Loading…

All Thy Lights Combine: Figural Reading in the Anglican Tradition is unavailable, but you can change that!

We do not simply interpret God’s word. His word interprets us. Figural interpretation has been a trademark of Anglican devotions from the beginning. Anglican readers—including Tyndale, Cranmer, Hooker, and Lewis—have been figural readers of the Bible. By paying attention to how words, images, and narratives become figures of others in Scripture, these readers sought to uncover how God’s word...

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,
Page 4