VIDEO TRANSCRIPT How should I read and think about the Bible? Word on Fire Catholic Ministries 7.04 minutes November 7th, 2012

Transcription

1 VIDEO TRANSCRIPT How should I read and think about the Bible? Word on Fire Catholic Ministries 7.04 minutes November 7th, 2012 FR. ROBERT BARRON: The second volume of Pope Benedict's study of the Lord Jesus just appeared. He wrote one about three years ago and now this is volume two. The first one focused on the teaching and life of Jesus. This one is more focused on the passion, death and resurrection of the Lord. Both books are prefaced by very penetrating

2 introductions. They talk about the Pope's method of reading the bible and his impatience with the one-sided use of the historical-critical method and the need to move beyond it while still including it. What's the historical-critical method? The roots go way back into the 17th and 18th century with people like Espinoza the philosopher, and Strauss, who s a famous German scholar. It was then picked up later in the 19th and early 20th centuries by Julius Wellhausen, Albert Schweitzer, Gelhard von Rad, and many other Protestant German scholars.

3 In 1943, Pope Pius XII published Divino Afflante Spiritu, which was a papal encyclical on the reading of the bible he recommended Catholics use in a mitigated way with a historical-critical method. Because of that, a whole generation of Catholic critics emerged. This included people like Joseph Fitzmyer, Raymond Brown, Roland Murphy and many others who then used this method within the Catholic framework. What is the historical-critical method? At the risk of reducing a complex and multivalence approach too much, I would say this. The historical-critical

4 method is trying to uncover the intention of the human author's biblical books within their historical framework as they address their particular audiences. Looking at the book of the prophet Isaiah, the historical critic wants to know what the author of that book meant. What was in his mind as he addressed the audience of his time with their concerns? Let's say you look at the gospel of Matthew and you want to know what was in Matthew's mind as he addressed a particular audience. That's why historical critics are very interested in the history of that time in place.

5 They're very interested in literary forms and finding out what was the literary method used by the author to communicate. They're also very interested in cultural anthropology and sociology. What was it like in that time? What were the concerns of people at a given period? All of that contributes to the historical-critical method. Pope Benedict has been very clear throughout his career that there's something permanently valuable about this method. It has yielded very great fruits in the understanding of the scripture. I would say the primary value of it is this: Christianity is not a

6 mythological system. There are mythic elements within the bible, but primarily, the bible is not mythic, it's historical. It claims that God has spoken and acted in very definite historical situations. God has addressed particular people at particular times. The historical-critical method that roots us very much in history is a permanently valuable contribution. It also enables us to scrape away odd and excessive forms of interpretation that have crept in over the centuries. It gets us back to the bracing truth of what

7 the biblical meanings were of that time; the truths of all that's good, all that's permanently valuable. The Catholic Church, at least from Divino Afflante Spiritu on, has affirmed the value of it. Joseph Ratzinger, for the past 30 years or so, has been drawing attention to the danger of a one-sided use of the historical-critical method. His major problem is this: By focusing so much on the horizontal dimension, (the dimension of this world, of history, sociology culture, etc.), we miss the vertical dimension. What I mean is, by focusing on the human author and his intentions, we can miss the Divine

8 Author and His intentions. The claim of the great tradition is that the bible's not just a collection of books written by human authors in a particular time, it is also, in some mysterious sense, authored by God. We don't have a naïve sense of this as though God simply is dictating words to robotic human agents. No, God works precisely through history and precisely through the psychologies of the authors. That's true. Nevertheless, God is in some very real sense the author of the scripture, which is why we can see (and our tradition holds), great patterns and

9 trajectories within the bible that represent a unity of purpose. In other words, a danger of the historical-critical method is that it can leave us with a bible that's just conjuries or a collection of disparate text, written at various times by various authors for various purposes, but that do not cohere as one. The claim of the tradition is, they do cohere as one book because they are under the guidance ultimately of a Divine author. Here's the second and related problem with the historical-critical method: By focusing so much on history, on the time in which these books were written, it can

10 lock them in time. We thought a lot about the historical Isaiah, the author of the book of the prophet Isaiah. We know whom he addressed and why, as well as what were his particular concerns way back then. The danger is, how about when I read it today? How about we proclaim it in Church? Why would I bother with this ancient, distant text? A one-sided use of this method can preclude the possibility of reading the bible in our own time, but it has a transcendent meaning ultimately grounded in God's purposes. What's the answer?

11 The answer, the Pope says, is a theological hermeneutic that has to go along with a historical-critical approach. We don't eschew the historical-critical. We don't leave it behind. We put it in a broader framework of theological interpretation that's very attentive to divine authorship and that sees the theological and spiritual tradition of the Church, not as an obscuring overlay, but as a clarifying and interpretive lens. We read the bible the way the Church Fathers read it. They go back to Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the gospel of Matthew, and they read it through the lens of the

12 richly theological and spiritual imagination. I think Pope Benedict's two books (and soon to be third), are very good examples of exactly this very dense and integrated way of reading the sacred scriptures.