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            In today’s gospel the Fourth Evangelist refers to the passage in the Book of Numbers (21:4-9) which is today’s lesson: the story of the fiery serpents.  It has been suggested that this story provides a rationale for the bronze serpent in the Jerusalem temple, to which the people used to offer incense.  This cult object was destroyed during the reforms of Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:4), along with other objects thought to be incompatible with Yahwistic faith. 
            To connect the story of the fiery serpents with Christ on the cross seems a bit of a stretch, but we need to remember that the only scripture available to the church at its beginning was the Jewish scripture which, if read in the traditional way, gave no basis for Christian belief in Christ as Lord and Savior. 
            Therefore, means had to be taken to find Christian meaning in a Jewish book, and one of the means used was typology: the bronze serpent set up on a pole in the wilderness by Moses is a type of Christ on the cross. 
            Historical criticism has been scornful of typology, and also of the other approach to the Old Testament used by New Testament authors, namely allegory.  If the Bible is the history of salvation, then such unhistorical literary devices as allegory and typology must be deemed out of place. 
            But now that the limitations of historical criticism have become apparent, typology and allegory are making a comeback in Biblical criticism.  The early Christian writer Origen believed that the holy spirit clothed the divine intention in the dress of the wording of the text, and that only those who probed for the deeper meaning could understand what the text was really about. 
            Allegory divides those who see through to this deeper meaning from those who do not.  Language is constantly telling us that something is what it is not.  The dislocation of words from their objects will always keep language at one remove from what it claims to present.
            The overarching story enshrined in the Rule of Faith provides the framework to which scripture universally testifies.  The modernist concern with historicity has cut us off from a living tradition of complex multivalent images which have resonated in Christian art and poetry. 
            To be sure, allegory becomes pointless if it simply reinforces positions already held.  But when used with conscious deliberation, it can exploit the inadequacy of language in expressing that which is beyond all utterance.  In the words of a Puritan divine, “God hath yet more truth to bring forth from his holy word.” 

March 22, 2009

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