In the last decade, I have managed to read four of Ephraim Radner’s major monographs: Leviticus (2008), A Time to Keep (2016), Chasing the Shadow (2018), and A Profound Ignorance (2019), though not in that order. I’ve also read portions of Time and the Word (2016). I have been recently ruminating on Radner’s work, given that I am part of a panel addressing his extraordinary corpus at the annual meeting of the Society for Biblical Literature. On the panel, I am engaging Radner’s commentary on Leviticus with a view to teasing out his understanding of the literal sense of Scripture. In this piece, I reflect on what I have learned while studying his Leviticus commentary. While I do not always concur with Radner’s judgments, there is no question in my mind that he is right about many things. In this space I would like to articulate what I find so promising, but also raise a couple of critical questions with the help of Thomas Aquinas.
First, it should come as no surprise that Radner embraces Leviticus as a book that is fundamentally about Jesus Christ. Radner recognizes that Leviticus’ basic principle of intelligibility is Christ. Before reading Radner’s commentary, I understood that intelligibility in terms of fulfillment, “that the comprehensive scheme of Leviticus is fulfiled in the body of Christ” (113). In other words, the promise of Leviticus, for the Christian reader, lies in its indicating Jesus. This is of course true, but it is incomplete. Radner’s commentary speaks eloquently to how Jesus is “explicated by the sacrifices” (58). The acts of God in Christ explicate Leviticus and those very acts are explicated by Leviticus. Put differently, Jesus is the key to Leviticus, but now I know that Leviticus is also the key to Jesus. Leviticus attests Jesus, even as Jesus is expanded by Leviticus.
Second, Creation as a doctrine does important theological work. Creation (as is the case with providence) has an agent, and that is Christ. Radner writes, “Jesus’ body and blood is the originator of the beasts (and the harvests and cakes and so on) and their offering. He creates them in some basic sense” (288). Leviticus has the explanatory power that it does because Christ creates it, and the whole of creation is gathered to God in Christ. God does not leave temporality behind but rather draws it, in Christ and along with us, toward himself. Radner’s figural reading is firmly anchored in “the material character of the figures and discourse of Leviticus” (296). Accordingly, the vision that Leviticus champions is “time-anchored” (240). What is surprising in this is how creation relates to Israel’s history. Israel’s history explicates creation. Israel’s passage through time—which marks Jesus’ passage—denotes “God’s way of being in time and for creatures” (225). One of the key insights from this is the extent to which Leviticus solemnizes temporality as opposed to smothering it. Leviticus does not “squeeze out the phenomenal world as a whole” (114). Why? Because “the nature of figural reality … is real, not imagined, and its reality is given in a diversity of physical and historical shapes, not mental ones” (159).
Radner’s vision regarding Holy Scripture is profoundly comprehensive. He seeks to re-inject “all things into the forms of the Scriptures” to have them ordered “toward God” (117). This is an edifying move. The register is deeply metaphysical: reality is figural. Reality has scriptural form. Thus, Leviticus remains divine sustenance for the Christian community, for Leviticus is a text through which the Son of God moves as its very foundation. Scripture does not refer to reality or absorb reality; instead, Scripture is reality “under the formative sway of Jesus Christ” (33).
For me, three questions arise.
First, it is important to note that Radner’s idiom is “reference” and not so much “sense.” Scriptural referents are not only determinative “of everyday realities” but are reality (80). For Aquinas, however, the idiom is sense. Scripture’s nonliteral senses are contained in the literal sense, which includes Christ. I ask, then, is there much room left in Radner’s account for the literal sense as conveying what is necessary for faith?
Second, the idiom of Scripture as spoken by God dominates. In recent accounts of Scripture’s ontology, the notion of God as speaker, and of Scripture as sanctified human words transparent to God’s revelation, is commonplace. Think, for example, of John Webster’s Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch. As with Webster, Radner does not really invoke God as Author. In my view, this neglected motif (divine authorship) is important, and relates to my previous point about sense vs. reference. If God authors Scripture, then Scripture’s literal sense is divinely intended. It follows, for Aquinas, that God authors everything necessary for faith through the literal sense. This is not to detract from the instrumental character of Scripture’s human authors, but it is to reinstall God’s authorship of the literal sense as central, and to see all subsequent nonliteral senses as based on the literal.
Third and last, the Incarnation, for Radner, is “the source of all Christian language about God” (Time and the Word, 189). Radner’s account of Leviticus shows a particular kind of christological concentration, one that puts Christ at the center of creation and providence, indeed all of God’s ways and works. In this, I wonder about the place of God the Father. Yes, Jesus draws the world with us toward God, but the principle and condition for his so doing is the Father (and the Spirit). The Father is the One who will one day be “all in all,” following 1 Corinthians 15:28. Jesus is from above, from the Father, and the very way to the Father. Radner ends his commentary on Leviticus with the statement that “there are no reflections upon God within it. More than any other scriptural book, then, it is for the Christian a lens rather than an object of the vision itself” (298). If Leviticus is a God-authored text, would it not be fitting to argue that we see in Leviticus something of the attributes of the one God and of the irreversible order of the three in the triune life? Does not the fire that came out “from the Lord and consumed the burnt offering” (9:24) indicate something of what God is like, something of who and what God is? In sum, my hunch is that the way to honor the irreplacable nature of Christ is ever only in relation to the Father, the One from whom Christ comes and to whom he returns in the Spirit, with a redeemed world.
These three questions notwithstanding, I am grateful for Radner’s work. It has helped me to take temporality, indeed bodily life, far more seriously. Most important, it has moved be beyond a vision of the New Testament as simply fulfillment of the Old. I approach the Torah with the recognition that Christ’s form is given there.
The Rev. Dr. Christopher Holmes is professor of Systematic Theology in the Theology Programme at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.
