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| Scripture Contains Many Contradictions, and Many Statements Which are Not Literally True, But Must Be Read Spiritually and Mystically.
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4. Scripture
Contains Many Contradictions, and Many Statements Which are Not
Literally True, But Must Be Read Spiritually and Mystically.
In the case I have supposed where the historians desire
to teach us by an image what they have seen in their mind, their
meaning would be found, if the four were wise, to exhibit no
disagreement; and we must understand that with the four Evangelists it
is not otherwise. They made full use for their purpose of things
done by Jesus in the exercise of His wonderful and extraordinary power;
they use in the same way His sayings, and in some places they tack on
to their writing, with language apparently implying things of sense,
things made manifest to them in a purely intellectual way. I do
not condemn them if they even sometimes dealt freely with things which
to the eye of history happened differently, and changed them so as to
subserve the mystical aims they had in view; so as to speak of a thing
which happened in a certain place, as if it had happened in another, or
of what took place at a certain time, as if it had taken place at
another time, and to introduce into what was spoken in a certain way
some changes of their own. They proposed to speak the truth where
it was possible both materially and spiritually, and where this was not
possible it was their intention to prefer the spiritual to the
material. The spiritual truth was often preserved, as one might
say, in the material falsehood. As, for example, we might judge
of the story of Jacob and Esau.4997
Jacob
says to Isaac, “I am Esau thy firstborn son,” and
spiritually he spoke the truth, for he already partook of the rights of
the first-born, which were perishing in his brother, and clothing
himself with the goatskins he assumed the outward semblance of Esau,
and was Esau all but the voice praising God, so that Esau might
afterward find a place to receive a blessing. For if Jacob had
not been blessed as Esau, neither would Esau perhaps have been able to
receive a blessing of his own. And Jesus too is many things,
according to the conceptions of Him, of which it is quite likely that
the Evangelists took up different notions; while yet they were in
agreement with each other in the different things they wrote.
Statements which are verbally contrary to each other, are made about
our Lord, namely, that He was descended from David and that He was not
descended from David. The statement is true, “He was
descended from David,” as the Apostle says,4998
“born of the seed of David according
to the flesh,” if we apply this to the bodily part of Him; but
the self-same statement is untrue if we understand His being born of
the seed of David of His diviner
power; for He was declared to be the Son of God with power. And
for this reason too, perhaps, the sacred prophecies speak of Him now as
a servant, and now as a Son. They call Him a servant on account
of the form of a servant which he wore, and because He was of the seed
of David, but they call Him the Son of God according to His character
as first-born. Thus it is true to call Him man and to call Him
not man; man, because He was capable of death; not man, on account of
His being diviner than man. Marcion, I suppose, took sound words
in a wrong sense, when he rejected His birth from Mary, and declared
that as to His divine nature He was not born of Mary, and hence made
bold to delete from the Gospel the passages which have this
effect. And a like fate seems to have overtaken those who make
away with His humanity and receive His deity alone; and also those
opposites of these who cancel His deity and confess Him as a man to be
a holy man, and the most righteous of all men. And those who hold
the doctrine of Dokesis, not remembering that He humbled Himself even
unto death4999
and became obedient
even to the cross, but only imagining in Him the absence of suffering,
the superiority to all such accidents, they do what they can to deprive
us of the man who is more just than all men, and are left with a figure
which cannot save them, for as by one man came death, so also by one
man is the justification of life. We could not have received such
benefit as we have from the Logos had He not assumed the man, had He
remained such as He was from the beginning with God the Father, and had
He not taken up man, the first man of all, the man more precious than
all others, purer than all others and capable of receiving Him.
But after that man we also shall be able to receive Him, to receive Him
so great and of such nature as He was, if we prepare a place in
proportion to Him in our soul. So much I have said of the
apparent discrepancies in the Gospels, and of my desire to have them
treated in the way of spiritual interpretation.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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