Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity.

Davies, Lloyd G.

By John David Dawson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. ISBN 0-520-22630-5. Pp. x + 302. $50.00.

One of the great surprises for any Christian upon exploring the intricacies of Jewish textual study and halakhic observance is that practices so different from those of Christianity can nevertheless derive from the same source--the Hebrew Scriptures. Latent within the unity of that text are the divergent ways of normative Judaism and Christianity, ways of reading and living that have been richly productive of cultures so distinct that sometimes it seems the two communities exist in completely different worlds. And yet, beneath the difference, or prior to it, there are the same Hebrew words, words that both traditions accept as sacred, divinely inspired, constitutive of their lives-and words that, despite their sameness, mark the very origin and locus of difference.

Interpretive disagreement between the Jewish and Christian traditions regarding their shared Scriptures has provoked much antagonism throughout history, with often murderous results. But it has also forged a relationship and commonality--a kinship--that, in the sobering aftermath of the Holocaust, has led to a new kind of dialogue, as between equals, over those differences. Today, in an alliance against a newly militant Islam on the one hand and a frivolous, secular entertainment culture on the other, serious Christians and Jews show new promise of achieving a mutual appreciation for the different ways their traditions have opened up the meaning of a common Scripture. John David Dawson's Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity, despite its often plodding academic style, is a timely contribution to this ongoing dialectic between Jewish and Christian hermeneutics; it deserves careful attention by anyone wishing to understand more fully what is at stake in the way Christians read the Scriptures.

Dawson writes at an historical moment when the legitimacy of the Christian Bible--Old and New Testaments--as a morally viable, coherent unity is under attack. The attack revolves around the charge of supersessionism--the idea that the New Testament interprets the Old Testament in such a way that Christianity supersedes Judaism, that Christian Israel replaces Jewish Israel. In a supersessionist hermeneutics there is no place for a distinct Jewish presence within a newly constituted Israel, for "Judaism has been completely displaced from the Christian Bible" (2). For some critics of Christianity the necessary theological preconditions for the Holocaust are already set in the New Testament, and Christian history need only run its course from Paul, the Apostle of "neither Jew nor Greek" to its consummation in Hitler's final solution to the problem of Jewish existence. Dawson believes that this disturbing critique of Christianity should be taken seriously, but he also recognizes that the idea of a transformed Israel "seems central to classic Christian self-identification" (3). Can Christianity maintain its own sense of participating in a divinely inaugurated transformation of Israel's history, while at the same time escaping from the charge that it denies to Jews an independent identity? Is a non-supersessionist Christian reading of the Hebrew Scriptures possible?

Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity is an extended investigation into just such a hermeneutic rehabilitation of traditional Christian reading, focusing on the classic form of interpretation known as "figural" or "typological" Dawson's task is to demonstrate that Christian figural interpretation of the Bible does not necessarily lead to non-literal, allegorical readings that efface Jewish existence. This is a defensive book, particularly in its response to Daniel Boyarin's Jewish critique of Pauline hermeneutics, but Dawson also revisits Erich Auerbach and Hans Frei, giving voice to their secular and Christian points of view as well. Interwoven in Dawson's discussion of each of these modern thinkers are the ideas of Origen, the major representative of Alexandrian allegorical hermeneutics and one of the founding fathers of Christian interpretation. Origen provides Dawson the historical distance to bring modernist assumptions about reading and textuality into question; for instance, Dawson makes a distinction between textuality and historical action, claiming that true Christian reading is not exclusively about texts and their meanings but rather concerns the "intelligibility of a divine performance" (11).

Dawson's subtle, sustained discussions of Boyarin, Auerbach, and Frei are excellent introductions to each of these thinkers. In his analysis of Boyarin's A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (1994), Dawson uses Boyarin's arguments against Paul to highlight the difficulties that Christian readers face in answering charges of supersessionism. Dawson's reading of Auerbach reminds us once again of the brilliance of the twentieth century's preeminent literary scholar. Auerbach's "Figura" from Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (1984), is the crucial text in this discussion, but Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953) shows its central relevance, both aesthetically and historically, for understanding what Dawson calls "a unified European humanistic culture" a culture "rooted in a uniquely religious mode of representing reality--the Christian tradition of figural interpretation of the Bible" (84). Dawson uses Frei's The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974) to show that modern Christianity has good reason to avoid allegory: just as Christian allegorists once neglected the literality of the Old Testament in favor of its fulfilled "meaning" in the New Testament, so too modernists can subvert the literality of New Testament accounts of events such as the resurrection of Jesus by substituting an allegorical meaning for the literal sense of the story. To Frei (like the New Critics), the meaning of a text is inseparable from its narrative form, and thus he cautions against the "subversion by meaning" of the Gospel narrative (160)--that is to say, the story of Jesus always takes precedence over any possible meaning. When meaning can be attained independently, narrative loses its revelatory power to communicate real knowledge; instead, the text simply acts as a stimulus to thought, and meaning becomes "indistinguishable from one's own all-too-human subjectivity" (187).

Dawson maintains a running dialogue with Origen throughout his book, for it is Origen's emphasis on spiritual transformation that Dawson finds central to Christian figural reading: "Where Origen most excels, [...] and where each of our three modern thinkers falls short, is in his awareness that classical Christian life is a life of continual transformation of what already is into something different" (214). Dawson maintains that this desire for a new life need not involve the replacement, rejection, or repudiation of the old; instead, Christian figural imagination, like historical narrative, takes on a structure in which both past and future form a coherent whole as one discovers one's identity through development and change.

In these readings of Boyarin, Auerbach, Frei, and Origen, Dawson's own voice is curiously muted; one could desire a more personal, even polemical, engagement with the issues he raises rather than his continual deference to other authors. Because of his reticence, it is difficult to know Dawson's own position when, for instance, he notes in a discussion of Frei that "Christians insist that the figural reading of the Old Testament is precisely the reading that extends the meaning of Hebrew Scripture when that meaning is adequately grasped" (163-64). Here the divide between Christianity and Judaism remains obscured behind a kind of hermeneutic blindness, which is linked, ironically, to the Christian insight into the linear form of narrative. Christian insight into story centers on the Gospel accounts of divine acts, rendered intelligible as the anticipated fulfillment of earlier prefigurations; the meaning of the Gospels depends upon a figural reading of both texts--Old and New Testament in their literal sense. This commitment to narrative realism is achieved, however, at a twofold cost: New Testament fulfillment tends to overshadow Old Testament type/figure, and the linear structure that moves from figure to fulfillment gives to biblical narrative a dangerous precedence over biblical law.

Christian figural reading does indeed extend and grasp a narrative meaning in the Hebrew Scriptures, but to assume that "the meaning of Hebrew Scripture" can be grasped adequately through a figural reading alone is to ignore the grasp of meaning in the Hebrew Scriptures that is extended properly only in rabbinic Judaism. Christians who restrict Old Testament meaning to a narrative culminating in the Gospel story fail to grasp adequately the meaning of halakhah, which, like narrative, is also inseparable from its performance. Dawson charges Boyarin atone point with "displacing an activity with a meaning" (31), but Christians too readily assume that the Jewish activity of observing the law can be legitimately displaced through a recognition of its inner, spiritual meaning--a classic, insidious instance of "subversion by meaning" Just as the meaning of resurrection is dependent, finally, upon its actual, bodily performance, so too the meaning of circumcision requires a literal and physical cutting. I suspect a Christian hermeneutic tends to reduce biblical narrative itself to a mythos of sweeping historical patterns, while neglecting the ordinary, mundane activities performed by each individual in his or her own particular life. But a concern for story is, ultimately, inseparable from what Wordsworth calls those "little, nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and of love"--actions that are the very focus of halakhic observance. The embodied meaning of Torah, as it is enacted in the halakhic life, provides an invaluable counterweight against the tendencies in figural reading for a disembodied meaning to supplant and subvert the literality of Scripture.

If the divergence between Judaic and Christian readings of Hebrew Scriptures revolves around the importance of narrative for Christianity, so that historically "Christianity ended up privileging haggadah over halakhah" (173), Christianity nevertheless remains covenantally bound to a Scripture that also can be read halakhically. It is incumbent upon Christians, as responsible readers of the Hebrew Scriptures, to explore their relationship to Judaic reading and to "return to the linguistic forms--midrash, peshat that characterize the biblical reading of [Judaism]"; in so doing they will face what Frei calls "the unpredictable consequences of learning the `language' of the Jewish tradition" (174). Dawson states, in a rare moment of self-disclosure," I suspect that few contemporary Christians even begin to encounter, respect, and engage Judaism at the level of concreteness to which the figural imagination of the New Testament itself commits them" (217). While this book does not itself undertake such an engagement with Judaism, it persuasively argues for its necessity and lays the preliminary groundwork. One can only hope that Dawson himself is committed to that project; if so, we can look forward to a sequel exploring how the figural imagination of Christianity intersects with the halakhic imagination of Judaism.

Lloyd G. Davies
Western Kentucky University