I am pro ‘symbolic’ reading of the Bible. This goes by a few different names, which aren’t entirely contiguous with each other: typology, spiritual reading, the four senses, allegory, maximalism, and more. These things aren’t the same, and they might not all even really be the same neck of the woods, but they are all in the woods.
Of course, lots of people rightly push back on symbolic reading by questioning whether there are any guiderails to keep you sane. If you get drunk on symbols or typology, does everything means everything else? How do you know if a maximalist reading of the Bible is what the text is saying, or not? It certainly seems like anything goes in some approaches.
I listened to some symbolic exegesis the other day—though I don’t know if the person doing it would own that particular term, but that’s what I would argue they were doing—and it didn’t click with me. I love this stuff, but it didn’t seem to be opening up the text. If anything, it seemed to be narrowing it down rather than widening it out, and it seemed to be against the grain of the text.
It would be simple enough to suggest that we need to read with the grain of the text, but I noticed that the person I was listening to made a directional move that I think was the source of their problem.
They took their symbol to the text from the world rather than to the text from the text.
That might be too stark as I’ll try to expand on below, but in essence they encountered an analogous term in the Biblical text. Great, they’re everywhere. They then turned to that thing in the world and made a number of comments on the nature of that thing. They then took those comments back into the Biblical text. This would be like reading about the body of Christ, making some specific comments about tissue and organs and then reading those back into the text as though they were what were intending; or reading a text that uses the mountain symbol and then made some specific comments about the formation of mountains and tectonic plates before reading those back into the Bible as though that’s what it meant.
I think that’s backwards. The world is a book to be read, but we don’t learn to read the symbol in the world and take it to Scripture. Rather, we learn to read the symbol in the Scriptures, take it around the Scriptures, and then take it to the world.
So, if I encounter a symbol, like clothing or light or stones or bread, that I’m aware the Bible uses multiple times throughout its narrative, I need to allow that symbol to develop its meaning (it’s ‘symbolic domain’) through the Biblical text. This has to be attuned to story, by which I mean symbols develop their meanings chronologically. Sometimes a symbol is used in an antagonistic way, like the way wine is a good thing in the Bible largely until the prophets (with some exceptions) where the blessing is now also employed antagonistically to intend a curse. That isn’t a disagreement, but a deliberate development as wine’s meaning of ‘curse’ arises naturally from its meaning of ‘blessing.’
I then take these meanings with me to when I encounter these symbols elsewhere in the Bible and explore which of them fit the warp and woof of the text at large. Which is reading ‘with the grain.’ Sometimes it’s all of them, sometimes it’s not. We expect the text to tell us once we’re clued into the meanings the symbol holds.
At that point I can read the symbol to the world—expecting wine to bless me if used with wisdom, or bread to create friendship when employed in hospitality—but not before. I might even learn something from the world: Mark Scarlata’s biblical theology of wine does some interesting things with the concept of terroir, but Scarlata is careful to only use the world to explicate meanings that have already arisen from the biblical text. He’s interested in why wine is a fitting symbol for the meanings he’s found rather than trying to bring outside concepts into the text to begin with.
There is a place for noticing that modern scientific knowledge of the development of seeds fits with the way the Bible employs a symbol. However, this needs to work illustratively so that the Scriptures retain the corrective control on our thinking. What I mean by that is that if we spot a way that our knowledge of the world fits the symbol, we make sure we’ve understood the symbol within the matrix of the Bible’s meaning first. Then, assuming our knowledge of the world fits with that, we can use it as an illustration. This works in preaching. What we aren’t doing is taking those meanings first and pasting them on the word. My distinction here does require us to show our working—which to be fair I’ve not done with those meanings I’ve suggested because they form part of my thesis and I need to wait for it to be published, apologies—because the distinction in some cases will be one of method rather than final form.
There is also a place for prophetically applying a passage along with additional meanings from the world: the classic explanation of the arrow in the quiver along with a long explanation of how arrows are formed by fletchers is a common example of this in my world (Isaiah 49). What we mustn’t do is mistake ourselves for saying what Isaiah meant or what the Bible means to us as Christians. We should therefore be quite tentative in that particular movement, ideally tethering it to the scriptural symbols of the arrow and the quiver.
We should read symbolically, but we have to do so wisely.
Photo by Joel Muniz on Unsplash
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