Time and the Word:
Figural Reading of the Christian Scriptures
by ephraim radner
eerdmans, 326 pages, $50
Moderns are accustomed to taking premodern interpretations of the Bible to be products of a bygone time, when outmoded worldviews permitted naive, anachronistic interpretations of scriptural texts. On this view, it is only by an extreme tendentiousness, a blinkered approach to reality, that one may understand the words of an Israelite prophet to refer, for example, to the Virgin Mary or the suppression of Christian heretics. Postmodernism has softened this judgment a little, prompting some to appreciate the verbal sophistication and literary imagination typical of figural reading of Scripture. Yet the condescension, though subtler here, remains.
In Time and the Word, Ephraim Radner, one of our leading theologians, makes a new case for an old practice: figural reading of the Bible. To read the Bible figurally is to read it as a single, coherent text whose words refer not only to an original context but also to things that may be quite distant in both time and historical situation. Examples of figural reading include the rabbinic application of Song of Songs to the relation between God and Israel; another example is the traditional identification of the Servant Songs in Isaiah with the passion of Christ. In both cases, parts of Scripture are integrated into what Hans Frei called “a single cumulative and complex pattern of meaning.”