account for Hebrews’ appropriations of the OT Scriptures and the challenges these pose for modern sensibilities. At present we wish only to take up the thread we let drop above and suggest a broad way of thinking about what is happening for what it is worth.
In modern fiction it is not uncommon to notice what could be called fragmentary “images of Christ” scattered among the characters of a story or even in the plot line as such.19 The device is all the more compelling when the image of Christ is assigned to a character so completely unlike Christ. One thinks of Edward Wallant’s The Children at the Gate or the whiskey priest in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, though the possible illustrations are many. Again, we will take recourse to the different image of light shown through a dispersive prism. The one, integrated light is dispersed into its several colors. Or again, we may think of an abstract painting of a woman. The painting has an historical individual as its subject yet the image is of such a character that the human subject could not be guessed unless she revealed herself to us in person. All her features are present but rearranged and distorted in other ways such that she is truly the one present, she and no other, but unrecognizable without direct knowledge of her in person. In fact, the abstract image can be said to reveal her essence more truly than a realistic image could give us.
Each of these analogies—images of Christ, a prism, abstract art—provide ways of appreciating how Christ is present in the OT shadows and copies for Hebrews. His one, integrated atoning act is represented in the rites of the OT that are radically diverse in character and that may even be chronologically distinct. His image is scattered among personalities so unlike each other and so unlike him as to be untraceable, and yet the correlations represent the OT divine-human authorial intention. Christ’s profile and that of his work is indubitably (as a matter of truth) that of the OT witness and yet unrecognizable in that portrayal until he steps into view as himself. All along the OT witness was signaling its incompleteness and its prophetic character while God’s speaking awaited its self-expression in the appearance of the Son who is himself the radiance of God’s glory,20 but all along it was speaking of this one and no other.
It will not do to expect easy correspondence. Where we find the most compelling foreshadowing we find the most striking dissimilarities. He is not so much answerable to the patterns as they to him, and yet he commands us to see him in them and it is clear that we cannot see him in himself without them. They are the clothing of his glory, the revelation of his person and work.
It is not our work in what follows to unlock the interpretive secrets behind this exposition but we will hazard its source, which is none other than the “christological big bang” of Jesus’ own presence in which he embodied those Scriptures, enacted them in his obedience, taught his disciples, received his Father’s vocal witness from the skies, and, not least, opened the Scriptures themselves (and his disciples’ minds) in the days separating his resurrection and his ascension. Subsequently he poured out his Spirit through which this understanding unfolded in the obedient life of the church. The birth of the new creation brought all this to existence. Patterns of interpretive reasoning are evident in the samples of this reading that we have in the apostolic writings of the NT though the hints are never so full as to enable us to reduce this way of reading to a set of strictly rational rules of a method.21 We must read as did the apostles but then this will mean that we must carry on as they did in the same Spirit, participating in the same obedience of the Son’s own mission. The question of hermeneutics (roughly, theory of interpretation) is nested inside of the larger movement of obedience in the Spirit. Hebrews is not a handbook of Christian hermeneutics but it is an authoritative guide to how the OT Scriptures must be read and how Christ must be known.
It is not that the modernist demand to reduce all things to reason—defining “reason” in a somewhat limited way—is a wrong approach as such, and it is one that must be respected in any earnest attempt to translate the gospel in compelling ways for a modernist (and “post-modernist”) audience. It is rather to say that what is actually happening in the gospel cannot finally be reduced to those particular tests of “reason” (of the modernistic type) and the insistence on doing so will distort our perceptions. It is not the purpose of this commentary to explore this question in its own right, but we cannot avoid acknowledging it in this general fashion if we are to read Hebrews sympathetically and properly.
Jesus and the Heavenly Tabernacle
At more than one point (e.g., 4:14–16) we will register the view that the pattern shown Moses was none other than the Son and that the copies and shadows corresponded to him and his work more than to heavenly architecture and furniture. This requires at least a brief justification and explanation.
There are ways of affirming a given writer’s beliefs about heavenly objects—however they may be imagined ontologically—that can share in the same modernist assumptions about things and language as do denials of those beliefs. To illustrate: a modernist, scientific mindset might find it more agreeable to imagine that Hebrews intended the language about the heavenly tabernacle as “figurative” rather than “literal.” We might insist in opposition that this is anachronistic. What is agreeable to us is irrelevant; the ancients “would have” (naturally, we suppose) taken the language “literally,” for which parallels can be marshaled. And yet upon inspection it may turn out that the latter view is guilty of assuming that only what is not “modern” (meaning, some belief held by modern people) can be “ancient,” which is a back door sort of way of imposing modernism on antiquity. It may in fact be equally mistaken to assert that a particular ancient thinker either did or did not believe that things “were” (or “are”) as imagery like that of Hebrews presented them. Self-consciously, these were symbolically freighted ways of talking about what exists in the most serious of ways, ways that were normatively determinative for right and wise conduct within empirical history.
Yet it stands to reason that then as now—think of the differences of views even among modern Christians!—individuals may have intended such language as that of Hebrews more or less symbolically, more or less “literally.” One may wonder if all Israelites at the time grasped Solomon’s expansive view of God’s relationship to heaven and earth (1 Kgs 8:27), a view that seemed both to affirm that God was uniquely present in the Most Holy Place of the newly built temple and yet was unlimited by that space. Putting before an ancient (or many a twenty-first-century person invested in a “mythological” conception of the universe) a model of the physical structure of the universe (heliocentric and so forth) may have precipitated either a cheerful shrug (acknowledging the truth and value of both perspectives), violent opposition, or a crisis of faith.
Taking these preliminary remarks further would draw us too far afield, requiring us to take on board anthropological, linguistic, exegetical, theological, and other perspectives. Rather we will merely indicate the considerations that draw us toward the view that Hebrews’ intention was that what Moses “saw,” to which his copies and shadows corresponded, was the Son and his work as enacted in the accepted gospel (which does not mean a fully understood or articulated gospel), while these same copies and shadows form for us what can be described as linguistic-visual “basic particulars” for seeing the Son, images past which we cannot get as if trying to get to our sort of empirically grounded description.
The following considerations are not ranked in order of importance, nor are they exhaustive. Our exposition will register a number of comments along these lines, albeit in passing and without attempting to gather then into one formulation.
Firstly, for the sake of comparison, one could think of the geography and map of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. As one reads the history of The Lord of the Rings it is clear that we are to think of that map as real and consistent; it is the physical setting of the story without which the plot would be shapeless. Or again, the geography and map of Palestine behind the canonical Gospels works the same way. If in either case that physical given were to be strangely
