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4 Distributing the Word Holy Scripture and the Preacher in Gregory of Nazianzus Gregory’s account of divine action in history allows him to understand Scripture theologically as the product of God’s saving activity and its instrument, serving as the medium of Christ’s pedagogical presence, without abstracting it from the historical continuum. Because the presence of Jesus Christ as teacher and divine wisdom is by the Spirit’s inspiration at the heart of Scripture, in Gregory’s understanding, and Christ is at the heart of history, there is for Gregory no tension between the teaching of Scripture and the world of the reader, nor is that teaching simply of only relative worth amidst the historical breadth of human culture. Rather, Christ’s scriptural pedagogy enables Spirit-illumined readers to realize the universal saving force of the incarnation in their own lives and shapes their understanding and action. It is this sanctifying pedagogy that Christian pastors are called to serve in their exposition of Scripture, as the Spirit enables them and their listeners. In these ways, Gregory sketches premodern lines that can inform our response to the challenges presented by historical consciousness to the theology of Scripture. Distributing the Word: Scripture and the Interpreter in the Economy We can get a first glimpse of how Gregory locates Scripture, and its interpretation within his understanding of history configured around Jesus Christ, from his account of pastoral ministry and its demands in Oration 2. That account is central to his apology for having fled that ministry after his priestly ordination. For Gregory, the exposition of Scripture is one of the chief tasks of the Christian pastor, and his argument both contextualizes that task within 107 the divine economy of salvation and begins to reveal his understanding of the nature and function of the sacred text. Gregory’s basic argument in Oration 2 is that the pastoral art is so difficult and so weighty in its responsibilities that no one should undertake it before they have acquired sufficient spiritual formation, and hence he may be forgiven for having recoiled from that task in order to prepare himself for it. One way in which Gregory makes that argument is by a comparison of two kinds of medicine: the care of human bodies and the spiritual care of human beings, in order to show just how much more difficult is the latter than the former. The climax to that piece of argumentation comes when Gregory contrasts the scope of the physician’s art, which seeks the preservation of the flesh, with that of the pastoral art, which aims at the rescue, restoration, and deification of the human soul made in the image of God.1 For, he explains, this work was the purpose of God’s saving action, especially in the incarnation. For this reason, the Word assumed every aspect of our condition, as Gregory explains: “For each of our things, one thing of him who was above us was given in exchange and he became a new mystery, the economy of philanthropy for the one who fell through disobedience.”2 This exchange, according to Gregory, explains every feature of Christ’s life, ministry, death, and resurrection. All these were a divine pedagogy and therapy for our weakness, Gregory explains, “leading the old Adam back to whence he fell and conducting us to the tree of life, from which the tree of knowledge estranged us when partaken of unseasonably and improperly.”3 Of this therapy, he continues, those who are placed over others to lead in the church are “servants and fellow-workers . . . for whom it is already a great thing to know and heal our own passion and deficiencies.”4 And those who exercise this enormous responsibility have a very difficult task because of the great variety among those for whom they care. For motivations and impulses are not the same, he points out, “for women as for men, nor for old as for young, nor the poor as for the rich, or leaders and the led, wise and unlearned, cowards and courageous, angry and gentle, those who succeed and those who fail.”5 Similarly, he adds, there are great differences in desires and passions and 1. Or. 2.22. For a fuller account of Gregory on the pastoral art, see Christopher Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We See Light (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 235ff. 2. Or. 2.24, SC 247...

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