All Thy Lights Combine: Figural Reading in the Anglican Tradition

by David Ney (Editor), Ephraim Radner (Editor)

We do not simply interpret God's word. His word interprets us.

Figural interpretation has been a trademark of Anglican devotions from the beginning. Anglican readers―including Tyndale, Cranmer, Hooker, and Lewis―have been figural readers of the Bible. By paying attention to how words, images, and narratives become figures of others in Scripture, these readers sought to uncover how God's word interprets all of reality. Every verse shines the constellation of God's story.

Edited by David Ney and Ephraim Radner, the essays in All Thy Lights Combine explore how the Anglican tradition has employed figural interpretation to theological, Christological, and pastoral ends. The prayer book is central; it immerses Christians in the words of Scripture and orders them by the word. With guided prayers for morning and evening, this book invites readers to be re--formed by God's word. Become immersed in the riches of the Anglican interpretive tradition.

Genres: Theology

422 pages, Hardcover

Published January 12, 2022

Reviews

[Jack W. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best theology book I have read this year.

Best intro to Anglicanism book for any literate person.

Also best church history book I've read in a couple years.

Also most inspirational and devotional book I've stumbled across in a hot minute.

Best spiritual vision casting book I've read in months, too.

The final chapter alone on Lionel Thornton's interpretation of Scripture (who?) makes it worth the purchase, as it totally blows your mind on how to think about the harmony, trustworthiness, and comprehensiveness of Scripture; add to that amazing chapters about the poet John Donne's paradox of language, the founding archbishop Thomas Cranmer and his vision to conform all of England to the Bible, several excellent essays on William Tyndale and Henry Mansel, plus good essays on CS Lewis, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Wesley, and female activists of the 19th century, plus decent essays on Richard Sibbes, William Jones, John Keble, Christina Rossetti, and Richard Hooker and this book cannot help but transform how anyone reads their bible even as it gives them an appreciation for the undeserved blessing God has given the Anglican church through the centuries in such faithful men and women.

Longer review hopefully forthcoming

[Melody Schwarting · Rating 4 out of 5]

All Thy Lights Combine considers Anglicans interpreting Scripture across time, from Thomas Cranmer to C. S. Lewis. Each chapter is fairly short, concluded by an excerpt from the subject. End matter includes ye olde versions of Morning & Evening Prayer.

I enjoyed the subject matter and exploring how writers from Donne to Rossetti employed the "figural" reading of Scripture. (Somehow, the author of the quotation employed as the title, George Herbert, was not included.) It was different for each one, and the contributors made many helpful comments explaining how figural interpretation worked for each author. It has me perked up to find other instances of figural interpretation, within and beyond the Anglican tradition.

[Jacob Moore · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was about a 3.5, but I just couldn't round up on it given some of my hesitations I will explain below. I had too many issues and places where the book fell flat still for me overall.

The overall thesis of this book is that "figural reading" is a kind of "missionary" reading of the Bible where the mediation of our religious experience by prayer and the liturgies of our church starts to "absorb the world" (11) we live in. To this end, the readers in this work "affirm with John Donne that the interpeter must search the Scriptures as one searches a wardrobe: not to make an inventory of it, but to find in it something fit for thy wearing" (10).

To that end, I do like that the reader in this thinking is not one who comes to the text and plucks it out to be used in a prooftext manner. Indeed, the title of the book alone suggests that is not possible. For a true figural reading can only emerge when we start to gain some sense of how "all they lights combine," which is the poetic wish of George Herbert. To that end, one does not trot out the Bible as a prop in their own play, but rather the person is actually absorbed into the divine drama of Scripture in such ways that their own world and life begin to be transfigured and made intelligible in light of that. In that light, one can see why Kevin Vanhoozer endorsed the book since it is very friendly to his general thesis in Drama of Doctrine.

The value of such readings is that Scripture starts to absorb all of history, even when we are removed by thousands of years from the writings of the latest books in the Bible. So figural reading is a way of "community-building" in which we "receive, interpret, and passon the Bible" as those who are "midstream" (11) and have received it before us as well as are continuing to transmit the faith to those coming after us.

This book then proposes to offer its own figural readings from its own stream, the Anglican stream of Christianity. These figural readings are heavily mediated by the Book of Common Prayer (BCP), the 39 Articles, and the liturgical elements observed regularly in church services. The beauty of these dominant mediatory tools are that they offer, year in and year out, consistent forms that start to ground the individual in a storyline of faith and a repetition of words -- divine words -- that give them a sense of being able to start to "speak in a distinct mode" (17). This is what fueled someone like Tyndale speaking of England as Ninevites who must, like they heard it from Jonah, receive the word of God and repent (35). If they do not, they will be worthy of more condemnation at the end of days (Matt. 12:41).

Figural reading then is one that has been absorbed by the literal words of Scripture and starts to typologically and/or allegorically -- figural reading has semantic overlap with both modes of exegesis -- see the spiritual sense (typological connections) of the text and be able to move into tropological (ethical) and anagogical (what the future will be like) because they see the events unfolding around them as part of the types they find in Scripture's divine drama. So then these Biblical interpreters start to speak "as with the very words of God" (1 Pet. 4:11).

This move is grounded and warranted in the fact that "creation actually is a unity" (350). Because "everything in creation signifies Christ" to such a reader (xiv), their reality is "theophanic, or rather, Christophanic" in nature and can thus be made intelligible by their devotional attendance to Scripture.

With some sense of the book's thesis let me say a few things about the book. First, let me state what I liked about it. There are three specific elements of the book that are extremely commendable to that end.

First, I really appreciated that figural reading is mediated by prayer life and the liturgies of the chruch. While there are some questions the book doesn't address like how much the Church of England is uniquely capable of reading the Scripture this way due to its political and liturgical relationship to the state, it is still powerful to suggest that the regular morning and evening prayers start to absorb the reader's world in a way where their life becomes undeniably centered and made intelligible by Scripture's own storyline and history. I think this should call us all to the reality that powerful interpretation requires deep habitation via prayer and whatever local church liturgies we develop, and should make us desire to find community that seeks after this together. One powerful quote is on p. 293 that "the great idealistic pholosophers who were influencing English theologians had little time, for example, for the simple practice of prayer. Kant and Hegel, for differing reasons, coudl not imagine a God who could be petitioned, pleaded with, or conversed with." Thus, one who is faithful in their prayers will yet one day hold the edge over Kant and Hegel and I think this is immensely worthwhile to say boldly!

Secondly, figural reading offers a lot of utility and fruit in the tropological realm of Scripture. Because we see how types absorb us into the story, we actually start to gain a sense of ways in which our own encounters in the world are continuations of a world in which Christ has come and is always coming (to paraphrase Bavinck). Thus, there is a power in figural reading that really can and has benefitted preaching and would be well recovered by the church.

Third, following the above point to some degree, I do think that the world having an organic unity (again, something Bavinck would be very keen on) as it relates to how we can see Scripture coming alive in our lives is useful to us. I think these figural readers had wide imaginations and were effective in proclaiming valuable truths in ways that mirror how God's word is living and active (Heb. 4:12).

Now, let me say the thing lacking in the book which caused me to rate it as lowly as I did.

There are virtually no limitations or method on how this all happens. Indeed, from the outset the editors of the book say that all these readings are party of an "enfigurated Scripture" that "streams together so that, through the threads of God's word, each is related to another, each shaped by and in the other ina grand scriptural ecumenism" (14). Indeed, the book may be a bit too ecumenical. It does not really discuss any ways in which the BCP may be misappropriated or in what sense dogmatics actually may offer limitations upon the kinds of readings that come forth. Even some kind of offering of thermographic readings, where some are more hot or cold, such as Jonathan Pennington suggests in his Reading the Gospels Wisely would be useful.

How does one do figural reading? Apparently, if you pray enough and do enough liturgies it just kind of happens? The authors literally say that "figural reading of Scripture is less a method than an atmosphere: a feeling of infinity" (250). This is, largely, all there is to figural reading, which seems to me to run aground a great many dangers in the ocean of interpretation. Are there any atmospheres that the reader should beware? How does one even know they are "feeling" infinity? These questions are unadressed and figural readings are simply received as figural because they apparently emerge from the atmosphere of the BCP and Anglican liturgy. I am skeptical that interpretation is quite so free. As Vanhoozer says in Meaning?, if the Holy Spirit does not depart from Christ's words and is faithul to teach them and only them, we should beware thinking we have more freedom than He does as it comes to the divine economy of God's words. I am not sure a "mood" will save us from potential error in this department.

In fact, the book repeatedly notes that those included in this book have sometimes had "their figural renderings ... received with suspicion or perplexity. Yet the seeds sown by their figurations have borne enormous fruit" (15). What fruit this is, though, is left to the reader to imagine and far from obvious. Take for instance John Henry Newman's claims that Coleridge "indulged a liberty of speculation, which no Christian can tolerate" (219). I do not mean to enter in and say whether Newman or Coleridge is a superior reader of Scripture. The problem is that a comment like this has no means of arbitration. How could one vindicate Coleridge from such a claim? Can they merely appeal that the BCP was something he attended to faithfully? Did Newman himself not do his own prayers in his own tradition?

The fact that so many of the readers in this tradition are ones who can be looked at with skeptical or unsure eyes would seem to have warranted some discussion of the vindication of their figural reading methods as useful for the church and vindicated in her hermeneutical practice. This is somewhere where Vanhoozer's Drama is helpful in that it acknowledges that a communal practice of reading is, by itself, no guarantee of successful reading.

While I want to be ecumenical and charitable as a reader, this issue left me enormously perplexed and feeling that, as one outside the Anglican tradition, I have nothing practical to take away other than to engage with the liturgical practices of my own church. While that sounds wonderful, are their liturgies that we would despise? What about the liturgies found in Prosperity Gospel circles? Surely that is a mood that can produce figural readings. What about much of the modern Episcopalian churches in America? What about the Anglican church's own divides between the competing moods of England and Africa. Can the Anglican communion read figurally that the LGBTQ community is the prostitute lying at the door in Judges 19 while the African church reads figurally that they are the brutes outside the door of Lot's house? What would prevent these figural readings from emerging, should someone conceive of them while liturgically thinking about the word of God?

I will stop here as this review is quite long enough, but hope that this sufficiently raises a troubling flag in what otherwise would have been a great book. I want very much so to read figurally, but the book starts and ends in the same place: with Herbert's desire that he wished he knew how all Thy lights combine in Scripture. I inquire with him now, how DO they combine? Surely, I believe they do. I simply do not think this book has actually done the work to distinguish between satellites and stars in the night sky and would thus consitute a constellation that will be unable to be found with the next night that comes.

I hope that people enjoy this book if they read it and take what is good from it, but I also hope that this caution is helpful to someone who wants a bit more than a "mood" as their north star of figural reading.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

"All Thy Lights Combine: Figural Reading in the Anglican Tradition" is a welcome survey of Anglican figural reception of the Scriptures from Tyndale to Lionel Thornton.

“Figural” exegesis may itself be unfamiliar territory to many readers (this one included). The editors explain figural reading as “the practiced version of that conviction of Scripture’s power to provide and reveal the wholeness of God’s world and history, and to absorb and include all aspects of actual life within the formative power of God’s own life, most clearly given in Jesus Christ” (3-4). Figural reading can subsume three of the four-fold medieval quadriga modes of reading the Scriptures. Allegorical, anagogical, and tropological readings all find their place under the umbrella of figural exegesis as modes of reading which welcome the reader into the very mind of God through the veil of Scripture. Ephraim Radner’s essay on Cranmer richly illustrates how figural reading is the bread and wine of the Anglican life of prayer, so assumed is figural interpretation in the Book of Common Prayer (esp. 47-9, 55). The BCP is itself the model handbook for figural reading. As such, the 1662 BCP Daily Offices are included as an appendix.

"All Thy Lights Combine" introduces readers to fresh aspects in the theological reflection of names they already know (Cranmer, Lewis, Wesley). The book also introduces the rich Anglican theology of lesser known authors like William Jones, Josephine Butler, Elizabeth Rundle Charles, Maria W. Stewart, and Henry Mansel. Each of these authors reflect the influence of Anglican figural reading in their reading of the Scriptures and how their reading of the Scriptures shapes their world.

John Tyson’s essay on Charles Wesley’s figural reception of Scripture through the theological commentary of his hymns was especially sublime. Wesley’s hymns are a mosaic of Biblical allusions, in which his Anglican figural reading of the Scriptures is not only expressed, but induces the experiences the Scriptures revealed to Wesley (183). Ney’s chapter on William Jones of Neyland reflects on a lesser known Anglican theologian’s use of figural reading to respond to the demythologization projects of 18th century England. Marion Taylor introduces three female devotional interpreters including African-American Maria Stewart, who found in Anglicanism the “figural space” she needed for her powerful prophetic voice critiquing nineteenth-century America for practicing the economics of Babylon (esp. 271, 283-5). Judith Wolfe considers C.S. Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms, in which the Psalms provide Lewis a way out of “the problematic ideal of authenticity” through to the possibility of goodness (330).

"All Thy Lights Combine" is a rich and rewarding collection of guides to the reception of Scripture in the Anglican tradition across the centuries. One finds here a reminder that Anglicanism has needed to return to the gift of figural reading in every generation. Figural reading is a means by which the church might once again be shaped into the forms of Scripture and taken to God, rather than swept away by every wind of doctrine.

This volume is highly recommended to anyone interested in the Anglican theological imagination.

Disclosure: I received a copy of the book for free from the publisher. I was not asked to provide a positive review, and this in no way affected my review.

[Jacob Villa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some cool and moving stuff, quite a bit of boring stuff, some confusing stuff, and some weird stuff.