1. It takes work, but eventually we can see and be excited to understand that the whole Bible shows us how all God’s activity is both a history and a development. This holds true not only for God’s work of creation, where it is so obvious, but also for the work of grace and salvation. God did not do all this in a timeless heaven of ideas, but rather within our history and our time, thus giving meaning and value to time itself. Everything in God’s plan begins from a seed and develops through stages, moving toward fulfillment. This continually happens in nature, where everything begins with a seed, then grows, matures, and bears fruit. This happens in human history as well,1 where life, as it matures and brings forth new ideas, poses new problems as well. By confronting these problems with the resources of a given period of time, humanity is led to push beyond its available resources and to discover new values and new forms. This is what emerges in God’s work, as we see in the work of the Revealer and Redeemer to whom the Bible bears witness.
Here everything is based on God’s initiatives, and that explains why development does not mean a sort of automatic continuity but rather is governed by the distinct “vocations” that God offers to human beings who are, in the most special way, “those who belong to God” or, as we will see, the prophets.
From one end of the Bible to the other, the gifts of God are first given to one person or to a small group, but with the idea of a gradual offering of the gift to everyone. Adam is given breath “in the image of God” but in order “to grow,” to multiply and fill the earth. Abraham is chosen and called but in order that in him “all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.” All further development takes its point of departure there. Earthly humanity is only the development of Adam, while religious and redeemed humanity is only the development of Abraham.2 We are talking about the people of God coming forth from the promises addressed to Abraham—realized first of all in Israel, then beyond Israel, in the church. The final reality is only the development of what had been given and foreseen from the beginning. It was given in the form of a seed with the prospect of its complete realization; the final reality was contained in the beginning, but it was called to develop even to the fulfillment where this beginning will finally reveal what it had contained and the reason why it had been given.
Israel, the people of God, is already there in the patriarchs. What the patriarchs lived prefigures and engages the whole destiny of the people who will come forth from them. The twelve tribes come from the twelve sons of Jacob-Israel. The tribes are really only the extension and the realization of the children of Jacob. The church will come forth from the twelve apostles and will only be the developed reality of their experience (cf. Jas 1:1)—one of the reasons, not the least important, why the church is called “apostolic.”
We could reread the entire Bible from this point of view.3 But that exceeds the possibilities of this present study. Let me simply summarize the conclusions that would come from that kind of analysis. Everywhere we look, God’s gifts are given first in the form of a seed. This seed, even at the beginning, contains in a hidden and veiled way the fullness toward which it is directed. But it only develops this content progressively through stages. It is destined to result in the full manifestation of what it possessed from the beginning, but this only happens progressively and always imperfectly.
It is not only the Bible that begins with a Genesis and ends with an Apocalypse—that is, a revelation. Everything is a gift; everything is God’s own work. Everywhere, there is first promise, then realization of the promise, but only a partial one still calling for a final fulfillment. Everywhere, the meaning is discovered in the final fullness. The Old Testament moves toward the New, where its promises and expectations are fulfilled. The Gospel itself, a reality with respect to the promise of the law, is still a seed of promise with respect to the church, toward which it moves and in which it fulfills itself. And the church, the reality of the promises that became fulfilled in Jesus Christ, is still awaiting its last and definitive fulfillment.
Even though the seed is oriented from the very beginning toward the fullness and perfection that will only be revealed at the end,4 it nonetheless only develops the potential it holds within itself progressively and by stages. It works within time, drawing upon the resources of time. If God were the only one to do everything, if everything were pure gift, if truth and salvation, while being given by God, did not become realized also through our agency as well, then there would be no need for a progressive development, or for delays and stages of emergence. If, however, the gifts of God require our response, if they represent a divine condescension that requires and calls for us to rise up, if they leave to the one who receives them a piece of the action, an element of cooperation and of preparation, if God, finally, is not only the one from whom everything proceeds by pure grace but also the one to whom everything is destined to arise and return through an effort that God makes it possible for us to do but which we nonetheless do—then, of course, we can understand why there needs to be development, movement from promise to reality, the unveiling or the unfolding of what was already contained in the seed. In that case we can see why God’s action must be progressive and carried out in stages. This is indeed how God’s work happens, as it is portrayed by the Scriptures.
2. We can describe God’s plan revealed in the Bible as a process of going from the outside to the inside, from figures and symbols to a reality within human persons
themselves. We know the classic structure, devised by the Fathers and used by iconography and Christian liturgy as well (and even before them in the interpretation of the New Testament). The meaning of things in the Old Testament was as a prefiguring, a prediction, a promise, or a stage of development. Their true meaning is found beyond themselves. The Fathers called them Sacramenta Veteris Testamenti—sacraments of the Old Testament.5 More precisely, we can say that things in the Old Testament that had the character of a prediction or a preparation remained somewhat exterior. Once within the new covenant, however, they have to become internalized within human beings themselves—become spiritual and interior. It’s easy to show this by referring to the ideas of the Epistle to the Hebrews that make the contrast between the situation of the old covenant and that of the new. The elements of comparison are the law, priesthood, sacrifice, temple, or presence of God. For the present, let us examine the question of sacrifice, which requires a priesthood, since the act of sacrifice structures priestly functions, and finally the question of the temple.6
Throughout the Bible, God requires worship and sacrifice. In the old dispensation worship and sacrifice are governed by regulations and carried out in a certain number of prescribed external actions. In particular, the Old Testament prescribed sacrifices of animals and the offering of first fruits. However, we see the prophets criticize sacrifices and even claim that God holds them in disdain.7 Some historians have been so carried away by this that they came to think that this meant a condemnation of worship as such.8 But the same prophets who repudiated sacrifices in this way go on to call people to make a perfect sacrifice9 that the old law was powerless to produce. The old law was unable to bring anything to its perfection (Heb 7:19).
There are passages in St. Augustine, in Pascal, in L. Bouyer’s Mystère pascal, and in the writings of the Anglican theologian Gabriel Hebert10 that show how God, under the old covenant, asked for sacrifices and at the same time announced that he did not want them. The prophets were commissioned to establish and to oversee the development of religious institutions and the fulfillment of God’s plan. They said at one and the same time: yes, this is what God wants; and no, this is not it. God wants it, and he doesn’t want it. He wants it, but not in the way that you imagine and that you practice it. He wants it, but in another form, done in another way, going beyond what you are presently doing… So God wanted a sacrifice, but not what the old law, with its imperfections, prescribed to be offered to him, namely, the blood of bulls and goats. He wanted a sacrifice, but only that of the human person himself: openness, conversion, and the gift of one’s heart.
Here as elsewhere “fulfillment” of the law by Jesus will consist not in adding to the prescriptions set down by Moses some supplementary and more perfect norm, not a new obligation, either more rigorous or more general. What God sought was to isolate and reaffirm, within the law, the fullness and the purity of meaning that pertain to the intention that God had from the beginning, which was none other than the perfection of love. God wanted to deploy a fullness which had been tied to historical conditions within
which, in each one of its stages, the people of God realizes the plan given to them to fulfill.11 From the point of view of sacrifice, this fulfillment seeks a sacrifice that cannot be anything exterior, but only the person himself. Jesus Christ achieves this new interior sacrifice and then, after him and thanks to him, we join ourselves to him, even to the point of forming with him only one single body.
We need to read the admirable texts of St. Augustine, written at a peak of theological contemplation, where this doctor of the church shows how the true sacrifice of the Christian, with respect to which the other sacrifices are merely “sacraments” (that is, means of achievement meant to be surpassed)—the true sacrifice is nothing other than the body of the whole Christ, the tota redempta Civitas—the whole redeemed city, that is to say, ourselves who have become, even though we are many, a single body in Christ.12 St. Augustine explains the “truth” of the priesthood in a way that corresponds exactly to these ideas. But that would take us too far afield. Consider instead a parallel idea, namely, the great reality of the indwelling of God and the existence of something which might be called God’s temple.
Ever since Moses, God had promised to dwell in the midst of his people. During the Exodus, he had manifested his presence in an extraordinary way through the ark of the covenant. When David, who had made his capital in Jerusalem, wanted to build a temple to shelter the divine Presence, God told him through the prophet Nathan what he really wanted in this respect, and that became a promise of decisive importance (cf. 2 Sam 7). David would not build a house for the Lord, but his son would. And God announced that from this son, his posterity, he would make for David a lasting house. God solemnly promised that this would be an unending bloodline, and God’s grace would remain with it forever.
When Solomon had constructed a glorious temple, he thought that he had really fulfilled what Nathan had predicted to his father. He believed that the program of the temple and the indwelling of God among his people had been achieved for good.13 However, in coming years, the prophets announced that God was going to leave this dwelling place and that the temple would be destroyed.14 And indeed it was. The ark was lost, and the flower of the chosen people was taken into captivity.
It was then that the voice of the prophets was raised anew. There is no longer a temple, they said. However, the promise that God made to dwell in the middle of his people is more valid than ever.15 God remains and will remain in the midst of his own.16 As Isaiah said, God dwells in the hearts of the contrite.17 In short, we rediscover here the dialectical affirmation so characteristic of the prophets that we have already seen with respect to sacrifice. It is like this, but no it’s not; it is true, but not as you imagine, not as you believe it to be and have experienced it… So the prophets affirmed at one and the same time the imperishable validity of the promise but also that it would be necessary to look for its fulfillment beyond the outcome of what had already happened.
In fact, Jesus teaches us that it is neither in Jerusalem nor on Mount Garizim, nor in any other particular place, that we should worship the Father. Rather, we should worship
in spirit and in truth (John 4:21-24); or better, Jesus tells us what really is the temple of God, the place of his presence and so the place for true adoration. This is the temple of his body.18 Then we can understand what was the object of God’s promise from the beginning to dwell among his people and what was the meaning of Nathan’s prophecy. God was not going to dwell in a house made of stone or in anything made by human hands.19 We then understand these apostolic claims: we are the true temple of God; we are members of Christ and collectively form one body with him.20 The one true temple of God is the son of David and it is also, just as truly, his people, the fraternal community of the faithful who are the members of Christ. In short, the true temple is nothing other than humanity itself, when it is renewed through Jesus Christ and reunited in him. Humanity here is in truth made to the image of God. There is no other true sacrifice, no other genuine altar, no other true temple than humanity reaching its fulfillment in the body of Christ.
Look again at the splendid text of the City of God that we mentioned above. St. Augustine saw the whole economy of salvation not only in the lives of individuals but in the great collective movement that starts with Abraham (even with Adam) and moves to the heavenly city, rising by stages to the point where everything is fulfilled. That fulfillment is the perfect interiority of human beings one with another through the unity of all in one, and the unity of God becoming truly “all in all.” This is the endpoint of the huge trajectory of God’s purpose, or of the work of God, which is brought to completion in his people and to which the Scriptures bear witness.
3. However, this trajectory is achieved in stages, through a development made up of successive and gradual outcomes. This forward movement will succeed and reach its goal, intended from the start, only if it does not stop at one of the intermediate stages. There is always the danger that some stage already achieved will refuse to yield to further development, that the group or the individuals who carry out the promise, who are the stewards of the seed and of its future, become stuck. There is the danger that they may imagine their present experience to be unchangeable and definitive in terms of the forms in which the living idea finds itself already realized. Yet the dynamic power of the seed or of the promise eventually has to surpass all the intermediate stages. This is exactly the temptation of the synagogue. I will explain this more clearly in borrowing examples from salvation history.
In the Old Testament we find an insistence upon purity that would only be fulfilled in an interior and spiritual holiness surpassing all external and legal purity. In many texts a moral and interior meaning already had been given to legal purity, and the essential role of gratuitous divine mercy in the justice of the law had been affirmed. The development of the Old Testament itself, through the writings of the prophets, reached out toward what would be the message of the Gospel. But the Jews, clinging to the given historical form of the divine requirements for purity, although in its preliminary stages, remained caught up in observances of the law and refused to recognize the fulfillment of this demand in the Gospel. In a way, they refused the Gospel by being faithful to the gift and the commandment of God; and so there is something tragic and poignant in seeing them
turn away from the fulfillment of the gift out of fidelity to the gift such as they understood it. We will find comparable situations in the church.
Marriage had been given from the beginning with an eye to its perfection. It had been willed and instituted as monogamous. Even in Israel, despite God’s condescension to allow polygamy and divorce sanctioned by the Mosaic Law, the purity of conjugal union was maintained. The idea of a spousal union between God and his people, powerfully presented by the prophet Hosea, is exclusive and definitive. When our Lord, who came not to abolish but to complete the law, affirms the obligation of a monogamous and perpetual union between couples, he presents this reform as the reiteration and completion of what had already been instituted from the beginning. Transcending the valid form given in a certain stage of life of the people, the Lord gave meaning and development to the seed that had been planted from the beginning with an eye to its fulfillment.
All the “fulfillment” of the law declared solemnly in the Sermon on the Mount corresponds to this same intention.21 Throughout all statements of the type, “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times … but I say to you,” this “fulfillment” consists not in Jesus adding to the prescriptions of the Mosaic Law some further precision, some new obligation that is more rigorous or universal, but rather in