Christ the Cipher

How Christians read the Old Testament has always been a matter of some controversy. Not, however, until the rise of fundamentalism have moral questions about Old Testament the stories of genocide been particularly pressing. Contrary to what one finds in the more brutish anti-religious polemics, it is not the case that Christians have always read the Bible as the straightforward documentation of facts about the past, only retreating in modernity to metaphorical and spiritual readings in modern times.

Fundamentalism, however, is a demonstrably modern phenomenon; whereas sophisticated spiritual, typological, and metaphorical readings of Scripture stretch back to the beginnings of Christian exegesis. In considering how we should read the “hard passages” of the Old Testament, less literal approaches are often the more traditional.

Taking the Literal Sense Literally

The error of fundamentalist approaches to Scripture is not that it overemphasizes the literal sense. It is, rather, that it impoverishes the letter.

The distinction between the literal sense and spiritual sense has nothing to do with degrees of truth. In the literal sense, meaning is had through words ("literal" comes from the Latin word for letters); in the spiritual sense meaning is had through the things spoken of. The former has to do, that is, with the manner of presentation in Scripture (the words that signify), and the latter with what is signified.

The literal sense includes metaphor and parables. Metaphorical truth, one might say, is even more purely literal than straightforward historical narrative, because it has more to do (proportionally) with what the author intends to convey by his expression and the latter more to do with the meaning of what is expressed.

Literalism of the fundamentalist sort is that spoken of by Paul, when he said "the letter kills, but the spirit gives life."

Metaphor in Practice

"[The Israelites] waged war against a foreign nation. The text calls those combining against them Amalekites. For the first time the Israelites were drawn out fully armed in battle array... Moses, standing on a hilltop far away from the furor of battle, was looking up toward heaven with a friend stationed on either side of him.

"Then we hear from the history the following marvel. When Moses raised his hands to heaven, those under his command prevailed against their enemies, but when he let them down, the army began to give in to the foreigner's assault." St. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses (HarperSanFransisco, 2006) 17.

"Moses's holding his hands aloft signifies the contemplation of the Law with lofty insights; his letting them hang to earth signifies the mean and lowly literal exposition and observance of the Law." Id, 75.

St. Gregory's bold assertion of the superiority of the non-literal exposition of the Law of the Old Testament over the "mean and lowly literal exposition and observance of the Law" doubtless runs contrary to the instincts of some of the hermeneutic traditions arising after the Protestant Reformation. The literal exposition tends to lead to a more univocal meaning, regulated by the text itself, giving epistemological certainty as opposed to a method that would lead to a multiplicity of meanings that must be judged on the basis of extra-biblical criteria. If the Bible serves as the epistemological foundation of all things Christian, then the Christian would be desirous of finding a method that grants definite certainty, that can be clear enough to delineate those beliefs and practices which may be permitted, and those that may not be. St. Gregory's hermeneutic undermines this certainty.