rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_0dc255b3-d2a8-5246-ab57-cfe5fab06481">71. Ibid., 251.
72. Ibid.
73. Kawashima, “A Revisionist Reading Revisited,” 50. Emphasis original.
74. Trible, “Eve and Adam,” 252.
75. Ibid., 253.
76. Ibid., 254.
77. Ibid., 252.
78. Ibid., 256.
79. Ibid., 257.
80. Ibid.
81. Koosed, “Coming of Age in Phyllis Trible’s World,” 16.
82. Trible, “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” 48.
83. Martin, Pedagogy of the Bible, 30.
84. Gregory of Nyssa, Great Catechism, 481.
85. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, 25.
86. Trible, “Eve and Adam,” 258.
87. Augustine, “On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins,” 22.
88. Augustine, City of God, 279. See also Rombs, Saint Augustine and the Fall of the Soul, 101–6.
89. See Langdon Gilkey’s assessment that “both Bultmann and Niebuhr, so it appears from the vantage point of the present, seemed surprisingly too liberal” on the issue of the primitive versus real or permanent meaning of Christian myths in On Niebuhr, 68. For a helpful discussion of Niebuhr on myth, see Dorrien, Word as True Myth, 122–26.
90. Niebuhr, “Truth in Myths,”16.
91. Ibid., 25.
92. Niebuhr, Interpretation, 46.
93. Ibid., 53–54.
94. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, 18.
95. Ibid., 14.
96. Ibid., 16.
97. Ibid., 59.
98. Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, 34.
99. Wyschogrod and Caputo, “Postmodernism and the Desire for God,” 301.
100. Henriksen, Desire, Gift, and Recognition, 32.
101. Ward, “A Postmodern Version of Paradise,” 7.
102. Ibid., 8.
Chapter Three: Biblical Journeys
The stories of Abraham setting out for the land of Canaan, Moses leading the Israelites through the wilderness, and Jesus traveling to Jerusalem have long sparked the imagination of Christian writers who discovered a deep resonance between these pivotal events in the biblical narrative and the twists and turns of their own journeys of faith. Both in the life of the community and the life of the individual, the journey stories function as compasses to orient Christians as they navigate their way through time. The elements that comprise the journeys become symbols of the dynamics of the Christian life: the allies who make it possible for the sojourner to advance in the journey become the virtues, the foes who attack under the cover of darkness become our deepest fears, and the destination being sought describes our deepest aspirations. In this chapter we will examine how the image of the biblical journey has been incorporated into the theology of the third-century biblical scholar Origen of Alexandria in his Homily XVII on Numbers, the twelfth-century Augustinian canon Achard of St. Victor in his Sermon XV, and the contemporary Franciscan Richard Rohr in his recent work, Falling Upward. It is hoped that a study of how they employ the image of the biblical journey might help us revitalize the use of the image in our own theological reflection and spiritual reading of the Bible.
Origen, Homily XVII on Numbers 33
The common thread that runs throughout all areas of Origen’s thought is his deep familiarity with the Bible. This, his supporters contend, enables him to uncover various levels of meaning from the most seemingly insignificant biblical passages. According to his critics, however, he can spin fanciful tales from the simplest biblical details. Origen’s exact position on the number of meanings to be found in a biblical passage remains a matter of scholarly dispute. At the heart of the debate is Origen’s observation in Book IV of his On First Principles (or Peri archon):
One must therefore [portray] the meaning of the sacred writers in a threefold way upon one’s own soul, so that the simple man may be edified by what we call the flesh of the scripture, this name being given to the obvious interpretation; while the man who has made some progress may be edified by its soul, as it were; and the man who is perfect and like those mentioned by the apostle: “We speak wisdom among the perfect; yet a wisdom not of this world, nor of the rulers of this world, which are coming to nought; but we speak God’s wisdom in mystery, even the mystery that hath been hidden, which God foreordained before the worlds unto our glory”—this man may be edified by the spiritual law, which has “a shadow of the good things to come.” For just as man consists of body, soul, and spirit, so in the same way does the scripture, which has been prepared by God to be given for man’s salvation (IV, 2, 4).103
Many of Origen’s interpreters have taken this to mean that each passage has a threefold sense. This position, however, is not without its problems. In his study on the history of biblical interpretation, Henning Graf Reventlow notes that “it is conspicuous that nowhere in his later practice of exegesis does [Origen] carry out this threefold sense.”104 Other
