Scripture “in the flesh”: holy speech as theopoiea

in early and eastern Christian receptions of the Psalms

Rev. Silviu N Bunta
—talk given at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary Symposium, Yonkers, New York (Nov 14-16, 2024)

If one peruses the work of the famed third-century Christian exegete Origen, one will eventually notice
that he uses five prepositions to speak of his hermeneutics: the scriptures, he says, are written for me, to
me, about me, are fulfilled in me, and are written by me.1 Beyond the largely misconceived
allegorical-versus-literal dichotomy drawn by some contemporary scholarship, in which he is placed at
the extreme end of the allegorical, Origen not only was identified later on as the cornerstone (or to be
more precise, the sharpening stone) of Christian hermeneutic (by voices as widely authoritative as the
Cappadocian Fathers), but he set forth his exegesis as comprehensive (inclusive of what one may call the
literal) and as inherited, drawn from the scriptures themselves, both from how some scriptures interpret
other scriptures (aptly named by recent scholarship as “inner-biblical exegesis”) and from how—in
Origen’s view—the scriptures themselves wish to be interpreted (for which I proposed the term
“outer-biblical exegesis”). For this hermeneutic centered freshly in and out of each new interpreter
(which is not unique to Origen at all) I already suggested the term “hermeneutic of death,” in order to
drive the point that what Origen speaks of is not something metaphysical, intellectual, formal, and
methodological, but rather something physical, existential, ascetical, and ultimately procedureless.2 A
non-procedure, as it were, of ascetical emptying of the self, abandonment of one’s life, in order to take on
the life of the King. Origen’s five prepositions mark the progression of this non-procedure: the
interpreter moves from being target to author, moves from degree to degree of enfleshing the scriptures
as for him, to him, about him, in him, and by him. The primary point of my proposal to you is that this
hermeneutics of death determines much of early and eastern Christian reading of the scriptures, and
that its interpretive space (I say “space” since interpretation is more akin to state and atmosphere than
action), again its interpretive space is one in which the divine is made to happen, in three dimensions
which are discrete only from an etic perspective—God, the text (or rather the speaker/writer), and the
interpreter. From an emic perspective, this exegesis is precisely the space in which these “dimensions”
not only intersect, but are one. In other words, interpretation—or proper interpretation for Origen—is
the space in which God makes gods and gods make God. And this is the case for the interpreter because

1
For example, Homilies on Joshua 3.1, 18.2 (on Joshua 14:6), Homilies on Jeremiah and 1 Kings 28, 4.
2
If I may take a stab at the current practice of “reception history,” for all the good it does, it may still miss this
essential point: the essence of reception history itself, or that which reception history itself is made of, is not an
intellectual appropriation of the scriptural text, driven by questions of method and meanings, but it is rather
fundamentally ascetical. And this is the very non-historical substance of the so-called field of “reception history,”
which, although belonging to this ancient hermeneutic, is constantly in danger of being read through the historical
premises and methods of modern hermeneutics.
God is enfleshed—and experienced—in the text not as merely setting out messages or information, but
as creating a space of self-sharing.
I must acknowledge that the majority of the modern interpretations of the passage do not go as
far as this, but I would like to propose the theophany on the road to Emmaus as emblematic of this
exegesis. The scene is hermeneutical not as a matter of metaphysical procedure, but as a matter of
physical transformation. Significantly, the scriptural text is given an interpretation in advance of this
transformation, but the interpretation is not truly internalized until the eyes open after the common
heart of both disciples (we have a singular here!) is set on fire—language which the hymnography of the
day identifies as an interiorized theophany or rather as the turning of the human insides into a
theophany. This means—among other things—that the proper encounter of Christ is not a cognitive
prying open of the text, a sort of finding of Jesus’ life and teachings within the scriptural text (this thing
in Christ or in his life is that phrase or verse in the scripture), but an existential prying open of the
hearer in a piercing conquest by God, or is the creation of a God-space, in which words, writer, and
reader are one divinity.
For this space in which divinity is made, I decided to reclaim an ancient term out of the tight grip
of theosophy, “theopoiea.” As far as I can tell, the word was coined in English in 18673 in order to name
the ancient art of endowing inanimate symbols of the gods with their living divinity.4 Shortly after it was
given its classical and enduring usage by Helena Blavatsky. Yet, early Christian texts use this very term in
the sense which I am proposing, as early as the following text of Clement of Alexandria [all translations
are mine with the sole exception of a Syriac text]:
Godliness (θεοσέβεια), which assimilates the human being to God as much as it is possible,
marks God as a congruent teacher (κατάλληλον διδάσκαλον), the one who alone can model
the human after God as much as it is worthy. The apostle who knows this teaching as truly
divine says, “You, O Timothy, from a babe have known the priestly/sacerdotal letters (ἱερὰ
γράμματα), which are able to make you wise unto salvation, through faith that is in Christ”
(2 Timothy 3:15). For truly holy are the letters which make one priestly and divine
(ἱεροποιοῦντα καὶ θεοποιοῦντα). (Clement of Alexandria, Protreptikos 9.86.2-9.87.1-2)5
The two vast bodies of literature on which I am focusing (both with ever-extending and porous
boundaries) can be clumped together for many reasons, not least because the early Christian literature

3
The North British Review 47 (1867), 279.
4
Augustine gives the following example, before he quotes Hermes Trismegistus: “To unite, therefore, these
invisible spirits to visible objects of bodily substance by some strange technique, so that the result is something
like animated bodies, idols dedicated and subject to these spirits, this, Hermes says, is “making gods” (deos
facere), and this great and miraculous power, he adds, of making gods has been given to men” (De Civitate Dei
8.23, text and translation Loeb , 105-107).
5
My translation of the original Greek from C. Mondésert, Clément d'Alexandrie. Le protreptique, 2nd edn. (Sources
chrétiennes 2. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1949), 154.
is still foundational to the Christian east and because the ultimate exegesis of the latter—the worship or
liturgy—is part and parcel of the former; the Christian east still worships by and large in the words of
early Christianity.
Now, I must admit that my point is timely only because some fresh scholarly insights are moving
beyond the tired presupposition that early Christian hermeneutics was dominated by questions of
meanings and procedures and also because finally voices have appeared in Orthodox liturgical theology
which no longer see the liturgy as an accumulation of meanings and practices. Rather, in this refreshing
view, in all its dimensions—words, gestures, time, location, direction, chant, icons, candles, etc.—the
liturgy presents itself not as a flat sum of harmonized but discrete elements, but as an integrated and
all-encompassing spacetime. Furthermore, all the elements of the liturgy, even if also present
somewhere else and historically “taken from” somewhere else, come together in every liturgical act as
into their life, as to a single moment and location for which they are meant and outside of which they
have no existence and meaning. The liturgizer’s integration in this reality means that he or she will
experience liturgy as the only real spacetime of the entire history of the world and of all locations, at
once, and will not relate to liturgy as to an ultimately discrete and flat reality, as to a conveyer of
meanings and teacher of practices.6 Therefore, as I argued somewhere else (since I, too, am part of these
voices), in early and eastern Christianity, worship and the scriptures are not intersecting but ultimately
distinct realities of what one would call religion, but rather worship is a matter of hearing-producing the
scriptures and hearing-producing the scriptures is a matter of worship, as is already intimated in the
aforementioned passage from Clement, who strikingly uses the adjective ἱερός, “sacerdotal,”
”consecrated,” or “priestly” for the reality we would call scripture.
Of course, in the time allotted I cannot provide exhaustive views of this massive literature. Rather,
my desire is to put a beginning to a sketch of the matter. I submit to you that, for reasons already
advanced, there is no one better positioned to provide the basic structure of this sketch than Origen with
his five prepositions, and that, for reasons both obvious and which I will elucidate shortly, there is no
better biblical writing than the Psalter. Due to its highest degree of difficulty, for the remainder of my
talk I will focus only on the last Origenian preposition, scripture “by me,” or, specifically, the Psalter by
me.
On the Psalter we hear from early Christians—who still hold authority in the Christian east—that
it is a text given for (new) authorship to every new hearer-speaker. For example, the fourth-century
Athanasios of Alexandria has the following to say:

6
See also “‘It is time for the Lord to make’: Thoughts on translating liturgy with an ‘I’ toward being made,” keynote
talk at the International workshop “The Lived Byzantine Liturgy between Local Context and Standardized
Tradition” at the University of Vienna, Austria, January 25, 2024.
 When it comes to the Psalms, beyond the prophecies about the Savior and the nations, the
unexpectable thing is that the one saying the other things [the one reading the psalms out
loud in the church] is speaking as in his own words, and each one sings them as if written
about himself, and receives them and goes through them not as if of another speaker or of
one speaking about another, but rather he recites them as himself speaking about himself.
And the things spoken are such that he offers these to God as himself acting and speaking
from within himself... And it seems to me that these words become like a mirror to the
psalmodist, so that he perceives in them both himself and the movements of his own soul,
and he recites them feeling in this way.7
This, the North African bishop says, is equally true of the one who hears the psalms in worship. Attesting
to the wide circulation of this view in early Christianity, a second, congruent voice comes from
three-centuries later and from a very different, Semitic environment, through Isaac of Syria:
In the verses of your psalmody do not be like a man who borrows words from another...
Rather, recite the words of psalmody as your very own, that you may utter the words of
your supplication with insight and with discriminating compunction.8
This view on the Psalter was made possible and was recommended (even recommended as the only
proper approach) because these early Christians recognized the authorial hearing-reading process as
founded in, and solicited by the text itself, by an appropriative openness and fluidity of the text as divine
speech seeking its divine speaker. Origen already points to this value of the scriptures.
To this reading of the Psalter I will provide only two examples. The first is John 10:34-36, in
which Jesus responds to an accusation of self-deification, which I also pursued at greater length in a
recent publication.9
[34] Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law that, I said, you are gods? [35] If
those to whom the word (λόγος) of God came to be, he called (εἴπεν) ‘gods’—and the
scripture is incapable of being loosened—[36] you tell the word whom (ὅν) the Father
sanctified and sent into the world You blaspheme, because I said I am son of God?
The text is ripe with ambiguity and is of an extraordinarily intricate construction. For example, the
referenced “writing in the law” is Ps 81:6 (82:6 MT), which reads in both Greek and Hebrew: “I said, you
are gods,” yet Jesus can be introducing the quotation at two different points, either the entire phrase or
only the quote within the phrase “you are gods.” He could be saying both “Is it not written in your law
that, [and the quotation begins here] ‘I have said, you are gods’?” and “Is it not written in your law that I
have said, [and the quotation begins here] ‘you are gods’?” If the latter, Jesus clearly presents the divine
7
My translation from St. Athanasios of Alexandria, Letter to Markellinos, PG 27:24A-C.
8
Isaac, Homily 54 of the first part, number 54, page 269, from Alfeyev, Spiritual world, 147.
9
“Post-loguing the Prologue: The Johannine Gospel and the Priority of Christ,” in Knowing God in Light. Theophany
and Language (eds. Nichifor Tănase et al.; Münster, Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2024), 3-26.
speech within the psalm as his own voice. One may be tempted to solve this ambiguity, but it seems to
me that this ambiguity is essential to the meaning of this pericope: depending on the readiness of the
hearer, at its deeper level the ambiguity reveals the term “word” to indicate not only the psalm, but also
the first person voice in the psalm, and the one whom the Father sent into the world and is speaking to
the accusers. Jesus’ words work only with this ambiguity and this identification in place, due to the
obvious reverse parallelism at the heart of Jesus’ response to the accusation of self-deification: the Word
called you gods, you call me blasphemer.
In light of this, the complexity of the carefully woven confrontation between God and humanity
has the accusers to whom Christ is speaking not simply as affective hearer of the psalm, or as additional
subject of it, but rather as its actual subject. To put it bluntly, in the complex imagery of John 10, the
production of the psalm and the gospel conversation become one and the same thing, in a moment of
God–and–humanity, as the only moment or present of all time. The psalm saying receives its actual Sitz
im Leben in Christ’s argument against his interlocutors. This oneness is further strengthened by the
peculiarity of 35b, which I tried to retain in my translation above: in οὐ δύναται λυθῆναι ἡ γραφή “the
scripture is incapable of being loosened,“ οὐ δύναται “is incapable” is not impersonal and it is in the
present tense. For an impersonal and historical sense “it is not possible that the scripture be loosened” ἡ
γραφή “the scripture” should have been in the accusative and the subject of λυθῆναι. Instead, ἡ γραφή “the
scripture” is the subject of οὐ δύναται “is incapable.” The statement has an overarching ahistoricity.10
Furthermore, this particular eternal moment in John 10 extends to the hearers-authors of the
gospel text itself, as an unveiling of Christ in all time. As John words and frames the text, the existential
confrontation with the divine ultimately belongs to humanity overall. The only way in which the words
of the gospel-psalm moment will ‘ring true’ and will unveil ever deeper meanings of their complexity, as
the gospel itself wishes, is if the gospel’s own hearers-authors become participants in this moment
which undergirds all time.
There is another point to be made here. The gospel-psalm moment is tantamount to an existential
crisis and its meanings are set up in such a way as to be gained only through surrender and loss. To put it
differently, for John the entry point into his words is the Word crucified and resurrected. The Word’s
hearers-authors within the gospel and his hearers-authors through the gospel will acquire what He is
saying precisely to the extent to which they are crushed by his winning, or rather by his obliterating
presence.
The inevitable conclusion is that the psalm is not pre-existing the gospel moment at all. Rather,
the psalm will be written in the past as merely the memory, or rather immortalization—since this is a

10
The English ‘the scripture cannot be ...’ (as in RSV) is not sufficient for de-objectifying or de-textualizing ἡ γραφή
as clearly as the Greek does. It can still be understood impersonally, as ‘it cannot be that the scripture is …’.
matter of death and life—of the current gospel moment, which, as simultaneous with all time or
containing all time, undergirds eternity, including the hearers-authors of the Johannine gospel itself.
My second text adds the liturgizer-exegete, or holy person, to the god-making space in a more
explicit manner. I have chosen this text because it is built on a very peculiar psalmic verb with an
easy-to-trace history—the verb ἐξερεύγομαι. The verb appears only two times in the Greek Old
Testament outside of the psalms, both in reference to the Egyptian rivers’ production of frogs (Ex 7:28
[=8:2] and WisSol 19:10), and it appears four times in the Psalter. The well-known translator of early
Christian texts Fr. Ephrem Lash has summarily evidenced the use of the word in early Christian
literature, including liturgical.11 He has also found evidence in a native speaker of koini, John
Chrysostom, that the word refers to the involuntary act of regurgitation, to vomiting.12 This makes its
uses in the psalms quite striking. In 44:1 “my heart” throws up “a good word” (ἐξηρεύξατο ἡ καρδία μου
ָ In 118:170, “my lips” throw up hymn (MT ‫)נָבַע‬. In 143:16 (144:13
λόγον ἀγαθόν; MT has the hapax ‫)רחַשׁ‬.
MT ‫ )פּוּק‬the “storehouses” of the sons of Israel throw up all over the place, as it were, as they apparently
burst from overfill. Finally, in 144:7 the generations of Israel throw up the memory of the magnitude of
God’s kindness.13 As Fr. Ephrem has shown, in early Christianity the dominating use of the striking verb
is christological and mostly in relation to Ps 44:1, “my heart will throw up a good word.” Already in the
second century, Justin Martyr and Theophilos of Antioch say that the involuntary regurgitation of the
good word is the Father’s throwing up of the Son whom he had had in his bowels before all ages.14 The
later sources behind this reading of the psalm verse abound: Origen, Eusebios, Athanasios of Alexandria,
Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Epiphanios, Cyril of Alexandria, John Damascene, to name
just a few. What is most significant in this literature is a theft which Fr. Ephrem has failed to notice. The
psalm verse in question, 44:1, is overtly about the production of divine speech: ”my heart will throw up a
good word, I say my works to the king, my tongue—a writer’s reed, writing swiftly.” This is also the case
with the other three psalmic uses of our striking verb (more clearly 118:170 and 144:7, but also
arguably 143:16). And yet the striking verb and its main usage, Ps 44:1, have been moved indistinctly
into the domain of christology.
My second text—mentioned by Fr. Ephrem in his study—is the well-known irmos of the canon of
the Annunciation by the eight-century John Damascene: “I will open my mouth and it will be filled with
Spirit, and I will throw up word to the queen Mother” (ἀνοίξω τὸ στόμα μου, καὶ πληρωθήσεται Πνεύματος,

11
Lash, “Translating Liturgy,” here 200-201.
12
Nevertheless, the consulted English translations have chosen to smooth it out, with “pour forth” (PAS, DJ, HP) or
“utter” (which is, surprisingly, Fr. Ephrem’s own choice). I myself opted for “pour out,” which is arguably the
closest phrasal synonym to “disgorge,” the verb Fr. Ephrem himself wished it would sound well liturgically.
13
There is a version of Ps 78:2, at least as quoted in Mt 13:35, which contains the same verb, version attested in
Clementine Homilies 1.18.15, Clement of Alexandria, and John Chrysostom: Ἀνοίξω τὸ στόμα μου ἐν παραβολαῖς καὶ
ἐξερεύξομαι κεκρυμμένα ἀπὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου.
14
Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 38.1-3; Theophilos of Antioch, To Autolykos 2.10.
καὶ λόγον ἐξερεύξομαι τῇ Βασιλίδι Μητρί). By the way, it is a terrible mistake to add the words “like David
said” to the English translation of the hymn, as some have done, words which are not there in the
original Greek. The use of Psalm 44:1 is obvious: “I will throw up word,” the hymn says using our striking
verb. Of immediate note is that the hymnographer does not present himself as merely quoting the psalm
(as the unwarranted addition would have it), but as the one whose words the psalm is revealed to be (of
this the addition itself is an unwitting acknowledgment, albeit a disapproving one). Of note is also the
fact that the appropriation of the psalm does not seem to move away from its overt meaning—the
production of divine speech.
It might be tempting to see this hymn and the aforementioned christological appropriation of the
psalm—which, by the way, is present elsewhere in the works of the Damascene himself15—as parallel or
alternative meanings, gained through different interpretive methods proper to distinct genres. Yet, even
the summary evidence presented so far brings into focus a different picture, in which interpretations are
rather simultaneous and fundamentally synonymous layers in an ascetical and mystagogical progression
of word-unveiling. In contrast to modern exegesis which is set horizontally under methodological and
historical questions, the literature surveyed here is presenting a vertical one. Furthermore, the gains of
recent scholarship are making it increasingly obvious that, in spite of our natural temptations to
cross—at our own peril—into formal theological thought, into methods, definitions, and
conceptualizations, in the so-called “Byzantine” world in which we are now moving there are no such
things as territories of distinct meanings, as I hope to have intimated already. At this point it is useful for
us to remember that the theology we witness in our texts, as much as it borrows from these, still finds
Byzantine humanism and western scholasticism as foreign to it in essence, and that, among other
reasons, it does so as a radical methodological point: these wish to bring procedure and system into a
procedureless and unsystemic universe.
That our hymn is at the same time christological—only at a deeper level—becomes more obvious
once its assignment to the feast of the Annunciation is given proper attention. As another hymn of the
Damascene notes, this is the second generation of the Word, from a mother without Father, mirroring
the first generation, from a Father without mother. What is significant is that—in view of this—the
liturgizer (or more precisely his Spirit-filled mouth) is presented as a source or contributor to this
second generation of the Word, just as he is presented as the author of the psalm verse which has
received a christological application throughout its Christian appropriation.
Thus, the liturgizer’s present voicing of the word to the Mother is also the very word of the divine
speech of the psalm and the generation of the Word from the Father. In other words, in the chanting of
this hymn the throwing up of the psalm by the prophetic holy man, the throwing up of the divine Word

15
John Damascene, Sermon on the birth of the Birthgiver of God 7.3.
by the Father, the throwing up of the same Word by the mother, and the throwing up of worship by the
liturgizer, are one and the same experience in the synonymous and simultaneous layering of the divine
space, the theopoetic space. Distances, distinctions, and chronology are only an outsider’s perspective.
At this point I must repeat what I already said about early and eastern liturgy-exegesis, just in
different words: in the universe we are now analyzing liturgy-exegesis is the spacetime in which all
things, of God and of man, come together as one and the same Thing, the God-man. To state this from
another point of view and to use an expression by Gregory of Nyssa, liturgy-exegesis is that which hides
“under the appearance of history” (ἐν διηγήσεως εἴδει) and—I would add—of space.16 The same Gregory
of Nyssa has the following to say in relation to the Sinai revelation: “What we hear from history to have
happened then”—which is the “manifestation of the nature beyond natures” (τῆς ὑπερκειμένης φύσεως ἡ
ἐμφάνεια)—“we learn from the contemplation of the Word always (εἰσαεί) to happen.”17 I submit to you
that this is also one of the deeper points in Paul’s remark on the spacetime in which ages have already
ended, that is, the soul of the holy person:
all these things (ταῦτα πάντα) [the events during Israel’s wandering in the desert]
came to pass for them as types, but they were written for our mindfulness, to whom the
ends of the ages have come down18 (εἰς οὓς τὰ τέλη τῶν αἰώνων κατήντησεν) (1 Cor 10:11).
In place of conclusion, allow me to add one final point to this short sketch of how theopoiea (or
theopoiesis) works at its highest point, that is, when the scripture becomes the production of its speaker,
in a space in which the latter becomes divine together with his or her spoken word. It seems to me that
we stand in front of a hermeutic which is radically Wittgensteinian: the program, as it were, of reading
Scripture is ascetical-erotic,19 a hermeneutics of self-emptying death, of self-denying love. And in this
hermeneutics the text, as something ultimately human, is also subjected to the same death. The text dies
together with, or rather as one with the deadness of its new author—the human who is being made
god—in order for the scripture to continue as the eternal life in which this author is one with God.

16
Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Oration 5, from E. Mühlenberg, Discours Catéchétique. Introduction, traduction et
notes par Raymond Winling (Sources chrétiennes 453; Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2000).
17
St. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses 119, my translation from PG 44:361B.
18
Or more literally have encountered down. There are significant differences between this Byzantine form of the
verse and the other forms, especially the ones translated into English (and regrettably even Orthodox translations
are worked off the other forms).
19
I am using “erotic” here in the Dionysian sense.