“Figural reading” in the works of a wide historical range of voices within the Anglican tradition connects the varied essays in the engaging All Thy Lights Combine: Figural Reading in the Anglican Tradition, edited by Ephraim Radner and David Ney. Radner and Ney are right, early in their introduction, to explain what is meant by “figural reading,” as the overlapping interests of readers—history of exegesis, literary theory, practical theology, the role of the Bible in Anglican history and practice, convictions about authorial intent and fixed meanings versus the reciprocal nature of textual engagement—may allow for some false starts. Radner and Ney take a generous approach: “figural reading” includes both the premodern senses of scripture and the theological perspective that scripture can reveal a certain wholeness to God's world and the givenness of life. This is broad indeed and yet allows a capacity for a diverse array of essays to contribute to a conversation whose surprising harmony—perhaps intentionally?—reflects the subject at hand, that all the “lights” (all the stories and characters of scripture) combine into a seamless whole. The title is a nod to this very claim made by George Herbert in one of his poems. The fifteen authors and their prosopographical subjects, beginning with Thomas Cranmer and William Tyndale and concluding with C. S. Lewis and Lionel Thornton, present scripture as containing complex layers of meaning and significance which captivate mind and heart. They point to a tradition that insists, through repetition of prayer and biblical meditation, that the stories of scripture unite both to create a unified narrative and to make sense of the world we creatures inhabit.
Two large claims seem to be at work through these essays, one a bit more subtle than the other. First, there is a key hermeneutical thread, one highlighted by Hans Boersma in the foreword and carried throughout these essays, that the scriptures interpret readers as much as readers interpret the texts. On the one hand, we witness in these variegated figures from Anglican history—bishops and reformers, poets and preachers, scholars and pastors, clergy and layfolk—a conviction that scripture echoes itself with repeated imagery and that the Bible is rich with narratives that double back on earlier narratives. This is simply the perseverance of ancient patterns of Bible reading: the quadriga, the four senses of scripture, namely the literal (or, debatably, historical), the allegorical, the tropological (or moral), and the anagogical (or eschatological). But it is more than the quadriga. It is also the conviction that scripture is regularly referring to a narrative universe that it is also always creating or perhaps uncovering. This contrasts with modern tendencies to reduce scripture to moral instruction and an Enlightenment approach that operated with a more limited and literal method: Song of Songs, for example, could not possibly be about the love of Christ for his church; Psalm 45 is about the warrior king David, not Christ. These figures from the Anglican tradition instead rely on the richer and more ancient course of reading the Biblical texts. On the other hand, however, the claim is not merely about the inner workings of the Biblical canon. As Radner puts it in his discussion of Cranmer, scripture can be and should be the divine instrument of human transformation; the story absorbs the individual and the community in the vision and assumptions of these figures. Many of the figures examined in these essays, especially those early ones associated with England's sixteenth-century reformation, advocated an immersion in scripture—the purpose of daily Morning and Evening Prayer in the Church of England—which did not simply instruct and inform communities but rather gathered the world up into scripture's narrative cosmos. This is scripture engaging its readers: the reader is transformed by participating in God's self, which may be located in the word. The subsequent essays unpack some of the sacramental possibilities inherent in this instrumental understanding of scripture; for example, John Tyson's chapter on Charles Wesley.
Second, and perhaps more subtle, is the claim that “figural reading” is normative to the Anglican tradition itself. The argument is gentle and gracious and thus much appreciated because any discussion of what is normative for Anglicans invites energetic counter-claims. And yet this figural approach—both the internal layering of stories and the external dynamic, formative power—persists through the distinctly Anglican figures examined. There are, as one might expect, essays on Hooker, Donne, and other usual suspects, and these are certainly helpful. Torrance Kirby, for example, offers a hardy exposition of Hooker's integration of Neo-Platonic philosophy and Reformed soteriology, arriving at the conclusion that Hooker understood God to be law. Yet there are chapters here covering figures not on the usual Anglican catena, for example, Henry Mansel, Christina Rosetti, and Lionel Thornton. Jeff Boldt, covering Thornton, captures well one of the larger themes of this collection, that is, reading the Bible as a whole. Scripture stands behind all history, Thornton reasoned, and, as scripture is God's word, the words themselves have a bearing on the whole of life. No part of the canon can be ignored or denied because the word has a bearing as a whole; all thy lights—all the stories—combine. This is, again, that gathering of all life into scripture's cosmos.
Radner and Ney also include, as an appendix, Morning and Evening Prayer from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer along with a lectionary. This addition puts into perspective a philosophical conviction at work: this collection of academic essays is not merely an intellectual exercise but presents formative possibilities. While All Thy Lights Combine certainly will be helpful to historians of the Anglican tradition, the purpose of the book—perhaps like the argument being presented over and again in these essays—is to demonstrate the comprehensive power of scripture in Anglican practice, the way scripture traces a story of creation and recreation, and, when engaged, may provide a certain narrative wholeness to life and reality. Just as the stories of scripture each find their place to form a whole, so, too, do these insightful essays.
