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,