way they should hear and receive the scripture as it is directed now also to them.

The multi-sense analogy is designed to avoid reading scripture merely as plain or literal words, for to do so would be to neglect the spiritual message(s) of scripture. The analogy, however, could also be said to have a positive affirmation of real unity between the literal and spiritual senses. Frances Young expresses this positive meaning by contrasting Origen's ‘Alexandrian’ approach with Gnostic spiritual exegesis. The Gnostics used allegory to split the literal/material world from the spiritual world, producing an anti-literal allegorical reading. This divides scripture itself into two worlds sitting in tension and competition with each other (rooted, in turn, in a dualistic cosmology). Young concludes:

the two worlds apparently implied in the Alexandrian allegorical tradition should never have been divorced. The spiritual ‘meaning’ is ‘incarnate’ in the text rather than belonging to an entirely different order of being, and so the performance of the text involves performance in the whole of life. … The ‘Two Natures’ coinhere. The ancients recognized that … the Logos moves the hearer to response … It is because the whole is meshed together as God's whole creation that two apparently distinct mimetic worlds never really worked, even for the Fathers. Music ‘represented’ the deep reality of the cosmic order, not a different world. Likewise whatever scripture ‘represents’, it is not a different world, but our world understood as God's. In that sense the ‘Two Natures’ coinhere, and the ‘spiritual meaning’ is inseparable from the letter.²⁷

The multi-sense analogy affirms the unity and integrity of the world itself and affirms that the truest speech and action in the world is that which finds its context in the world-joined-to-the-Word. The Christ-healed world is the only world, though this way of seeing the world requires transformed vision, vision conformed to the historical revelation of God in Christ.

The christological analogy and the unity of scripture

I have now presented three distinct forms of the christological analogy, and in each case, I reflected on the extent to which each form uses the analogy to articulate the unity of scripture. The negative analogy does not itself directly affirm any unity, except perhaps the material unity of the Bible itself in its canonical form(s). This may, in fact, be an attractive feature of this form of the analogy, since it requires minimal ontological commitments. However, it also makes the exegetical relevance of the analogy vague. For instance, if we distinguish, as I speculated above, between narrow exegesis (interpretation of the text's historical sense) and broad exegesis (interpretation of the text's theological and spiritual meaning), then the negative analogy permits both, but it cannot specify any intrinsic relationship between the two. If some kind of unifying relationship were assumed, it is hard to see how it would not involve something like one of the other two forms of the analogy – i.e. either that the theological meaning is the substance of revelation whereas the historical sense is that which witnesses to revelation (Barth), or that the theological meaning is discernible in and through the historical sense (Origen). The negative analogy, then, seems insufficient for an ontology of scripture and too vague to sustain its interpretive function.

What then of Barth's authorial analogy? In this case, there is a kind of unity affirmed, a unity between the human witness to revelation and the divine act of revelation. This suggests an agential unity: the unity of scripture is found in the unity of the divine Word's communicative action.²⁸ The difficulty with Barth's authorial analogy turns on the relation of authorial agency in the communicative act(s) of scripture. Barth's actualism, at least as it is deployed in his theology of scripture, seems designed to avoid construing scripture's authorial agency in either docetic or adoptionist terms. But if the unity of scripture as a communicative act is grounded in the Word's agency, then what kind of agency do the human authors have? Has their agency been usurped by the Word's, resulting in a docetic human ‘appearance’ of scripture? Or has their agency been accepted for the Word's own use, resulting in an adoptionist affirmation of human persons’ communicative acts? John Webster, building on Barth's views, argues that ‘The being of the canonical texts is determined by their divine use’, reinforcing the ontological judgment that scripture's unity is rooted (exclusively?) in divine agency.²⁹ Similarly, Kevin Vanhoozer, implicitly working with Barth's category of ‘witness’, attempts to affirm the agency of human authors alongside Christ's by suggesting that scripture is ‘Christ's own witness to himself via the commissioned agency of the prophets and apostles who authored it’.³⁰ As an ontological identification of the being and unity of scripture, however, this sits uncomfortably with a christological analogy insofar as it seems to presume an ontological incompatibility between creaturely agency and divine agency and then must identify the real agency, for which the only eligible candidate (when revelation is at stake) is God.³¹ Webster's attempt is explicit on this front, since he is rejecting ecclesial construals of scripture by exclusively identifying scripture with divine agency.³² And it is hard to see how Barth's view can successfully avoid this competitive construal. This is because the focus on agency and personal communicative action inclines toward applying the analogy as if the christological unity of scripture is a hypostatic union – that is, as though scripture is taken on as something like the ‘textual nature’ of the person of the Son. For Barth (if he were to go this far, and I am not convinced he would), this could only really happen in an occasionalist sense and not as a metaphysical fact about the textual reality of scripture. Rather, in the event of revelation and proclamation it happens that the Bible may be the ‘textual nature’ of God the Son, a created reality assumed by Christ to enact revelation.³³ This act both prioritises the agency of the Son over-against the agency of any human authors and grounds the communicative power of scripture purely in the freedom of God, in every occasion of revelatory through scripture. The freedom of God in this act seems to undercut any abiding judgment that scripture is God's word, since its status as such is dependent on an act of God which is otherwise veiled by creaturely media.³⁴

However, the multi-sense analogy offers a different construal of the unity of scripture's humanity and divinity. It suggests that the ordinary and historical level of meaning or ‘sense’ of scripture is united to a spiritual sense – a unity that corresponds to the cosmic/metaphysical unity of the spiritual and the physical world and that follows from, but is not identical to, the Christ's theandric unity. That is to say, it does not propose a hypostatic union, now with a textual nature, but proposes instead a metaphysical union.³⁵ In a multi-sense, metaphysical union, the biblical text is not joined to the person of the Son; on the contrary, the focus is on the ordinary historical communication of these written words. If these words were directly attributed to the Son's person, it would be hard to see how these words would have their ordinary historical sense, a sense rooted in an economy of multi-voiced human communication and consisting of internal tensions at that historical level. There must be an ordinary historical sense in order for that historical sense to be united with spiritual senses, and yet this ordinary historical sense is precisely what would be compromised if the union between text and Christ were hypostatic. For in that case, the personhood of the historical authors would sit in tension with the single-subject identity expressed in the hypostatic union. Rather, the multi-sense analogy involves first and foremost a theological judgment about the reconciliation of reality in and through Christ's union of divinity and humanity. The spiritual senses of scripture are rooted in the capacity of ordinary things to signify spiritual meanings, so that an ‘allegorical’ reading of scripture does not entail rejecting its literal sense but entails a multi-vocal way of viewing the historical realities about which the literal sense speaks.³⁶ In Origen's hands, this even allows for the meaning of scripture to shift as it is brought into contact with the world after Christ.³⁷

Perhaps we cannot repeat wholesale the premodern articulation of a fourfold sense, but a modest acknowledgement of multiple senses seems both possible and necessary for theological interpretation.³⁸ Reading theologically relies on a deepening and fulfilling of meaning that culminates in the eschatological consummation of the particular speech of God's people as it is taken up into the triune life. This is the first manner in which scripture is ‘christological’: its sense is not reducible to a singular meaning or plain reading, rather it is bound to the ongoing formation of God's people in anticipation of the eschatological fulfilment of speech (including scripture's) in the one Word through whom all words are spoken.³⁹ And yet in scripture's unique display of the unity of the literal sense and eschatological fulfilment, it anticipates Christ's drawing of all things into his own triune relation to the Father (i.e. adoption). In this way, something of Barth's authorial analogy might be integrated into a multi-sense analogy that emphasises the christological unity of the literal sense with the eschatological sense, where the literal sense's role is, in part, to communicate human authors’ ‘witness’ to revelation as that which will ultimately be fulfilled in eschatological reconciliation to Christ. It is not scripture itself – certainly not ‘scripture alone’ – that transforms the world. This is why the christological analogy need not obsess about epistemic authority or with locating God's agency inside scripture. Christ himself is redeemer of the world, so the world can be viewed as God's stage for the drama of the divine economy, which includes the church's ongoing work of bringing scripture ‘constantly into contact with the world’.⁴⁰ The multi-sense analogy, then, roots the unity of scripture in the concentric spheres of Christ's human–divine unity (innermost sphere), the eschatological unity of the church with Christ and the current Christ-sustained unity of the spiritual and physical world (outermost sphere), all of which provides the context for the intelligibility of the unity of the literal sense (narrow exegesis) and spiritual senses (broad exegesis). That is, the unity of the literal and spiritual senses of scripture is bound to the church's vocation in the world of ‘generative’ faithfulness to the eschatological work of Christ through the Spirit.⁴¹

Conclusion

When we think, then, of the ontology of scripture through the lens of the christological analogy, I suggest that we are imagining the Bible to have a particular role in God's eschatological activity in the world, an activity we participate in as our vision is transformed by the unity achieved in Jesus’ person. If this is the world within which the Bible exists, we ought to reject, in line with the negative analogy, extremes that mirror christological heresies of docetism and adoptionism. And even further, we might see scripture itself as an instrument of Christ's healing of the world, though this does not require locating divine agency within scripture. When the multi-sense analogy is at the fore, the christological analogy of scripture is an ontological claim about the mediation of this divine–human unity through the church's performance of scripture: in engaging with scripture, the church is working out its unity and identify before God and in the world. This formulation avoids deploying the christological analogy for securing epistemic authority, especially as a reactive strategy to shore up authority in face of ‘secular’ authorities. Rather, it affirms that scripture is a gift of God to the church in and through which the church continues to work out its vocation in the world, often in unpredictable improvisatory directions.⁴²