Clergy and Educators

The Old and the New Challenges of Reading Noah in the Christian Tradition
Dr. Christopher M. Leighton

There are distinctive ways in which Christians and Jews read their sacred stories. And yet, despite our irreducible peculiarities, both Christians and Jews face a similar problem. Sometimes these stories are like windows that allow us to see distant lands. Other times they are like mirrors that reflect back our religious assumptions. The problem shared by Christians and Jews is that we sometimes have difficulty knowing if the text is functioning as a window or a mirror. We don't always know if the text is simply reflecting our own theological convictions and the larger tradition to which we belong or if the story is pulling us outside of ourselves, demanding us to look anew at the religious perspectives which we have inherited. Let me take a moment to explore with you the challenge by identifying a distinctively Christian reading of the Noah story.

The early Christians adopted a strategy of interpretation common throughout the ancient world, a strategy of reading known as typology. When Christians from this early period of church history (the patristic era) studied the Hebrew scriptures, they went in search of images or "types" that prefigured later events, most especially the life of Jesus Christ. (see Norman Cohn, Noah's Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought. Yale University Press, 1996, chapter 3) They assumed that nothing in the so-called Old Testament could be properly understood without reference to Christian revelation. To quote one of the preeminent church fathers, Augustine: "In the Old Testament the New lies hid; in the New Testament the meaning of the Old becomes clear."

Now when the church fathers stared into the Noah story, they not surprisingly saw a variety of New Testament images reflected. One which gained considerable currency envisions Noah as the "type" for Christ. Noah's survival and his emergence from the ark were viewed as anticipations of the resurrection of Christ and his emergence from the tomb. Origen extended this image: was not Noah like Christ the head of a new, regenerated people? Another church father, Justin Martyr unearthed hidden allusions in the Noah story and concluded that the whole mystery of salvation through Christ resides just beneath the surface of the text. "The wood of the ark prefigured the cross...The fact that the Flood covered the whole earth indicated that God's message was intended for all humankind and not merely the Jews." (Cohn, p. 26) Another reading popularized by Augustine, Jerome, and John Chrysostom equated the ark by which God had saved a remnant of humankind with the church. The harsh fact that there was only one ark demonstrated that there was only one valid church, and all those who stood outside of it were doomed to tread water.

This typological reading of the Noah story is I suspect largely unknown by most Christians today, and it is apt to strike many as a strained, even bizarre interpretation. Yet, there is a theological claim that I believe this interpretation conveys that is rather widespread, namely the assumption that the Jews somehow missed the boat...and that ultimately their salvation requires them to climb on board the church. Underlying the typological reading of Noah is a supersessionism, a theology of displacement which asserts that the church has replaced the synagogue, and this outlook is far more pervasive than we like to admit in this era of political correctness.

What then are Christians to do about a theological assumption that leads many to divide the world in two: the saved and the dammed. Many good liberal Christians have decided to ignore, if not repudiate the once-common affirmation articulated by Cyprian, that outside the church there is no salvation. But if the church does not establish a unique and necessary relationship between God and the believer, why bother with it? If it does not matter if you are a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu or Muslim or Hale-Bopper or anything else, as long as you are sincere, as long as you are a good person, then aren't we really all playing the same game and calling it by different names? Aren't our theological attachments and therefore our particular religious identities really superfluous? The religious liberal maintains that there is room on the ark for at least two of everything. You're ok, I'm ok, even God's ok, as long as we accept each other. There is no room on this ship for a stowaway, much less a deity who proclaims the Day of Judgment. Yet, one wonders: will the theological convictions of those who champion tolerance as the highest of virtues keep us afloat into the next millennium? I somehow doubt it--because this big-hearted liberal vision cannot abide the very reality which we need to embrace--our diversity.

So there is a question with which I think Christians must wrestle when they read the Noah story. Can Christians see their story within the story of the Flood? Can they claim, indeed celebrate their particularity? Can they learn from a tradition of interpretation that insists that their survival is at stake? If they fail to answer God's call, if they fail to build the church, making it a liveable space with plenty of room and capable of withstanding rough waters, then they will perish. And yet, at the same time that they claim this story as their own, can Christians avoid stumbling into the arrogance of assuming that there are not other sea-worthy vessels, the synagogue and the mosque among them? Can Christians relinquish their triumphalist claim that the church alone can navigate the high seas without tossing their tradition overboard?

What do we Christians really see reflected back to us when we stare into the depths of the story of Noah? An occasion for hope, grounds for despair, a tale of destruction or a promise of rebirth, a story of heroism or a sorry memory of cowardice, a challenge to do things the same or do things differently? Where do we situate ourselves in the story? Where, for God's sake, do we situate our neighbors?

Dr. Christopher M. Leighton
The Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies

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