The Hidden and the Revealed

An unacknowledged but powerful presumption guides a great deal of today’s theology, whether it appears in the popular press, in scholarly journals or in Sunday morning homilies. It is the conviction that language and images that depict transcendent rather than empirical reality are mere metaphors. They are “symbols” in the modern, popular sense, which means they are mere “signs” that point beyond themselves to something else. To ancient Christian theologians, on the other hand, words and images are genuinely symbolic: they actually participate in the reality they depict. They have the capacity, under the right conditions, to take part in the very existence of the person, object, event or promise to which they refer. It is this capacity that enables words and images to become vehicles of divine revelation.

This understanding of the symbolic character of words and images is basic to Orthodox Christianity. It justifies, and in fact makes necessary, an approach to the interpretation of Scripture that is based to a significant degree on typology. “Types” can be described as verbal images that point forward to future or transcendent realities, as the image of the Hebrew Temple points forward to the Church, the manna in the wilderness to the Bread of Life (of both the Eucharist and the heavenly Banquet), or the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 52-53 to the Person and Passion of Jesus Christ. Because of their symbolic quality, though, types do more than simply point beyond themselves to some future reality, the “antitype.” They actually participate in that reality: they share in it and bring it to completion. The Church as the Body of Christ recapitulates and fulfills the covenant relation God had already established with His people Israel; the Eucharist is grounded in and fulfills the Passover liberation of the Exodus, itself symbolized by the blood of the Lamb; and Christ accomplishes His work as Revealer and Redeemer by incarnating—bearing “in the flesh”—the innocent suffering and vicarious death of the Servant of the Lord. Through the relation between Old Testament image and New Testament fulfillment—between type and antitype—God reveals His presence and purpose within the realm of human history, the realm of our daily life.

Typology in the understanding of the Fathers goes farther than this, however. To their mind, the antitype in a very real if mysterious way is already present and active in the type. This is why the apostle Paul, in 1 Corinthians 10:4, can declare, regarding the rock that followed the people of Israel through the desert to provide them with “living water”: “the rock was Christ”!

Because of these connections, exegetes—particularly those interested in “hermeneutics,” the principles of biblical interpretation—will speak of Scripture as “self-referential.” Its meaning can be grasped, at least in part, by discerning the interrelationships—the symbolic connections—that exist between the Old and New Covenants as between the various books of either Testament. Exegesis, as the Fathers practiced it, involves a constant cross-referencing, from type to antitype, from prophetic image to fulfillment in Christ—and back again (the true meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures, in this perspective, can only be understood as Christological: Jesus is both the fulfillment of the Old Testament and the key to its proper interpretation).

To talk in these terms, though, is only possible when we understand two basic truths: that the “ineffable, inconceivable, invisible and incomprehensible” God actually reveals Himself in human history, in the framework of human experience; and that the mode of His self-revelation is essentially that of word and image. (Hence the importance of iconography in Orthodox faith and worship: the words of Scripture are expressed graphically through the dogmatic “statements” of sacred images.)

Theological language, nevertheless, always points beyond itself and beyond the limits of our understanding and experience. Behind every creedal confession, as behind every Gospel account or apostolic exhortation, there lies ultimate, unfathomable mystery, hiddenness. God reveals Himself, He makes Himself known, in the Person of His Son, Jesus Christ. To a limited extent, words and images can capture that self-revelation and present it to us in language that we can understand. Behind the language (verbal or graphic), however, there lies an incomprehensible realm of being, power and glory that the human mind can’t begin to fathom, much less express.

God reveals Himself, yet He remains essentially hidden. God calls us to use our intellects to search the Scriptures and to perceive, to understand, His presence and purpose within history and within our life. Yet God remains mystery, inaccessible to thought and inexpressible by means of words or images. Symbols may participate in the reality they signify, but that participation is at best partial. As the ultimate “antitype,” Christ may participate—be present and active—in the prophetic images of the Old Testament and in the experience of the Church. But that participation remains “symbolic,” real and yet incomplete, until the End-time, the time of fulfillment, when God will be “all in all.”

This implies that any interpretation of the Scriptures—whether it serve to deepen our own understanding, to produce formal doctrine, to tell a Bible story, or to preach a sermon—needs to be grounded in an acceptance of the limits of intellectual inquiry, together with an experience of God’s self-revelation that is possible only in prayer. St. Ephrem the Syrian expresses this point in a verse from one of his Hymns of Faith^[1] :

There is intellectual enquiry in the Church,
Investigating what is revealed:
The intellect was not intended to pry into hidden things.

Each of us is called to investigate what is revealed, and to do so with all available tools of scientific inquiry. This includes honoring the symbolic nature of language, which enables us to behold in and behind the words and images of Holy Scripture (and of other liturgical, sacramental aspects of our faith) the presence and activity of the God of our salvation. That symbolic language is not mere metaphor. It offers us the possibility to participate directly in the reality it depicts because that Reality is present and acting in and through the language itself, in and through the words and images that bear witness to it. When we sing the Vespers hymn, “O Gladsome Light,” we not only “recall” the image of Christ and the Holy Trinity; we celebrate now—at the “setting of the sun” on this day—the presence and glory of God in our midst. When we read and proclaim a biblical story of one of Christ’s miracles, we are not merely recalling some event of the distant past. Our “remembrance” occurs in the profoundly biblical sense: it reactualizes what is remembered, so that we ourselves benefit from Christ’s ministry: we experience our own healing, accomplished by the unique Physician of our souls and bodies. In similar fashion, when we celebrate the sacraments, our words and gestures enable us to participate immediately in transcendent grace (the ritual of baptism is a true “initiation” into Christian existence; the wedding crowns, symbolizing both glory and ascetic struggle, actually structure—give shape and direction—to our vocation as a new creation united in “one flesh”). Words, gestures and images have power. They “accomplish what God purposes” in our personal and communal experience (Isaiah 55:10-11!).

This understanding of type and symbol is simply lost on most people today, including many who attempt to produce theology. If the traditional theological language of the Church is theoprepês, “worthy of God,” it is because it acknowledges and respects the difference between what is revealed and what remains hidden. Yet at the same time, it communicates to us, personally and intimately, the One who reveals Himself out of His infinite hiddenness, to offer us a real and eternal communion in His own transcendent Life and Being.