Abstract
This is an intriguing and at times enchanting book, though occasionally of a maddening untidiness. The author describes it as ‘a book on reading the Bible with the Church’s tradition’ (p. xiii), which is not how most biblical scholars admit to viewing their task. He also says of it that ‘[t]his book makes an argument about how to read the Bible— in a way that seeks to be surprised by Jesus, reading the text at multiple levels, for the sake of the church’s health and the world’s blessing’ (p. 164), and so offers an unmistakable but profitable challenge to the hermeneutical guild. There is a lovely first chapter reminding Christians not to regard either the Bible or its God as their own private property, for Judaism, he says, is ‘the gospel that Jesus learned at Mary’s knee’ (p. 10). At times this book will feel to weary scholars of the Bible a bit like ‘Judaeo-Christianity 101’, but it carries a message for all who would read the sacred texts. Byassee manages this by way of a glance at the ways that the church has had of reading the scriptures, with a chapter on Origen (who gazed at the Old Testament through the lens of Jesus), ‘growing into the radiance of love’; for Byassee, ‘the goal is to love God through love of the text’ (p. 41). The chapter on Mary will surprise some Protestant readers; but Byassee’s aim here is to show that there is life in the Scriptures. It is not always absolutely clear what holds this chapter together, but it is lively and full of delightful surprises. There is, too, a chapter on Augustine, and another, interestingly subtitled ‘God is Jewish, Catholic and Pentecostal’, which makes the important, and for some, revolutionary, point that the first question in biblical hermeneutics is not ‘What did the author intend?’ nor even ‘What did the first audience hear?’ but ‘What is God saying here and now?’ The next chapter is on Gregory the Great, ‘Tracker of Hidden Mysteries’, and is an invitation to rediscover the practice of allegorical reading of biblical texts, which aims to ‘keep us from avoiding Jesus’ (p. 100). In chapter 7, Byassee is trying ‘to lay bare the strange and wondrous ways ancient Christians read the Bible’ (p. 122). The final chapter takes us through the ‘four senses’: we are to ‘[p]ay special attention when the Bible reads the Bible. And pay greater attention still when Jesus reads the Bible in the Bible’ (p. 139). Allegory, he argues, is not a matter of making texts less embarrassing, but of reading the depth of our texts. There is, too, a very charming account of the relationship of science and religion (much needed in our day), and a commendable insistence on ‘delight’. Not everyone will relish this book, and in places it is hard to follow the argument; but it should be widely read in the guild of hermeneuts.