So too, growing numbers of serious Christian readers of the Bible have become persuaded that we can't hope to know what Moses "means" without seeing how he was read by Jesus, Paul, Irenaeus, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Newman, and Barth. The particular lineup of midrashic commentators can change, of course. The point is the exegetical humility of reading the Scriptures through the saints—an appropriate response to the humility of a God who bends toward us in Christ and gathers his people in a communion of saints.
Maybe. I've seen plenty of chauvinism in readings of this kind, if it's the only way you ever approach the text. The trick, here as in political theory, is to have some idea of the kind of question you want to have answered. If I want to have an idea of what Grotius wrote, the absolute worst thing to do is read the commentary on De jure belli, which is largely a reflection of the biases of the commentator. If my question is how the concept of sovereignty develops over the modern period, or how it gets used in various political contexts, those commentators become more important. Within Protestant hermeneutics, I see no reason why one cannot read a prominent Christian writer's positions, accord them a great deal of weight, and still find them lacking as interpretations, or interpretations when certain questions are in mind (Christ and Paul are different, but let's not step into that minefield).
See also allegory:
Those in Reformation-based churches have often recoiled at allegory as one of the means by which the plain sense of Scripture is distorted. This is rooted in our revolt against our Catholic forebears: let them have allegory, and pretty soon they'll find the Queen of Heaven in Revelation, or prayers to the saints in 1 Maccabees. Williams ably shows that the heartbeat of allegory for the ancient church was Christological. Allegory was a means to further the church's passionate love affair with Christ through discerning his presence on every page of Israel's Scripture. Like any interpretive practice, allegorical reading can go wrong and stand in need of reining in, sure enough. But without it, something dear to the heart of Protestants is lost: the chance to see Jesus anew, now refracted through the words not only of the New Testament, but of the Old as well. And there are so many more words in the Old!
My Bible study (stuck in the middle of Jeremiah) got into a big argument on this topic a few weeks ago: they (Orthodox and evangelical protestant alike) were finding allegories everywhere, and assigning the primary meaning of the text to these. I protested, because these seemed to me a dodge--the text had to mean something to the people who first encountered it, and as the intensity of allegory is increased (so I find), the urge to find other meanings decreases, and that seems to me to do definite violence to the text. If you come to the text asking what portions of it might further our understanding of what it means to be in Christ, and how his coming changes our understanding of past events, well, go to town. But it's an activity that has a time and a place, and any halfway decent reading will balance hermeneutic techniques against what's being sought after.
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