Macrocosmic Spiritual Seed: The Living Biblical Symbol of Christ

Consider Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae’s reflection, in The Experience of God, Volume 1, on the relationship between God’s work in and through Christ as it is depicted in Scripture and time in its threefold division into past, present, and future (pay special attention to the tensed and temporally oriented language): 

“...[T]he riches that God will show us in the ages to come, the entirety of the goodness he has shown towards us in Christ, is described in Scripture. Sacred Scripture is, thus, not merely a book which helps us remember what God has done in preparing for the incarnation of his Son and in that incarnation itself; it is also a book that tells us what the incarnate Son of God is now doing and will continue to do until the end of the ages to bring us also to resurrection. For Scripture depicts not only God’s coming down to us on earth even to the extent of his incarnation, but also the beginning of his raising us up to deification through the resurrection, and the beginning of the extension of this act of his spreading out within the early Church from the state of resurrection and providing the pattern for his action until the end of the world.” 

(Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Volume 1, p. 41) 

We see in Scripture a teleological unity which integrates past, present, and future, anchored eternally and transcendently in Christ. On one level, Scripture reveals the past as creation’s anticipation in man of the incarnation, the present as the creation in man being crucified with the incarnate Christ, and the future as calling creation in man into resurrected life. However, although a good point of departure, this picture of the meaning of biblical time is too simple. For the biblical past is not merely an anticipation of the incarnation but an anticipation of the incarnate Christ’s kenotic crucifixion whose purpose is to resurrect the whole cosmos in man—and to the extent that, from this perspective in the past, the biblical future-presents of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection are anticipated in the past, the biblical future is to that extent present within it. Further, the present is not merely creation’s crucifixion with the incarnate Christ in man but its active birth in man into resurrected life. And, finally, the future is not merely calling the present creation in man into resurrected life, as one far off, but is itself present within it in the eternal Christ, actively imparting new life through the Spirit. The apparent paradox of this mutual indwelling of past, present and future is resolved by Christ’s eternal presence within each.

Expanding on the Scriptures’ conveyance of Christ in relation to time, Fr. Dumitru finds in the notion of revelation the integral point of connection between Scripture, the unfolding of Tradition, and the eschatological development of man (which, for Fr. Dumitru, also implicitly involves the eschatological development of the whole world). 

“Inasmuch as it is in the general resurrection, in an eternal communion with the infinite person of Christ, and in our fulfillment in that person that revelation projects its final goal—a goal towards which we advance also through our own efforts in our continually improved human relations—and inasmuch as this goal is also disclosed in a concentrated way by Scripture, tradition makes explicit at every moment the road contained virtually in revelation as a road leading towards the goal of our perfection in Christ.” 

(Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Volume 1, p. 50) 

What Fr. Dumitru here draws out reverberates the deep significance of the words of Christ in Matthew 4:4, quoting Deuteronomy 8:3, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God”. All derivative life is participation in God’s Life, and when we, as humans, live by God’s words, we are progressively born into His Life. Biblical revelation, as it is perpetually cooked in the Church and served by its dynamic Tradition, is the symbolic food of man’s eschatological growth into God’s Life. Tradition, at every moment—past, present, and future—carries within itself the eschaton. Indeed, Scripture, through Tradition, is manifest as a sacramental reality, the pinnacle of which is the Eucharist, the food of Christ's body and the drink of His blood. Sacrament, among other things, is precisely the means by which eternal realities are experienced within time. Fr. Dumitru, on the page prior to that of the passage quoted above, points to Christ Himself as the very revelation preserved by the Church in her perpetual unfolding of Scripture, which is itself played out not merely in the reading of Scripture as something to be thought about and reflected upon by individuals, but as the very shape of Christ’s Life being incarnated in actual Church communities and sustained by the grace of God working in liturgy and through sacrament:

“But this transmission of the integral Christ through tradition, the Christ who is presented essentially in Scripture, also provides the possibility of a continuous deepening and unfolding of the content of Scripture. This is a deepening and unfolding which remains within the framework of the tradition of the Church, of the fundamental unfolding of Scripture through the sacraments and through her liturgical and spiritual life, for it is a deepening in communion with the same Christ who is infinite in the spiritual riches that he communicates to us.”

(Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Volume 1, p. 49) 

Scripture is a macrocosmic map of meaning which teems timelessly with the potentiality of Life, through which Christ calls man to enact His will in the world. After interpreting in the Scriptures all things concerning Himself for Luke and Cleopas on the road to Emmaus, and after His ascension to the Father upon fulfilling the entirety of His will in His earthly ministry, culminating in the Passion, Christ, through His prophets and apostles, leaves us not merely a written record of His life refracted through the whole of human history—past, present, and future—but a linguistic icon of Himself, the Bible, whose living exegesis through Tradition comes by the work of the Spirit within us, who illuminates the spirit of Scripture within its letter and calls forth a new creation out of itself through man. The Church, bearing this new creation within her womb until the end of time, will then carry history with her into the eternal Kingdom, whose patterns are encoded in Scripture and made progressively manifest in Tradition.

God, through Christ, will be all in all. There is no higher purpose than this; there is no greater plan executable than reality becoming Reality. The Scripture, in revealing Christ, through whom the world was made, reveals also the world as it truly is and as it truly will become. Accordingly, the Scripture, as a whole, is a semantic, macrocosmic seed containing in virtual form the transformational schema necessary for the world's eschatological unfolding through man in Christ by the Spirit. This seed was planted by the Spirit into the Church, which, after the likeness of the One who inheres symbolically in the seed, is a divine-human Garden, out of which grows a new creation. Christ is the divine-human macrocosm; the Bible is the divine-human macrocosmic symbol of the divine-human Symbol of God, the Spiritual seed of the new heavens and earth. To unpack and explore this further, let us turn to consider some aspects of the structure of Scripture.

Because the meaning of the Bible has macrocosmic scope, with many layers of nested symbols which also develop diachronically in the unfolding of its narrative, it is impossible to provide a linear exegesis that captures the whole of its meaning. Even to speak of its narrative as a diachronic unfolding, although true, is inadequate, since the One of whom the Bible is a revelation, Jesus Christ, is both the beginning and end of all things, all history, and all meaning. This leaves the reader in an awe-inducing, beautiful dizziness in which the narratival beginning of the Bible, Genesis, is not revealed in its full significance until the end of the book of Revelation; and, conversely, the book of Revelation is quite semantically opaque without being seen in the light of the Bible’s progressive symbolic development commencing and growing out of the seed of Genesis. With each successive reading of the Bible, its symbolic fullness grows like a tree from this seed; with each iteration, one finds fresh, new fruit to eat. Moreover, this narratively linear approach is only one of many possible coherent paths through the Bible; at each turn of phrase, there is a semantic wormhole through which a reader may travel, coming out in a different location or at a different level of meaning, or both. What results is a conception of Scripture as a semantically and symbolically four-dimensional continuum in which each point is connected to each other in its macrocosmic heart: the divine person Christ, the Symbol made semantic flesh. The four dimensions in this continuum can be found in the fourfold sense of Scripture—historical, typological, tropological, and anagogical—and the symbols that inhabit the biblical world find their full semantic identity through their location within this unified symbolic cosmos. While these four dimensions can be distinguished, they nevertheless constitute an organic whole and are thus inseparable. For example, it is possible to see the Bible distinctly at the tropological (or moral) level, but one can achieve this view coherently only in its relation to the other three dimensions—and the same is true for each dimension in relation to the other three. Truly, the key to navigating the complex Biblical cosmos is life in Christ, in the Spirit, in the Church, in the Tradition, in a continuous living dialogue among the faithful, made possible only by the grace of God working unity in human hearts by the Spirit who sheds love abroad from them all into all others. The expansive and illuminating radiance of this love will, on this basis, shine forth from the pages of Scripture, progressively revealing its fullness of meaning, which, ultimately, we will realize is precisely that very life and light of Christ by which we are able to perceive it. The fullness of the Bible’s meaning, because it is graspable only in terms of the whole unity of all its interrelated semantic and symbolic multiplicity, is thus only truly graspable in direct, personal communion with Christ, who is, as Person, the infinite fullness of its meaning.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” (Rev. 22:13)

Christ is both the genesis and consummation of all creation, the revelation of Reality.

“[Y]our life is hid with Christ in God.” (Col. 3:3)

The purpose of our earthly lives is to be born into Christ, and thus be born truly into creation—and in this new life, to participate in creation’s eternal eschatological perfection.

“It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.” (Prov. 25:2)

It is through our searching for and finding Christ in all things that we are both ourselves divinized and come, through our participation in God’s act of creatively transforming all things, to divinize all things together with and in Christ by the Spirit. We truly find Him when we stand at the juncture between mediating His presence to creation and having His presence mediated by creation back to us.