Fixed in His Memory
The thirteenth-century theologian Bonaventure once said that the difficulty with interpreting scripture accurately is needing to have so much of it memorized before one can even begin.
“No one will find this an easy task unless, by constant reading, he has fixed in his memory the text of the Bible to the very letter; not otherwise shall he ever have the ability to interpret Scripture.”
Bonaventure assumed that the Bible can only be understood in light of itself, and that such understanding requires having a great deal of scripture in one’s memory so that, as one reads along, word associations and connections will leap to mind.
Our easy access to the printed word, so easy that now many of us have searchable copies of the Bible with us at all times on our phones and tablets, is a great gift, but such access discourages memory, meaning that we often miss the interconnectedness of the text.
When we read that an event in the biblical narrative took place at Shechem, most of us do not immediately remember all the other events that occurred at Shechem in the course of biblical history. The first writers, readers, and hearers of the text would have thought of those connections.
Those first writers, readers, and hearers were immersed in a great system of symbols that enriched their communication and their understanding of the world. Most of us are deaf to that system of symbols as we read the Bible, and we therefore miss large portions of the meaning.
When we read a story about Gideon putting out a fleece and inspecting the dew that had fallen or had not fallen on it, we need to be aware of the meaning of a fleece and the meaning of the dew if we are to hear all that was there for the first hearers.
I make no claim to having mastered this system of symbols, but I have caught enough hints of it to believe that it cannot be learned apart from approaching the Bible as a unified whole. — Laura Smit, Judges & Ruth, 7-8. (She’s quoting Bonaventure’s Breviloquium, trans. Jose de Vinck [Paterson, NJ: St Anthony Guild Press, 1963], 18.)