In certain fascinating cases, our understanding, however strenuously won, is
to remain provisional. There is to be an undecidability at the heart, at what
Coleridge called the inner penetralium of the poem. 33Accepting that this is the nature of the scriptures and scriptural interpreta-
tion begins to deliver us from the naivety and hubris that again and again
thwart our attempts to read faithfully. That said, we must not let the dif-
fi culties of scripture overwhelm us, so that we refuse the responsibility of
interpretation altogether, like the servant who buried his “talent” for fear
of failing his diffi cult master. Far from it, we are daring and creative in our
interpretation just because we are confi dent that the scriptures—or, rather,
the scriptures’ Lord—demand this work of us. In the words of St. Peter
of Damascus, “The Logos wishes to transmit things to us in a way that is
neither too clear nor too obscure” so that we are not overwhelmed by our
“utter inability to grasp what is said” but are aroused to pursuit of the truth
and learn humility in the realization that not everything is meant for us
to understand. 34
T HE ECCENTRIC BEAUTY OF THE TRIUNE GOD
We cannot understand what the scriptures are or what we are expected to
do with them until we begin to understand the nature of the God who
gives them to us. Coming to know how to read the scriptures creatively
and beautifully begins, therefore, with refl ection on the doctrine of the
Trinity, because that is the way we begin to see how God is beautiful. As
Trinity, God lives eternally, giving and receiving the beauty we name as
“love.” In Jonathan Edwards’ words, God is beautiful precisely because
God personally partakes in the “consent, agreement and union of being
to being” within his own life. 35 In other words, God is the God of beauty
because God exists in the joyful delights of lively personal communion. 36
Through the event of Christ’s mission, the divine communion turns
itself over to the conditions of human being-in-the-world, making itself
vulnerable to the overwhelming power of sin and death. And through the
descent of incarnation/crucifi xion and the ascent of resurrection/ascen-
sion, the lively divine beauty takes up into itself the ugliness of the Son’s
worldly experiences, so that we cannot know the one apart from the other.
In the gospel story, the form of Christ’s beauty is revealed in barn smells and
soiled swaddling clothes, perfi dy and perjury, exposed bone and the cry of108 C.E.W. GREEN