Re Adventures in the Bible

Wow!

I am thrilled that this here blog has been re-vitalised! Thanks, Mark!
Also - despite a nearly two year hiatus, we still have a readership! Hodgen texted me today about it!

Ok, so, to this last post of yours:

No, your observations/connections are definitely not Seminary 101! More like 601, at least.
I just love how your brain is ticking in this regard -- I hadn't considered either of the symmetries you mentioned; both are brilliant.
This sort of mode of reading the Scriptures is akin to how the Fathers read the Scriptures, i.e. intertextually -- making the connection between different parts of the whole thing. However, the fathers usually work within more of a type/antitype parallel, ('a' -> 'A') rather than narrative inversions, ironies, etc. I.e. the Fathers are more prone to see Noah's ark as an embodied figure (a 'type') for the Church (the antitype -- the real thing to which the historical antecedent was a gesture towards) -- saving the faithful from judgment. That sort of thing. Your observations are more large scale, and work on a principle of inversion/mirroring: ("you men shall become gods" :: "God became man"), which is very awesome.

Two places come to mind where I have encountered something similar to this specific hermeneutical sub-species of yours:
1) Orthodox hymnography, where the ironic turns, the paradoxes, etc. within the Scriptures are sometimes brought out similarly.
I have only had minimal exposure to this: all I can think of are some specific Marian hymns with lines like, "you contained the uncontainable", and stuff like that. Or symmetries like: "As Eve was brought forth from the side of Adam, so the Church was brought forth, by water (baptism) and blood (Eucharist) from the side of the second Adam." and stuff like that. Perhaps Hodgen might have some more leads? One of the crown princes of hymnography was Ephraim the Syrian, which you might enjoy perusing.

& 2) St. Paul often makes similar kind of moves, though on a slightly smaller scale: "He who knew no sin, became sin" (2Cor 5:21), "through the trespass of the Jews, salvation has come to the gentiles" (Rom 11:11), "my strength is made perfect in weakness" (2Cor 12:9), "Just as sin came through one man, so righteousness has come through one man." Stuff like that.

To your question of "can we draw theological notions?" from this way of reading, the answer is "yes", as long as the symmetry/parallel is within the Rule of Faith. What I mean is: the Scriptures are multivalent enough, by their nature (in defense of this, check out S. Thomas' "I answer that" to I.I. Q1.10) that the Church is always exploring new depths of meaning and inter-connection within them. Our modern, human-author-centric view cramps our style in this regard, the Fathers were not so bound. When the Fathers read Scripture, they weren't inventing fanciful reflections, they were really exegeting the text. BUT -- they were reading the Scriptures through the lens of the person of Christ, which drastically re-casts all of it. (see Luk 24:44 also, in this vein, and very on topic for a 'Bible as Literature' thread, you might really dig this piece. It changed my reading of Scripture, and my appreciation for the Fathers greatly). In so doing, in some sense they knew what they were looking for (Christ) in any passage (Eden, Flood, etc) before they found it.

The ESSENTIAL bound to this modus lectionis is that all readings be tested, proved by the Rule of Faith -- i.e. the Catholic faith (of which something like the Nicene Creed is a good quick-reference rule). Early gnostics (Valentinians, Saturninians, etc) would, using a similar hermeneutical approach, but construct crazy alternate stories. E.g. "well, the Tree of Knowledge prefigures the wood of the Cross, and since Satan tempted toward the first tree, God actually wants us to resist the 'temptation' to follow Christ" or blasphemous drivel like this. What makes this "read" wrong is not the method per se, but the fact that they were using this method to their own inventive ends, rather than as servants to reveal the mystery of the Catholic faith once deposited to the Church. No novelty! And this is "what we can draw" (as you have done in your post! thank you!) from such typological or inversive recognitions within the canon of Scripture: deeper illumination of the unplumbable wonder of the Gospel of Jesus, which (hopefully, and often) has on its heels the inculcation of awe and worship in the heart of those who would contemplate such things (hello, readers!)

I.e. Nice work!

P.s. Re the Poetry posts, Readers -- I responded to the first in a private letter, not knowing that any of you still saw this. Mark, maybe you could scan the relevant section and put it up?
To the second, I shall respond sometime when I'm not planning a wedding and approaching finals week in Grad School...

Adventures in "the Bible as literature"

There's maybe one more thing I have to say about poetry and grief, but I am going to take a break from that to throw out two little symmetries in the Bible that I've been thinking about:

• The Incarnation as an ironic fulfillment of the serpent's false promise: not that we shall become like God, but that God will become man! This is laid out right there in the text, of course, in the "he shall bruise your head / and you shall bruise his heel" bit.  But thinking about it in light of the serpent's own words makes him (the serpent) a bit a Greek tragic hero, in the sense that his hubristic words outline his own downfall.
• Calvary as an inversion of the Flood.  Flood: everyone is sinning, kill them all except this one righteous man.  Calvary: everyone is sinning, kill the one righteous man.

So tell me, Ben, are these parallels Seminary 101? I won't lie, I was a little proud of intuiting them, but surely others have pointed them out before.  I think these things are neat, but can we draw any theological notions from them? Let's converse!