Theopolitan Reading

Peter J. Leithart, Theopolitan Reading (Theopolis Books / Athanasius Press, 2020)

Theopolis Fundamentals Series

116pp pb

ISBN: 9781735169002

£9.71 on Amazon UK today / $11.95 from the publisher

 

Anyone interested in reading the Bible more richly could benefit from spending time with this book.

 

This is not an elaborate hermeneutical text book of rules which allow the reader to insert the correct inputs, grind the machine and chunk out a correct reading. Instead, in an introductory chapter, Dr Leithart offers to serve as a mentor in the art of the Spiritual Reading of Scripture which pays close attention to the letter. Scripture is concerned for our intellectual and moral formation, which is partly achieved by our (sacramental) imaginative and liturgical formation. The church must be soaked in the Scriptures. We should aim to be at least as familiar with the story and detail of the Bible as we are with logos, brands, jingles, personalities and gossip of pop culture. We want to read the cues which the Bible gives us in terms of plot (division and reformation, exile and return, death and resurrection), character or setting (e.g. garden, temple, vineyard, wilderness, city, well) as readily as we can identify the genre or mood of a film from an establishing short or a change in the score. We want to begin to sense the biblical associations of mountains (and High Places and altars), water, trees, birds and animals, stars and all that God has made and spoken about to proclaim his glory.

 

The Bible is seen as a highly patterned (typological), artistic, symbolic, figurative and literal literary text. The end of the Old Covenant world might be described as the “stars falling from heaven”. This does not mean that the astrological bodies will hit the earth, but it does speak of an actual change of rulers and regime with the death and resurrection of the Messiah, which the Fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 caps, marking the end of the old world order of Temple and Law.  

 

The Bible’s main concern is not simply heaven and the soul but God-and-his-world-and-people, Christ and his body. It speaks of real events in this world (of a polis, a city) but most often in poetic and narrative terms. Scripture is not, in the main, a philosophical Dogmatics about God in himself but a developing drama of God’s dealings with the world, with Adam (and the Last Adam and his people) and Eve (and the Bride of Christ). All human beings are some variation of Adam and Eve, all places more or less Edenic.

 

The bulk of the book thus traces, sometimes lyrically, themes laid out in Genesis 1-3 and the Scriptural riffs on the world, Adam, Eve and Eden as originally created, fallen, redeemed and eschatological. Trained readers can hear allusions (overtones, harmonies, shifts in meter and instrumentation) as they attend to the “connotations, import and implications of what’s written” in all the Scriptures (p16).

 

Even if you worry this is fanciful in places, or you’re not convinced by each individual proposal, the overall approach seems compelling and the attention is worthy of the divine-human masterpiece which is the Bible. I would have liked a Scripture index so that I could more easily go back to the suggestions on the many individual passages that are scattered throughout the text.  

 

Take up and read. Taste and see!