Time and the Word: Figural Reading of the Christian Scriptures by Ephraim Radner (review)

Readers hoping to skim Ephraim Radner's book Time and the Word to bone up on the latest in theological interpretation of Scripture will be disappointed for two reasons: first, the book simply cannot be skimmed, and second, it offers few methods or practices. Instead, the book forces the reader to ask the prior questions that undergird any such notion of theological engagement with Scripture: "What is the nature of the Bible?" and "Who is this God?" Once these two questions are properly addressed, claims Radner, one will see that what is required is not necessarily an "exegetical method," but a "dispositional ascesis" (263). Like most of Radner's books, the work is densely historical, highly philosophical, and exceptionally broad in its erudition. Yet above all it is relentlessly theological, continually driving the reader back to the sovereign God as the giver of the Living Word and the active agency of that given Word.

Radner lays out his preference for using the term "figural," identifying it as "the general approach of reading the Bible's referents as a host of living beings—and not only human ones—who draw us, as readers, from one set of referents or beings to another, across times and spaces, whatever these may constitute" (7). And though he helpfully distinguishes this approach from allegorical and typological readings (and less so from figurative), he sees it largely as a broad term to encompass all kinds of readings of Scripture that share an understanding of the nature of Scripture itself. Here one finds the crux of Radner's argument: "Scripture articulates the way that the world is related to God as creation, such that each part of its reality, however temporally conceived, bespeaks the fundamental reality of God's creative being in act" (49). All of creation through all of time has already been given in Scripture. Ultimately, he hopes, we will come to understand the Bible as God's Word in time—a phrase Radner uses throughout—which is actively doing things, and not simply an object of our inspection.

The book is composed of two parts, with the first five chapters covering the history and theology of figural reading, while the final three chapters (plus the appendix, containing four homilies) are focused on the practice or employment of such readings. Radner's historical acumen is on display in the first part of the book as he sweeps from the patristic through to the early modern period. He works with two related theses through these chapters. First, the project of historical critical method, dominant for the past two hundred years, has been a failure. Second, Radner makes a strong historical case that his particular understanding of Scripture is nothing new in the life of the church. What he is proposing, he shows, actually had substantial ecclesial precedence, if not consensus, until the late modern period.

It is indeed a book about Scripture, not about methods of interpretation, nor is it even primarily a diatribe against historical critical practitioners. Radner wants to avoid a "fall narrative" for where it all went wrong and goes to lengths to at least partially redeem the Nominalists and the Reformers and even the early moderns; yet one cannot help but feel the illocutionary force of the historical narrative, which points toward the late moderns and their failure to uphold the divine omnipotence of God as where it all started to go wrong. Chapter 5 ("Figural Speech and the Incarnational Synecdoche") proves to be one of the most compelling chapters of the work. Though never demarcated as such, the chapter attempts to navigate a way through the now-worn disputes between postliberals and evangelicals on the nature of truth and the Bible. For those on either side, the chapter is a must-read. Readers less philosophically inclined will find the third chapter, "Imagining Figural Time," to be a tough slog, and I do not think Radner...