All Thy Lights Combine: Figural Reading in the Anglican Tradition

By David Ney, Ephraim Radner and Hans Boersma

We do not simply interpret God's word. His word interprets us.

Figural interpretation has been a trademark of Anglican devotions from the beginning. Anglican readers—including Tyndale, Cranmer, Hooker, and Lewis—have been figural readers of the Bible. By paying attention to how words, images, and narratives become figures of others in Scripture, these readers sought to uncover how God's word interprets all of reality. Every verse shines the constellation of God's story.

Edited by David Ney and Ephraim Radner, the essays in All Thy Lights Combine explore how the Anglican tradition has employed figural interpretation to theological, Christological, and pastoral ends. The prayer book is central; it immerses Christians in the words of Scripture and orders them by the word. With guided prayers for morning and evening, this book invites readers to be re--formed by God's word. Become immersed in the riches of the Anglican interpretive tradition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Release date: Jan 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781683595540

Hans Boersma

 Hans Boersma is the Saint Benedict Servants of Christ Chair in Ascetical Theology at Nashotah House Theological Seminary, Wisconsin. His other books include Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry and Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church.

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All Thy Lights Combine

FIGURAL READING in the ANGLICAN TRADITION

EPHRAIM RADNER & DAVID NEY, EDITORS

FOREWORD BY HANS BOERSMA

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All Thy Lights Combine: Figural Reading in the Anglican Tradition

Copyright 2022 Ephraim Radner and David Ney

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You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [e-mail].

Scripture quotations marked ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from The King James Version, public domain.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Print ISBN 9781683595533

Digital ISBN 9781683595540

Library of Congress Control Number 2021943369

Lexham Editorial:   Todd Hains, Elizabeth Vince, Jessi Strong, Kelsey Matthews, Mandi Newell, Abigail Stocker

Cover Design: Kristen Cork, Brittany Schrock

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

CHAPTER 1

An Introduction to Figural Reading in the Anglican Tradition

EPHRAIM RADNER AND DAVID NEY

CHAPTER 2

Scripture Words and the Scriptural Commonwealth

William Tyndale and Figural Reading

DAVID MASON BARR

Excerpt from The Prologue from An Exposition Upon the V. VI. VII. Chapters of Matthew

CHAPTER 3

The Archbishop’s Hand

Thomas Cranmer and Figural Reading

EPHRAIM RADNER

Excerpt from A Fruitful Exhortation Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture

CHAPTER 4

The Poetics of Law

Richard Hooker and Figural Reading

TORRANCE KIRBY

Excerpt from Richard Hooker’s Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie

CHAPTER 5

Making Song with the Psalms:

Mary Sidney Herbert and Figural Reading

LAURANCE WIEDER

Excerpts from the Psalms

CHAPTER 6

God’s Way with Words

John Donne and Figural Reading

NATHAN WALL

Excerpts from Holy Sonnet: I am a little world made cunningly

CHAPTER 7

Ecclesiological Unity and the Enlarging of Scripture

Richard Sibbes and Figural Reading

JULIANNE SANDBERG

Excerpt from Commentary on 2 Corinthians 4:14

CHAPTER 8

The Scripture Mysteries

Charles Wesley and Figural Reading

JOHN R. TYSON

Excerpt from The Good Samaritan

CHAPTER 9

The Multiplicity of Scripture Words

William Jones of Nayland and Figural Reading

DAVID NEY

Excerpt from On the Figurative Language of Holy Scripture

CHAPTER 10

The Mirror of Faith

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Figural Reading

JEFFREY W. BARBEAU

Excerpt from The Statesman’s Manual (1816)

CHAPTER 11

The Feeling of Infinity and Parochial Life

John Keble and Figural Reading

MARIA POGGI JOHNSON

Excerpt from Old Testament Types of the Cross III. The Rod of Moses

CHAPTER 12

Christ Came Not to Destroy but to Fulfill

Female Devotional Interpreters and Figural Reading

MARION TAYLOR

Excerpts from Josephine Butler, Elizabeth Rundle Charles, and Maria W. Stewart

CHAPTER 13

Lord, Bid Me to Come unto Thee on the Water

Henry Mansel and Figural Reading

DANE NEUFELD

Excerpt from The Spirit a Divine Person, to Be Worshipped and Glorified: A Sermon Preached in the Church of the St. Mary-the-Virgin, Oxford, on Friday, Feb. 20, 1863

CHAPTER 14

Let Us Kneel with Mary Maid

Christina Rossetti and Figural Reading

ELIZABETH LUDLOW

Excerpts from I Know You Not, Before the Paling of the Stars, Good Friday, and The Love of Christ which Passeth Knowledge

CHAPTER 15

A Richer Mythology

C. S. Lewis and Figural Reading

JUDITH WOLFE

Excerpts from Miracles and The Magician’s Nephew

CHAPTER 16

The Whole Bible

Lionel Thornton and Figural Reading

JEFF W. BOLDT

Excerpt from Revelation and the Modern World

ON THE DAILY OFFICE

THE ORDER FOR MORNING PRAYER DAILY THROUGHOUT THE YEAR

THE ORDER FOR EVENING PRAYER DAILY THROUGHOUT THE YEAR

LECTIONARY

CONTRIBUTORS

SCRIPTURE INDEX

FOREWORD

Too often we reduce interpretation to something we do: we perform an interpretive act upon the biblical text. This collection of essays, All Thy Lights Combine, is a powerful witness to the truth that, first and foremost, the Scriptures interpret us. As John Donne prayed to God, Interpret thine own work. The Scriptures interpret us, and it is this truth that allows us, feebly, to begin our own work of interpreting them in turn.

This conviction regarding the all-encompassing reach of the divine Scriptures has powerfully shaped the Anglican tradition. The figural back and forth, both within the Scriptures and beyond them (so as to include us), exposes us to God’s powerful word and forces us to bend the knee in adoration at the privilege of being taken up into this eternal word of God. David Ney and Ephraim Radner aptly comment that by searching the Scriptures Paul had somehow found himself within them. And he believed that he had found the Corinthians there too.

Nor is Scripture’s interpretive activity restricted to us—though we do avidly search for our place within the Scriptures. Turning to the constellation of stars that we encounter in Scripture, we long, with Herbert, to know "how all thy lights combine. The Scriptures reach beyond us to all of creation throughout time and space. God’s word includes everything it has made. As Ney puts it, Scripture words reach out into the world, grab hold of things, and draw them in so that God might convey his Lordship over them all: ‘Mine!’ "

It is God’s providence over everything created that places all things within the word. Few theologians may have captured this relationship between creation and word better than Lionel Thornton, who insisted that everything in creation signifies Jesus. For Thornton, writes Jeff Boldt, reality is figural through and through, because reality is theophanic, or rather Christophanic. Donne, Herbert, William Jones, Keble, Rosetti, and the many other wonderful authors examined here would join with Thornton in asserting that all reality, in its breadth and depth, is in the end a revelation of God in Christ.

The fifteen essays of this volume are a testimony to the profound continuity between the medieval tradition of figural reading and Anglican figural modes of engaging Scripture. We ought not to be surprised. Wherever Christians recognize the stamp of the word upon the world, they can only bow before the infinite wisdom of God that interprets and transfigures creatures into his own eternal life.

The question that Ney and Radner’s volume leaves us with is this: How shall we suffer the Scriptures to interpret us? There is no better guide for this than the words of John Keble: Think much and deeply on our Lord’s deadly pangs of the Body: figure to yourself His Sacred Hands and Feet, pierced through and through by the cruel nails, and the whole weight of His Limbs hanging on those Wounds: and make a resolution, with prayer, to think of that pain, the next time you are tempted to any sin of the flesh.

Suffering divine things (pati divina) is not about application as a second stage, after the exegesis is finished and done with. Rather, as Ney and Radner rightly insist, as we are interpreted, we are being re-formed at the hands of the Scriptural text and through common prayer.

Hans Boersma

Feast of the Annunciation 2021

OH that I knew how all thy lights combine,

And the configurations of their glorie!

Seeing not onely how each verse doth shine,

But all the constellations of the storie.

This verse marks that, and both do make a motion

Unto a third, that ten leaves off doth lie:

Then as dispersed herbs do watch a potion,

These three make up some Christians destinie:

Such are thy secrets, which my life makes good,

And comments on thee: for in ev’ry thing

Thy words do finde me out, & parallels bring,

And in another make me understood.

Starres are poore books, & oftentimes do misse:

This book of starres lights to eternall blisse.

—George Herbert, The H. Scriptures II.

CHAPTER 1

AN INTRODUCTION TO FIGURAL READING IN THE ANGLICAN TRADITION

EPHRAIM RADNER & DAVID NEY

When English speakers think of the power of biblical language, they often summon up memories of that great monument of historic Anglicanism, the Authorized King James translation (KJV). Within the remembered sounds or simply written sentences of this great monument to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century English lie the echoes of, it is sensed, a mysteriously great language. Ann Wroe recounts her first hearing, as a British Catholic, of a reading of the KJV at university:

I was around 20, sitting in St John’s College Chapel in Oxford in the glow of late winter candlelight, though that fond memory may be embellished a little. A reading from the King James was given at Evensong. The effect was extraordinary: as if I had suddenly found, in the house of language I had loved and explored all my life, a hidden central chamber whose pillars and vaulting, rhythm and strength had given shape to everything around them.¹

Much about these memories is just their grasp of something that seems gone. When, in 2011, the 400th anniversary of the KJV was celebrated, a spate of articles and books on the translation appeared, most of them addressing the specifically literary influence of the text. They noted with praise the tradition of sonorous eloquence, the vivid Saxon terminology, and the lyrical and sometimes mysteriously violent rhetoric set in motion by the KJV that seemed to order English prose and poetry for centuries, from the KJV’s own origins in the language of Tyndale and the Book of Common Prayer, to Donne to Melville. But the 2011 laudators also offered eulogies to the translation in the modern sense of tributes for what is lost and dead, a way of speaking and imagining the world that is no longer ours. Our contemporary language, it was often noted, seem pallid by comparison, weak and ineffectual.

The power of biblical language is generally viewed in our day as literary. Cultural or cognitive potency is what is at issue, something bound up with the way words and their ordering shape the individual and collective consciousness. No doubt the seventeenth-century translators of the KJV were sensitive to this important character of biblical speech, framed in a particular language or vernacular. But what governed their own presuppositions about the text that they translated, and that only thereby elevated the resonance of their English sentences, was their more fundamental conviction that the words of the Bible themselves held power to shape the world of nature, the world of men and women, bodies and spirits together. Scripture words could do this precisely because they are God-given, and in this divine origin encompass all creation: when God said, so it was. This is why, in Wroe’s description, the words of the Bible can give shape to everything around them: not because they are linguistically well framed, but because they frame all things. As Adam Nicolson writes, contrasting the King James Bible to Shakespeare’s King Lear, everything in Lear falls apart, everything in the King James Bible pulls together; one is a nightmare of dissolution, the other a dream of wholeness … it absorbs and includes.²

It was out of this conviction, and (more properly for those of faith) out of the reality on which this conviction resided, that English Christians, and especially the Anglican tradition that comprehended most of them until the nineteenth century, produced the rich, variegated, and astonishingly illuminating scriptural interpretation that this volume seeks to introduce. What is here called the figural reading of the Bible is but the practiced version of that conviction of Scripture’s power to provide and reveal the wholeness of God’s world and history, and to absorb and include all aspects of actual life within the formative power of God’s own life, most clearly given in Christ Jesus.³

The goal of figural reading was, to borrow a phrase from the great Anglican poet George Herbert (1593–1633), to come to know how all thy lights combine / And the configurations of their glory! Figural readers hoped to uncover the way that God’s creative work integrates all reality by showing how particular parts of Scripture—God’s own words—interlock with others, often across times and books and characters, through similitude, resonance, and moral form. Most Christians are aware of the figural connection between Adam or David and Christ, drawn not only by New Testament authors but elaborated upon extravagantly over the centuries in liturgy, homily, poetry, and image. But the figural readers of the Bible were not only invited but, given their understanding of the Bible, driven to see such connections in all the corners of the scriptural text, from those dealing with flowers or beasts to those dealing with conquest and destruction. The figurated Scripture told them what the world looked like, not only in terms of human imagination, but in the very mind of God. Figural reading, then, revealed and reveled in the truth.

Figural readers receive biblical words in canonical context and pay special attention to the way these words acquire theological and especially christological import, referring to these realities by taking into their meaning related words and texts. Scripture words, sentences, narratives, and images thus become figures of other words, sentences, narratives, and images—and finally of divine truths themselves—through their variegated use and linkages. The lexical range of figural reading overlaps with that of terms such as typology (where one event or person prophetically pre-figures a later event or person) and allegory (a looser mode of theological reference) and thus occupies a place within broadly conceived categories such as spiritual interpretation or theological interpretation. Because of its interest in particular objects and bodies depicted in Scripture and in their relationship with other referents, figural reading can sometimes rightly be opposed to spiritualizing tendencies in the history of biblical interpretation. But for the purposes of this volume, figural reading will be used generously as a broad category which includes the premodern modes of interpretation of the medieval quadriga as well as other historic theological interpretations of Scripture generated from reading the Bible according to its wider canonical interrelationships.

Like those for whom the King James Bible has become a relic from a bygone age, Christians of the modern West often study the figural reading of Scripture as one gazes upon an artifact in a museum. Students are still taught about the medieval quadriga, a term that conjures up the four wheels of a chariot. The quadriga referred to the fourfold senses of the Scripture that any text might hold: the literal, the allegorical (matters of Christian faith), the anagogical (matters of Christian hope), and the tropological (matters of Christian love).⁴ The latter three senses are usually designated as figural, and many modern Protestants (and now Catholics too) assume that they were left behind with the Reformation. Often the assumption that figural reading is premodern is accompanied by a value judgment: it is taken to be the mode of reading which is practiced by primitive Christians. Yet recent history suggests that it is resilient and reasserts itself even as scholars and preachers try to stamp it out.

The first early modern translator of the Bible, William Tyndale (on whose work the KJV is largely based), is famous for his Reformation rejection of complicated allegorical interpretation. Yet, as we see in David Mason Barr’s chapter on Tyndale, he was a thoroughgoing figuralist in his own way, largely because only by reading the Bible figurally could he make sense of Britain as belonging to God. The same can be said of Thomas Cranmer, a radical Protestant in some respects, but whose composition of the Book of Common Prayer in fact established figural reading as a central part of Anglican Christian faith. Preachers and poets, including Puritans and Catholics both, followed Cranmer’s lead well into the era we associate with enlightened social progress. Precisely this learning has, over the centuries, fueled the most focused devotion, sublime poetry, powerful conversionary preaching, vigorous political activism, and robust missionary outreach. The purpose of this volume is to trace some of these fruitful lines of witness.

THE MISSIONARY NATURE OF FIGURAL READING

In the late eighteenth century, a former African slave, Ottobah Cugoano, now a devout Anglican in London, wrote the first large-scale English language political denunciation of slavery by a black man. Cugoano pursued his ferocious argument through a self-conscious understanding of Scripture’s figural framework that drew on patristic but less remotely on Anglican hermeneutical perspectives of the Old and New Testaments in their conjunction. In his view, divine goodness and power could be discerned by the oppressed and suffering only in these terms.⁵ Cugoano’s Anglican figuralism found its American enunciation in the astonishing moral witness of nineteenth-century African American teachers like Maria W. Stewart, as we see in Marion Taylor’s chapter on female interpreters. Today, figural reading still finds a home in the West. In particular, it continues to take up residence in places far from the halls of power among those who are keenly aware of their need for God’s efficacious word. It is perhaps on this account that figural reading is energetically pursued in non-Western contexts today. It is particularly important to the growth of the movement which may yet prove to be the most consequential development in the history of Christianity, global Pentecostalism.

Many of the indigenous Christians responsible for the staggering growth of Christianity in non-Western contexts received the Scriptures from Westerners. They also received from Westerners various modes of interpreting the Scriptures, including figural reading. Watchman Nee (1903–1972) is arguably the most influential Chinese Christian writer of all time. His work had a direct influence upon the exponential growth of house churches in China at the end of the twentieth century, and his over sixty volumes of devotional and theological writings have been translated into dozens of languages. Nee was a great figural reader of Scripture. Nee’s figural approach to the Bible is an inheritance which was passed on to him and which he, in turn, passed on to others. He interpreted the Bible figurally at least in part because the single most important personal influence on the development of Nee’s theology, Margaret E. Barber (1866–1930), taught him to read Scripture in that way.⁶ Barber had arrived in Foochow, China, in 1899 as a church planter for the Anglican Church Missionary Society. While she eventually became an independent missionary, Barber had received the Bible and learned to interpret it through the mediation of the Prayer Book in the bosom of the Anglican Church.

Like many figural readers, Nee finds a justification for his figural approach in Paul’s words to the Corinthians: Now these things happened to them as an example (1 Cor 10:11 ESV). The Bible, says Nee,

records the history of the Israelites as an example to us. It is for the purpose of our edification. Although there is an outward difference between God’s work in the Old Testament and His work in the New Testament, they are the same in principle. The principle of God’s work is the same today as it was in the past.⁷

Types and figures are, for Nee, the means of drawing out the continuity of God’s work across time. Thus, for example, Nee insists that

The whole book of Exodus is a type of our salvation from the world. The Passover is a type of the breaking of bread. The crossing of the Red Sea is a type of baptism. The murmuring and sojourning in the wilderness are types of God’s children in their various conditions. The living water is a type of the Holy Spirit.⁸

These types or figures, as well as many others, are, in Nee’s mind, the handles he needs to present the text of Exodus to modern Chinese readers as both Christian and edifying. Through figural reading, all that transpired in the book of Exodus between God and his people is received by Nee as tokens of God’s love, God’s means of ministering to his people today.

As Nee emphasizes, figural reading is teleological or directed toward a particular aim. The authors of this volume all explore how figural reading has been employed by Anglicans to allow the scriptural text to do a particular theological or pastoral work. This work is sometimes explicitly communal and sometimes almost strictly devotional, but it always seeks to bring the truth of God to bear upon the lived experience of believers. The Anglican figural readers in this volume all affirm with John Donne (1572–1631) that the interpreter must search the Scriptures as one searches a wardrobe: not to make an inventory of it, but to find in it something fit for thy wearing.⁹ The figural reading of the text is an extension of vernacularization, the missionary work of Bible translation and distribution.

This volume’s teleological emphasis might be taken to indicate that figural reading is strictly a matter of applying the text rather than interpreting it. But an easy distinction between interpretation and application will not abide. Since the groundbreaking work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and other mid-twentieth-century philosophers of language, readers have become increasingly aware of the reciprocal nature of textual engagement. While interpreters interpret texts, texts also interpret them. And while interpreters apply the texts they interpret to their own contexts, they do not merely do so subsequently. Textual engagement is always a process by which the newness of the text is received by interpreters, brought to bear on what they already know, and thus applied. At the root of Anglican figural reading, after all, is the conviction that the scriptural word is, on its own accord as being a divine word, powerful in itself—a word that draws out interpretative judgments from the reader.

It is appropriate to speak of interpretation as the process by which the text is applied anew and thus absorbed by the world. Yet because texts work upon interpreters and direct them in particular ways, it is also appropriate, in Nicolson’s description of the KJV’s language, to speak of interpretation as the process by which texts absorb the world. As the late ecumenical theologian George Lindbeck noted in The Nature of Doctrine, texts that are received as canonically authoritative are inherently disposed to do such work. As communities immerse themselves in these texts, the texts come to define the way they see the world. As Lindbeck puts it, A scriptural world is thus able to absorb the universe. It supplies the interpretive framework within which believers seek to live their lives and understand reality.¹⁰ Figural reading continues to be energetically pursued around the world because the scriptural world is able to absorb the universe. As communities receive the Scriptures, they inevitably adopt Scripture words as the means of redefining their contexts and their experiences. For Lindbeck, this work is a gospel work by which God works through his word to transform communities into the likeness of his Son, and it is thus that figural reading is mandated.

The community-building power of figural reading is particularly important to note. To receive, interpret, and pass on the Bible is to receive, interpret, and pass it on midstream. As communities receive the Scriptures and pass them on to others, communities pass on a new vocabulary of Scripture words—Words such as God and Jesus, of course, but also words like sinner or redeemed. But before they pass these words on, they absorb them and are absorbed by them. Communities develop new identities which become part of the sacred deposit they pass along. It is thus that words such as sinner and redeemed are transmitted not merely as Scripture words but as words that describe the Christian witnesses themselves. Indeed, such words are passed on quite intentionally in the hope that those who receive the Scriptures will also receive them as self-descriptors, for those that do so receive an inheritance, a sacred and ancient trust which precedes them and which they will also, God willing, pass along to others.

Passing on the faith is not the same as playing a game of hot potato. Christians do not stand in a stationary position as they pass faith along and then idly look on as others do the same. They are shaped by and mysteriously drawn up into that which they pass along. For what I received, Paul says, I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures (1 Cor 15:3 NIV). Paul gifted his converts with a particular doctrine, namely, that Christ died for our sins. This gift was given in the Scriptures and thus given in the giving of the Scriptures themselves. Notice, however, that in giving this doctrine and the Scriptures, Paul also gave an interpretation of himself. The Scripture-doctrine he passed on was that Christ had died for him, and Paul therefore gave himself to his converts as this chief of sinners. By searching the Scriptures, Paul had somehow found himself within them. And he believed that he had found the Corinthians there too, for he tells them that Christ had died not just for his sins, but for our sins. Paul is confident that as the Corinthians search the Scriptures, they too will find that they are named there as redeemed sinners—in the words about Israel or about Canaan, Assyria or even Babylon—so that they too will come to call the one who is named there as the Christ that has died for them.

In 1 Corinthians 15:3 Paul unveils the nature of Scripture transmission: when Christians pass on the Scriptures, they act as those who have been re-formed by Scripture words and extend the invitation to others to go, and do thou likewise (Luke 10:37 KJV). More often than not, those who transmit the Scriptures also teach the Scriptures and thus determine what potential converts will find in them. Yet even when Scripture-bearers do not, the Scriptures confront potential converts with a decision. They must decide whether to believe what the Scriptures say about the Scripture-bearers and the world they live in, just as they will have to decide whether to believe what the Scriptures say about themselves. Thus, as long as the Scriptures are transmitted from one person to the next, from one generation to the next, and from one place to the next, the conditions for figural reading will abide. Many who have joyfully received the Scriptures have come to sing the words of Isaiah the prophet: How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth!’  (Isa 52:7 KJV). When they do, the feet of those who gave them are identified anew as beautiful feet. And as those who receive the Scriptures pass them on, they too are beheld not only as those who welcomed beautiful feet, but as those who have them.

THE ANGLICAN CURRENT OF FIGURAL READING

Christians receive the Scriptures and pass them along as those who have been given figural identities by the words of Scripture. They do so as members of the church and as members of a wider tradition of figural transmission which, historically, goes back to the earliest layers of the Old Testament and, geographically, now extends to every corner of the earth. Within this larger tradition the figural engagements of others invariably influence the way Christian communities receive and interpret the Scriptures. Of course, not all of these interpretations affect local communities in the same way. Those that are historically and geographically remote often have little apparent influence: within the great river of the figural tradition there are different streams and currents which flow next to some but are distant from others. Many of the streams can be attributed to divisions within the church: there are Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant, and now Pentecostal streams. Within these streams there are smaller currents, whether geographically, theologically, or denominationally defined. Yet the very reality of an enfigurated Scripture, to be sure, draws these streams together so that, through the threads of God’s word, each is related to another, each shaped by and in the other in a grand scriptural ecumenism.

This book is a modest undertaking to explore one current within this larger tradition. It does not insist that this current deserves pride of place. It does, however, lay important groundwork for future work on figural reading in the English-speaking world and beyond. Until the nineteenth century, almost every denomination of the Christian church in the English-speaking world was a direct descendent of the Church of England. And even today, the genealogy of the majority of English-speaking churches can be traced back to this common source. What is more, until the twentieth century, almost all English-speaking Christians used the scriptural text commissioned by the Church of England for use within the Church of England in 1611, the KJV. The story of Bible transmission, interpretation, and use in the English-speaking world begins with Anglicanism since Anglicanism provided both the Bible which has been interpreted and, in the Prayer Book, the framework for interpreting it—and since Anglicans have transmitted something of themselves to posterity by means of this gift.

The works of the interpreters featured in this volume were carried across the Atlantic and to the ends of the earth by a church whose missionary endeavors reflected the global ambitions of their nation. This is not to say that those who received their work have always embraced their approaches to the scriptural text. If the authors in this volume are any indication, sometimes their figural renderings have been received with suspicion or perplexity. Yet the seeds sown by their figurations have borne enormous fruit, not only in celebrated interpreters such as Nee, but in countless unknown others for whom these renderings have been the bridge between the ancient text and the contemporary world.

Figural reading has fueled the devotions of members of the Church of England from the beginning. And while there are few scholars within the Anglican Church today who intentionally practice figural reading, that does not mean that they haven’t been influenced by the figural explorations of their predecessors. Nor does it mean that figuration has been wholly driven from Anglican pulpits. There are important Anglican theologians who were not disposed to figural reading (Samuel Clarke and Charles Raven come to mind). But as this volume indicates, many of the greatest Anglican thinkers were great figural readers of the Bible. For influential figures such as Tyndale, Cranmer, Hooker, Donne, Coleridge, Keble, and Lewis, figural reading was a central aspect of their engagement with Scripture and the world. It is the express purpose of this volume to provide contemporary readers of these greats with the conceptual tools they need to appreciate the central role of