|
GETTING INSIDE THE NEW TESTAMENT
Some Suggestions
by Bruno Barnhart, OSB Cam
A. GENERAL AND PRACTICAL
- Engagement: Time and Attention
The principle is to embrace the Word with the whole of yourself, become intimate
with it, live with it and relate to it as food, drink, companion...
- Varied Approach
Use different methods at different times. e.g. usually read only a page or
a story or a scene or discourse. But sometimes read a whole letter or a
whole gospel. Sometimes question the text and sometimes just be with the
text. Sometimes read about the Scripture (commentary etc.), sometimes just
read the Scripture. Sometimes study it and sometimes move from Lectio (quiet
reflective reading) to prayer.
- Factual-Historical Context
Learn something about the book. Often a Bible will have an introduction to
each book or letter. It's good to know who is thought to have written it
(though most of the authors have gone into hiding, chased by the critics),
what the situation was, the enemies, the threats, the concerns, the concrete
hopes. But this is only a beginning.
- Proximity, Presence
This is more important than clear ideas or answers. Especially at first.
First comes presence and relationship, then through this medium comes understanding.
Being with the text, as you would linger silently with a friend. The communication
is very broad and deep. Don't be too frustrated when you don't seem to
'get it.'
- Attraction, Energy, Hot Spots
Be sensitive to the allure of the text and of elements in the text - for
instance the figure of Jesus, particular words of his. Feel for the warm
places, the centers of energy and attraction for you. This energy contains
light, understanding, but you don't have to extract it right away. Stay
with it. 'More than knowledge': become aware of the radiance, the field
of energy and light around a scene, a text.
- Structure and Style
Become aware of structural forms and features, elements of design. Try to
get onto the author's tricks. Ways of relating stories, e.g. through a
common word or theme. Symmetries, enclosures, chiasms. This is part of
'art appreciation' and helps to bring you into harmony with the work, onto
its wavelength. Develop a cultivated ear for the music of an author, especially
one like Luke or John.
- Internal Resonance
Staying with it. You will begin to become aware of something going on between
two texts in the same book or section of a book: between characters, elements,
events. Try to put yourself in the space between these two texts and listen
to what is happening between them. Ask questions at some point. What have
John the Baptist and the Beloved Disciple got to do with one another in
John's gospel?
- External Reference and Resonance
Following it up, staying with it, questioning it. Very frequently a NT text
- in a gospel or a letter - will refer back to an OT text. This reference
is meant to communicate meaning, to project a field of meaning around the
NT text. Seek out the text referred to. Question the meaning of the allusion.
And stay with it, remain in the still undetermined energy field.
- Theological Background: Favorite and Fertile Regions
of Reference
After a while you discover that one NT author has a predilection for the
first chapters of Genesis, the creation accounts. Another is obsessed with
the Exodus history. Study these fields of reference and the areas of meaning
which they open up. Does some coherent vision or theological 'system' emerge
through these references as a whole?
- The Play of Imagination
Let your imagination run free with a text, a scene, a saying, a parable.
NT texts are often written with imagination and must be read with imagination.
They are meant to stimulate the whole person, to suggest worlds of experience.
Imagination is a more powerful agent of interpretation than analysis, though
both are necessary.
- Typology
The Old Testament contains many elements which, beyond their own meaning
and role, represent Christ or the Church, Baptism or Eucharist, etc. New
Testament writers will very often refer to these 'types' to illuminate
the figure of Christ, the Church, the sacraments etc.
- Symbolism
Many elements - persons, things, events - in the New Testament, have a weight
and a fullness, a resonance and luminosity about them that that overflows
their place, going beyond their obvious importance, Things are not only
themselves, but they are representative, and this representation is not
only specific, typical (David-Jesus, Jerusalem-Church) but more general.
The symbol goes deeper than mere typology: in its own particularity it
represents the Whole - God, or the divine-human Mystery. The New Testament
has its own vocabulary of symbols. Most of them are drawn from the biblical
background, the First Testament.
- Plurality of Meaning, Levels of Interpretation
While the whole Word is one, the one Word contains an infinity of meaning.
An individual text may also contain an abundance of meaning, which is discovered
on different levels. (cf. the classical Four Senses of Scripture) NT meaning
centers in Christ, but then centers in ourself: both historically and unitively.
Learn to pursue the different possible levels or phases of meaning.
- Return to Simplicity
The plain sense of the text with its infinite field of meaning.
B. THEOLOGICAL AND UNITIVE
- Unity of the Word
The entire biblical revelation is one Word, and this Word is organic, like
a body. It is a totality of interrelating elements, each one of which potentially
contains the whole - like the cell of a human body. cf the organic 'new
paradigm'. The lectionary readings are always related at some level, beyond
the design of the lectionary.
- Christ-Mystery
The New Testament Revelation is, similarly, a single
whole which can be called the Christ-Mystery or Christ-Event.
This is, practically, the whole of cosmos, humanity and history
as brought together in Jesus Christ through his death and
resurrection. It is centered in the Paschal Mystery but implies
a wider comprehensiveness. In reading the New Testament,
a continual awareness of the Christ-Mystery in its totality
makes it possible to keep focused upon the central axis of
meaning and its extension into our own life and experience.
- Quaternary Structure
The Christ-Mystery naturally unfolds in four dimensions - that is, according
to the archetypal figure of wholeness, the mandala. The cross is a mandala.
The theological basis of this figure is Trinity and Creation: Father, Word,
Spirit, Cosmos-humanity. As we shall see, this Principle brings light to
our reading of the NT at many points and many levels.
- Polar Complementarity of The four Gospels
The gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John are related to one another according
to this quaternary form of the Christ-Mystery. There is a complementary
polarity between Mark and John, and between Matthew and Luke, that helps
to characterize each of the gospels and its interpretation of the one gospel
of Christ.
- Baptism: Original Fullness
Understanding of the New Testament presupposes
Christian initiation: that is, a personal reception of the
fullness of the Christ-Mystery in baptism. The NT texts are
continually making implicit reference to this fullness, which
is itself the heart of the NT and the primary principle of
its interpretation. Realization of this principle implies
a revolution in NT interpretation, since interpreters have
seldom remembered it.
- Participative Reading
Since you have been brought into the Christ-Mystery
by baptism and its fullness is within you, your understanding
of the NT is also an unfolding of that which is within you,
of that which you are. Your relation to the NT word is not
that of subject and object, not simply dualistic and objective;
it is intensely self-reflective and participative.
- Nonduality: Unitive Reality and Experience
In the Christ-Event and baptismal initiation, the communication of divine
fullness to the believing person is experienced as a new 'unitive reality'
or nondual reality. The nondual reality is experienced along two dimensions:
the unitive interiority of the new self (or contemplation) and the unitive
communion or koinonia which constitutes the new community.
- New Self and Solar Exegesis
In the baptismal event we are born anew in Christ;
we are a new person. Ultimately, the personal interpretation
of the NT results from the bringing together of two fullnesses:
firstly, the fullness of the Christ-Mystery that is present
in the Scriptural word and secondly, the fullness which is
your 'self': conscious and unconscious, realized and potential.
We need to bring to the gospel everything that we are, from
the inaudible bass notes through our world of clear consciousness
to the farthest resonances, the most distant overtones. All
of this is our image of the fullness of new creation, the
'End' of the Scriptures. This implies a completely open epistemology,
an approach far beyond method, an intimacy of lectio and
life, of lectio and the intuitive field of energy that is
our psyche. This, again, is a revolution in the traditional
interpretation which would ascend through the four senses
of Scripture. Rather, we begin with the fullness of personal
self and world in which the baptismal fullness is present'
and descend to the 'embodiment' of more concrete applications.
- New Self and Solar Living
The principle of descent from the fullness of the
new interior self applies not only to the reading of Scripture
but to the living of the gospel. This is the attitude of
the New Testament writers as they enjoin their readers to
live according to the fullness that they have received.
- From Baptism to Eucharist
The shape of Jesus' earthly life in the New Testament
texts is, theologically, the progression from a beginning
in his baptism by John in the Jordan to an end in his institution
of the eucharist and his death: understood as theologically
identical. This is also the form of the disciple's life according
to the New Testament.
- Actuality, Present Fullness
The Word does not present an abstract theological
vision for contemplation; rather, it evokes a presence, a
present fullness, an actuality, an energy. Our sapiential
approach to the New Testament culminates in a 'One-Pointed
Christianity', a simple unitive spirituality which is not
wholly unlike Zen. The homily should evoke this presence
of the living Word, a kind of eucharistic fullness.
- Direct Address, Challenge
The Word is spoken directly to me, requiring my
response. The actuality of the Word wants to become actuality
in me, expressing itself in action. Sapiential and unitive
interpretation of the Scriptures can become impersonal and
dull the cutting edge of the Word if there is not attention
also to the plain and literal sense, the personal urgency
and pungency, the bite and power of the gospel that calls
me to an active response, to conversion, that changes my
life. We must return, finally, to this understanding of the
gospel as spoken directly to me, calling me to conversion
and to the following of Jesus. The New Testament has two
sides, therefore: the sapiential and unitive side which we
have been pursuing and the prophetic or imperative or eschatological
or practical side with which Jesus is more explicitly concerned.
The imperative to follow Jesus is in function of the realization
of the unitive divine-human reality which is the Kingdom
of God.
Top of Page
|
|
