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Thinking about Christ and Scripture with and beyond Time and the Word

I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to Ephraim Radner’s important and challenging book, Time and the Word, a difficult essay that requires, but also rewards, patient and repeated reading. Radner’s ambitious proposal for the recovery of a figural approach to reading and interpreting Christian Scripture defies conventional “critical” modes of exegesis and is replete with implications for dogmatics, lectionary use and liturgics, and preaching. With the metaphysics undergirding this program, Radner endeavors to resolve perennially thorny problems at the intersection of the doctrine of God, Christology, and the ontology of Scripture. Time and the Word is neither a methodological guide to the practice of figural exegesis nor a survey of how figuration has developed in the history of biblical interpretation, though it does contain reflections along both of these tracks. The book, rather, advances a robust theology of figuration, focusing on the relation between Scripture, God, and time. I raise no quarrel with the main round of theses comprising Time and the Word. To my mind, Radner makes a convincing apology for figural exegesis as a mode of reading Scripture theologically and canonically. I find his approach to figuration helpful for establishing the reception of the Old Testament as Christian Scripture in a manner that makes Christological sense of the texts without compromising their essential Jewishness. Additionally, the heart of the book—chapter 5, “Figural Speech and THINKING ABOUT CHRIST AND SCRIPTURE WITH AND BEYOND TIME AND THE WORD