Figural Readings of the Old Testament: Theology and Practice
Don C. Collett
Baker Academic (2020). x + 194 pp.
Book Review
The premise of this work is that although the Old Testament “provides the basic grammar for the church’s confession on creation, providence, figuration, the nature of biblical inspiration, authorship, Trinity, Christology, soteriology, and ecclesiology”—in short, for Christian faith and practice—its witness has been neglected in the modern period, leading to a variety of problems within the Christian church (pp. 1-2). To resist this troubling trend, Collett focuses on the relationship between figural reading and the Old Testament’s literal sense. By “figure,” Collett means “the representative significance of biblical history for all time…a figure is something God providentially constructs for the sake of speaking of Himself,” including persons like David, events like the Exodus, institutions like the tabernacle, and places such as Zion (p. 46). Figures, then, are closely connected to God’s providential ordering of history and a figural reading recognizes the ongoing significance of the various providentially ordered biblical figures for the ongoing life of the church. Figural reading sees our own situation within the ongoing context of providential biblical history.
Figural reading does not run roughshod over the literal sense, but is founded upon it. The literal sense, most literally, “refers to the littera or ‘letter’ of the biblical text” (p. 28). In the early church, the literal sense could be “the verbal sense, the authorial sense, or the historical sense.” These are not competing understandings of the literal sense but different aspects of coherent whole. The literal sense describes persons, events, institutions that together witness to the providential ordering of history. Figural reading sees these as figures, pointing beyond themselves.
Collett’s exploration of the relationship between figural reading and the literal sense proceeds in three parts: “Frameworks,” “Exegesis,” “Assessment.” The argument moves back and forth between close readings of biblical texts and reflections on the hermeneutics and the history of interpretation. Chapter 1 begins with the relationship between Genesis 1 and 2 as pointing to the underlying relationship between the order of creation and providence: “the created order…is sustained through time by the divine establishment of providential links or ‘affiliations’ between rain and wild growth and between human life and cultivated growth…God’s providential ordering of things in creation shapes the meaning of human life and existence in the post-creation world” (pp. 13, 14). With this exegetical framework in place, in chapter 2, Collett turns to the relationship between the literal sense and figural reading from the early church up to the time of the Reformation. He concludes that reading Scripture in a merely historical manner “ignores the purpose for which Scripture was given—namely, to serve as the inspired instrument of the triune God’s self-disclosure in Christ by the Spirit” (p. 53). By contrast, figural reading is “the historical extension of a theological judgment authorized by Scripture’s own self-witness” (p. 55).
Chapter 3, which is also part two, applies this framework to an extended, concrete exegetical example: the figure of wisdom in Job 28 and Proverbs 8. This example laudably demonstrates the integration of a careful study of syntax and semantics with theological ontology, which exerts “pressure” on our reading. In chapter 4, which forms the bulk of part 3, Collett returns to the history of interpretation, picking up at the Reformation and assessing the various developments of the modern and contemporary periods. In the Reformation, Luther and Calvin saw the literal sense of Scripture as including the grammatical and figural sense. But in the modern period, the literal sense was constricted as it was connected to authorial consciousness and historical correspondence. Then, in a series of incisive criticisms, Collett demonstrates that although sensus plenior, “Christotelism,” and reception history all try to recover the figural sense, they are fatally built on modern presupposition. Chapter 5 is a brief epilogue which contrasts J. P. Gabler’s famous appeal to the historical sense as the “control” on the meaning of Scripture with “Nicene reason.” On this later approach, “objectivity was possible just insofar as ecclesial reason in the community of faith submits its thoughts to the God of Israel’s triune self-disclosure in the two-testament canon of Scripture…Canonically contextualized and biblically interpreted, the reality of God’s self-disclosure in history thus offers the possibility of objective meaning and a truly critical perspective, though only insofar as we order our thoughts in obedience to Scripture” (162).
In short, Collett invites us to see ourselves as living in “a world where authorial intention and historical context are part of a larger providential drama by which Scripture’s theological sense is rendered” (p. 108). Collett moves easily between Hebrew philology, Patristic and Medieval theological debates, and contemporary hermeneutics and some readers may find it difficult to keep up. I have some lingering questions. For example, should we really “variously speak of Scripture’s theological sense in terms of its literal sense, grammatical sense, figural sense, allegorical sense, and metaphorical or tropical sense” (p. 48) or should we attempt to maintain some distinctions? Nevertheless, I heartily commend this brilliant study, which I hope will be widely read as it has important implications for how we read especially the Old Testament as a discrete witness to Christ and for how we use Scripture in a liturgical setting.
Nathan Chambers is pastor of Wiser Lake Chapel in Lynden, WA. He earned his PhD in Biblical Studies from Durham University and is a member of the St. Basil Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
