MODERNITY HAS HAD A BAD HABIT OF FORGETTING ITS FORERUNNERS. Too often, in our efforts to critique the status quo and pursue progress, we have cut off our cultural roots. Ironically, this problem is most apparent in the conservative Christian insistence on biblical literalism.
In their attempt to return to what they imagine were the fundamentals of the faith practiced by the original believers, modern conservative Christians tend to ignore every part of the tradition that developed between then and now. As a result, their approach to understanding biblical texts clings to an exclusivist literalism that leaders in the early church would have rejected as heresy.
As an example of the ancient approach to biblical interpretation, let’s take a look at the approach used by Origen (c. 185-254 CE), one of the most influential early Christian teachers. Although some of his ideas were condemned centuries after his death, his devotion to and understanding of the Bible were respected and followed for millennia.
Writing in the early 3rd century of the current era, Origen saw three levels of meaning in the words of scripture: narrative, soulful, and spiritual (see On First Principles, Book IV). For the multitude of those he called “simple” believers, the ordinary narrative meaning of the text, its literal meaning, would be sufficiently edifying for their faith. Once one’s Christian life and spiritual practice entered onto the contemplative path, however, the narrative understanding began to open to the “soul of the scriptures.” The few, whose life and practice progressed to the outskirts of “perfection,” pursued the deeper, spiritual meanings of biblical texts in the hope that the “hidden wisdom” in the texts would be revealed.
Origen believed the Bible must be meaningful because it was divinely inspired. So, he saw the difficulties and “impossibilities” one encounters at the narrative level of the text as obstacles that would force some readers to seek the meaning of the text at deeper levels. At the spiritual level of meaning, both straightforward and difficult narrative images functioned as “types” pointing to the truths expressed in the “rule of faith” (which was codified later in the traditional creeds of the church). The literal text, then, was an allegorical screen hiding the spiritual wisdom of the faith from unprepared eyes.
This multi-level understanding of the Bible, which guided theologians and teachers in the church through the Middle Ages, was finally rejected by the Protestant reformers in the 16th century, who focused on the “plain truth” of scripture. Then, as the Age of Reason advanced scientific research and critical thinking, beginning in the 17th century, it became increasingly irrational to hold to the literal truth of narrative biblical meaning. At the dawn of the 20th century, a fundamentalist insistence on the inerrancy of the biblical narrative emerged as a conservative reaction to and rejection of modern skepticism.
Aside from being “un-reasonable” (because it stands in opposition to science and critical thinking), the obsessively one-sided literalist understanding of the Bible demanded by modern fundamentalists is, as Bishop John Shelby Spong has recognized, a modern heresy. Origen (and many other early Christian authorities) would agree with Spong, not because they would accept his historical critical approach, but because they would see that modern literalism is cut off from the soulful and spiritual levels of meaning and thus from the true wisdom hidden in the biblical text.
There’s really no way to go back to the ancient, naïve (that is, pre-critical) understanding of the Bible, however. Instead, we must push forward toward a post-critical approach. One such approach would be to follow C.G. Jung’s lead and read the narrative images as symbols rather than as allegorical types. To our current understanding, the ancient “types” would be “signs,” which, because they point to something already known (for example, through the rule of faith), are closed signifiers. Symbols, on the other hand, because they point toward something essentially unknown, remain open both to a “surplus of meaning” and to spiritual encounters with Mystery.
(In my book, Moonlight Shines in the Darkness, I describe and use a contemporary three-stage method of Jungian interpretation that I call “psychosymbolic interpretation.” See also my blog post, “Reading the Secret Language of the Word of God.”)
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