By the time it publishes, I shall have defended my undergraduate thesis the day before and shall, at this point, be curled up somewhere very sound asleep. The nature of my thesis is strange; it is entitled, “The Poetics of God: Exegesis and Story in Six Parables of Christ” and what I accomplished, or at least made strives to accomplish, was in the first chapter a rather extensive survey of the exegetical tradition of the Church Fathers and the Western medievals, up until about the fifteenth century, followed by three chapters in which I proceeded to, through imitation of their tradition of commentating, exegete six parables on my own.
And in the process, I engaged a particular method and thought of approaching Scripture, one that I should like to try and articulate to you now.
But this is complicated, as I am essentially presenting to you an apologia of how I think, which is perhaps best described as an artist. So I have sought rather to paint out this idea of our approach to reading the Scripture, in hopes that what I leave you with is, somehow, a glimpse into a method of reading that reverences our Lord and His Scripture.
(A bit of an explanatory note, an insight into how to read my sort of painting, is that golden bronze ovaloid you see is always the spirit of God, as Father, Christ, or Holy Ghost.)
“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
To approach Scripture well, we must approach the cosmos well. Matter, this created universe, was not conceived in neutrality. God called forth the whole of the creation and each time pronounced it Good. When we read the Scripture, we must read it with the mind that the whole of this world bares the gift of His creativeness, that by Him, we call it a law that the entropy of a system approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches zero; that the sin2θ + cos2θ = 1; and, that two hyrdogen atoms bound polarly to one oxygen to give us water, and by Him these things, too, were pronounced good. And in the Fall, it was not merely a spiritual fall, but our bodies fell, death entered the world, and with our bodies the whole of the cosmos: birds, bumble bees, and nucleotides all bare the consequence of the entrance of sin and death into the world. And if we are to read the Scripture holistically, we must understand that it does not seek to comment on a spiritual condition in the abstract, or upon us alone, but on the whole of that which was created, the very matter of the chair you are sitting in right now.
