We have to nurture both the daring humility to let the texts judge us and
the humbled audacity to judge their apparent and presumed meanings in
the light of the hope of the gospel’s promise. We have to trust that we can
truly discern “the mind of the scriptures” 63 because we have been given
“the mind of Christ,” and so share in his “instruction” (1 Cor. 2:16).
When we fi nd in the biblical texts anything that seems to contradict the
gospel as we have received it, we have to let ourselves be moved by the
holy troubledness and awed expectation that alone readies us to under-
stand what the Spirit is in truth saying to the churches. 64
Finally, then, in the light of all that has been said to this point, we
can face the question directly: how do we read the scriptures creatively
and beautifying? How do we make peace with them, as Origen directs
us to do? What does that look like in practice, really? As an attempt at an
answer, I can offer an example which in my judgment best communicates
the needed “how-to” knowledge, and which I hope rouses our imitation:
Paul’s use of Hosea 2:23 and 1:10 in Romans 9:25–26. 65 Hosea, seem-
ingly, prophesies only the restoration of the ten northern tribes of Israel,
but Paul fi nds in the prophecy the promise of the Gentiles’ inclusion in
Abraham’s covenant. He does so because he recognizes in Hosea’s text the
very logic of the gospel: the chosen have been rejected and the rejected
have been chosen so that in the end all may be saved (Rom. 11:32).
Recognizing the “how much more” of the gospel, the immeasurable hope
of the divine promise, Paul sounds new depths of Hosea’s prophecy and
so is moved—and moves us, as his readers—to wonder: “O the depth of
the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his
judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” (Rom. 11:33). That is what it
means to read beautifyingly. That is a way that makes for peace.
NOTES
- David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infi nite: The Aesthetics of Christian
Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 190. - Hans Urs von Balthasar, quoted in Richard Viladesau, Theological
Aesthetics: God in Imagination, Beauty, and Art (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 33. - James K.A. Smith, Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to
Christian Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 83. - Origen, Matthew Vol. 2 (fragment), n.p.; available online: http://www.
newadvent.org/fathers/101602.htm; accessed: December 17, 2015. See
114 C.E.W. GREEN