Getting Inside the New Testament
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.