Why the Transfiguration Changes How You Read Your Bible

One of the sweetest joys of the Christian life is when spiritual glory shines through the text of Scripture. But what is this experience, exactly?

Is it just the buzz of intellectual stimulation? Is it a lifting of the emotions due to some happy thought? Jonathan Edwards is helpful here. He applied the scalpel of his keen mind to distinguish between what is a genuine work of the Spirit and what is merely human. “A man might know how to interpret all the types, parables, enigmas, and allegories in the Bible,” he wrote in Religious Affections, “and have not one beam of spiritual light in his mind.” Elsewhere he wrote that this spiritual light is like the difference between knowing that honey is sweet and tasting its sweetness. The one who tastes, who beholds spiritual glory with the heart, explained Edwards, goes beyond rational knowledge, having “a sense of the gloriousness of God in his heart.”¹

It reminds me of Luke 24, when the newly risen Christ walked the seven-mile trek towards Emmaus and unfolded for those two blessed disciples “the things concerning himself in all the Scriptures” (Luke 24:27). Now note carefully how they describe that experience a few verses later, “Weren’t our hearts burning within us while he was talking with us on the road and explaining the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32). Here is that experience again, in slightly different words. Something about that conversation opened their eyes to see new and glorious things in the same Scriptures they had been reading all their lives.

Up the Mountain

We really cannot talk about these realities without leaning heavily upon metaphors from creation. But in this matter, we are simply following the pattern of Scripture. And here is what I want to reflect on in this article: how the metaphor of light is used by the Bible to teach us what it means to read the Scripture and grasp its spiritual sense. For this endeavour I am leaning heavily upon Kevin Vanhoozer’s recent book, Mere Christian Hermeneutics (Zondervan Academic, 2024; hereafter MCH), which renewed my love for the Scriptures and edified my soul. This article, then, is not so much a review of the book as a tribute to it.

Let’s return to the experience I’ve been trying to describe. That scintillating insight into a truth that is beautiful, like a shaft of light breaking in upon a dark cavern. It may come when you are reading a passage for the eighty-seventh time and you see, as if for the first time, a truth right there in the text. Only a living Word could offer such moments of sublime spiritual luminosity that leave us with “hearts burning within.”

Vanhoozer argues something which at first seems rather odd: that the narrative of the transfiguration of Jesus found in the three synoptic Gospels gives us “a precious vantage point on both the identity of Jesus and the whole process of reading the Bible literally and theologically” (225). I was skeptical of this claim. Much as I like the transfiguration story, what with the light shining forth from the face and clothing of Jesus, the bright cloud descending, and the voice of the Father ringing out, still it’s hard to see what this brief account might have to teach us about reading the Bible.

And yet—it’s an intriguing idea, isn’t it? I invite you to keep reading, as I did, and consider that it just might be so.

The Moses Connection

As Jesus is transfigured on the mountain before his three closest disciples, Moses and Elijah appear and converse with him. “They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem” (Luke 9:31). But what has Moses to do with this event? To answer this question, we must go back to the top of Mount Sinai.²

In Exodus 33-34, Moses pleads with God that his presence might go with them. He then asks God, “Please, let me see your glory.” And God passes by Moses, hidden in the rock, proclaiming his name. The result of this revelation was that “the skin of his face shone,” a phenomenon which meant that Aaron and the Israelites “were afraid to come near him” (Exod. 34:29-30). So we have here a striking parallel: a shining face, though in this case, it is a reflected glory.

Did God grant Moses’ request to see his glory? Yes—and yet there is a sense in which Moses experienced and saw only a partial revelation of God’s glory. It was God’s “back” that Moses was allowed, or able, to see. His face shone, yes, but it was fading. What if God’s final answer to that request—“Please, let me see your glory”—came not on Sinai but on Tabor, on the mount of transfiguration,³ when Moses beheld the Father’s glory made visible, the shining face of Jesus Christ? I believe so. More than a thousand years after Moses first made the request, God brought him to another mountain, and said, in effect: Okay, Moses—it’s time for you to see my glory unveiled. Feast your eyes on my Son in his divine glory, face outshining the sun.

The Transfigural Analogy

Something remarkable is happening on the mountaintop, that much is clear. But we haven’t yet explained how this transfiguration teaches us anything about reading the Bible. As Vanhoozer puts it,

In other words, while both the body of Jesus and the words of the Bible look normal on the outside, beneath their surface is something divine, “rendering both Jesus’ face and the literal sense of the Scripture conduits of light” (267-268).

Jesus was fully human, with a human body just like ours. He had a face like ours. And yet somehow, in the transfiguration, the glory of who he was as the incarnate second person of the Trinity became visible through his human face. In some miraculous way, light shone forth from a source other than the biological body of Jesus.

Similarly, the plain letters on the page of Scripture are not any different than the letters of any other text. The spelling, grammar, and vocabulary are not unique. It appears to be merely human, like the face of Jesus. And yet both the text and the body of Jesus are veiling their true nature, and therefore both can reveal themselves as a source of divine and supernatural light. When approached properly, and when the Spirit is at work, reading the Bible is transformative; the glory of its truths shines through, and the glory of the one it reveals transforms and transfigures the reader. And then we, like Moses, carry with us a fading glow of that divine light.

Our Stubborn Blindness

With the analogy made clear, it’s worth asking why, if the glory of transformative spiritual truth is able to shine through the text, it seems to happen so seldom. After all, many people pick up the Bible and read it without seeing anything glorious. And if we’re honest, our own Bible reading often feels rather stale and dull, a far cry from transfiguration.

There is more than one answer to this question, but Vanhoozer provides part of the answer by raising the issue of anthropology. In essence, he asks: what is the nature of the reader? For if we have a wrong view of the nature of the reader, then we will by definition have a wrong view of how that reader is to engage with the text. He argues that modern science gave rise to the assumption that one comes to the text like a coroner approaches a corpse to perform an autopsy. In short, that reading the Bible is a forensic examination by an objective agent acting upon a passive subject.

But this framework, claims the author, is wrong on both counts—the nature of the reader and the nature of the text. Instead of an objective agent, he claims that humans only ever approach the Scriptures as “answerable persons” who are responsible for their response to the self-revelation of the Triune God: “If today you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts” (Heb. 3:15). Similarly, the text of the Bible, far from being akin to a passive corpse, is the living Word of God. Therefore the modern approach is precisely backwards: it is far more true to say that the Scriptures are examining the reader.

The fallen human tendency is to avoid being answerable to any higher authority. But reading the Bible, wrote John Webster, involves “a readiness to be addressed and confronted.”⁴ The reader stands under, never over, the text. Aside from our sinful nature, there is also the evil one who works to keep unbelievers blind: “In their case, the god of this age has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:4).

Light from Light

Paul has much to say about light. In 2 Corinthians 3 and 4, he fleshes out connective tissue linking not only Exodus 34 to the new covenant and the light of the gospel but also Genesis 1:3 (”Let there be light!”) and, I think, the transfiguration event. We see this especially in verse 4:6, “For God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ.”

Drawing on the first creation of light in Genesis 1:3, Paul draws a parallel with the spiritual illumination the gospel brings to “our hearts.” And that illumination is specific in content; it is “the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ.” It’s hard not to think of the transfiguration—Christ’s face shining visibly with God’s glory—when you ponder that choice of words.⁵

Peter, too, has much to say. In his case, he has had some decades to ponder its significance. On the mountain, Mark tells us, “[Peter] did not know what to say, since they were terrified” (Mark 9:6). But now, in his second letter, Peter knows what to say: “We were eyewitnesses of his majesty… we ourselves heard this voice when it came from heaven while we were with him on the holy mountain” (2 Pet. 1:16,18).

Before reading the next verse, we should remember Vanhoozer’s claim that the transfiguration was connected to reading of the Bible—something that seemed implausible at first. Yet notice how Peter makes precisely this connection between his transcendent experience on the mountain and the Scripture: “We also have the prophetic word strongly confirmed, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts” (2 Pet. 1:19).

So how does the transfiguration connect to the prophetic word which shines like a lamp in a dark place? “The prophetic word is more sure because Peter saw its light in the bright shining promise of Jesus’ once and future glory” (282). In other words, the overwhelming revelation of glory in the transfiguration has confirmed and clarified what the prophets of old foretold; the transfiguration is “God’s own spiritual interpretation of the story of Scripture,” his “unveiling of the glory of the Old Testament’s literal sense” (283, emphasis original).

Down the Mountain in the Afterglow

What is the meaning of all this for Christians today? For one thing, reading the Bible is both like and unlike reading other texts. The basic rules of interpretation certainly apply, including the need for what Vanhoozer calls “the interpretive virtues: dispositions of the mind and heart that arise from a deep desire for understanding and for doing justice to the voice of another” (19). But in the Scriptures we have something utterly unique—an inspired, God-breathed, human-divine text—which calls for something more: a theological and spiritual reading, a Spirit-enabled transfigural reading which does justice to all that the Bible is.

Returning to the Scriptures after this stimulating study, I found myself more conscious of its divine nature, more expectant of glory, and inwardly trembling with awe that God would speak to us in these ordinary-looking pages. Besides these great benefits, the book helped resolve some abiding questions I’d long wrestled with about allegorical interpretation, typology, and the tension between the two disciplines of biblical studies and theology.

The theme we’ve explored here is but one strand within MCH. The book is marked by a breadth of scope which sets it apart from typical hermeneutics textbooks. It takes a few steps back from those good and necessary details in order to see the whole landscape, both historically and methodologically. Rather than offering one more hermeneutical approach, it offers a framework for understanding how and why the history of biblical interpretation has produced so many competing views over the centuries, and what common elements bind the best approaches. The result is a way of reading the Bible which aims to be in continuity with the best examples throughout church history (East and West), making this more a work of synthesis than innovation.

Conclusion

When I took my introductory hermeneutics class at Heritage College & Seminary, one of the key phrases drilled into us by our teacher, Dr. David Barker, was “Every time you crack the Book you’re face to face with God.” This catchy saying, cleverly formatted in iambic meter so it gallops off the tongue, was helpful in that phase of my life as it reminded me to never allow the study of Scripture, no matter how technical, granular, or detailed it became, to become less than spiritual. It warned me to continue stoking the embers of evangelical warm-hearted piety even as we donned the garb and took up the tools of scholarly analysis.

But having sojourned on Mount Tabor, taking in the afterglow of the transfiguration, the catchy little phrase took on a whole new depth of meaning. From the first hint of light in Genesis 1:3 to the Lamb-light of the New Jerusalem, the story of Scripture is suffused with the luminescence of divine self-revelation through God’s words and—most perfectly—the Word made flesh. And since all the Scriptures are ultimately about Christ (John 5:39, Luke 24:27), and in the face of Christ we see the “light of the knowledge of the glory of God,” then it is wonderfully true that “every time you crack the Book you’re face to face with God.”

May our reading of the Scriptures ever be marked by this spiritual sight and supernatural light.

¹ Jonathan Edwards, “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” in Sermons and Discourses 1730-1733, Works of Jonathan Edwards 17 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 413. Cited in Kevin Vanhoozer, Mere Christian Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2024), 254.

² Vanhoozer does explore in thrilling detail the whole ‘economy of light’ in chapters 6 to 9 of MCH. This amounts to a fascinating study—a biblical theology of light—that alone is worth the price of the book.

³ Though Mount Tabor is the traditional location for the transfiguration, I personally lean towards Mount Hermon for its proximity to Caesarea Philippi (the last place Jesus was before the event) and its significant height (9200ft vs Tabor’s 1200ft—hardly a “high mountain” as per Mark 9:2). The biblical text is silent on the question. I use Tabor in this piece because of how Vanhoozer uses it as shorthand for the transfiguration.

⁴ John Webster, Word and Church: Essays in Christian Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2011), 80. Quoted in Vanhoozer, Mere Christian Hermeneutics, 14.

⁵ Paul might also have in mind his own encounter with the risen Christ, the famous Damascus road experience which in Luke’s writing shares a number of common words and themes with the transfiguration narrative: light/glory, a voice, fear, and witnesses.