Words and Word

Radner has these final comments on the hermeneutics of the “holiness code”: “The difference between the sexual laws of Lev. 18 and the laws of clean and unclean flesh in Lev. 11 cannot simply lie in their respective relation to teh category of ceremonial character. The difference lies in the way Jesus himself carries these realities in his body and in the body of his church. With respect to the animals . . . they are gathered up by Christ as reconciled creative distinctions that he bears in his own death. But with respect to the laws of sexual relation and family, we see the legal particulars, much as in the Sermon on the Mount, taken up by Christ and passed on to his church in an almost exaggerated fashion, renewed and refocused. We see both these things, however, not according to a logic of categorization, but according to the discernment of time as the Scriptures have molded them in God’s good will. The Scriptures are the book of God in the same sense as Revelation speaks of ‘the Lamb’s book of life . . . they form the shape of life as God’s creative purpose.”

Then this key formulation: “The word/words distinction in this case is as potentially misleading as the ceremonial/moral distinction is unhelpful. Jesus as the word fulfills the words of the text by carrying them in his own flesh through time: word and words are one, and the bonds of blood and life are thereby made strong.”