Old Testament Scripture

The session on Old Testament Scripture left a number of students with concerns and questions. As Dr. Russell suggested in November, biblical exegesis can challenge the faith of the student, perhaps even precipatating a "crisis of faith" in some. Here, Dr. Russell addresses some concerns raised by students after the Old Testament course.

1) I think the fundamental difficulty students are experiencing is due to focusing on the first part of this sentence, without sufficient emphasis on the second (from CCC 109).  Could you comment?

To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words.

  First off, the first sentence of CCC 109 is missing from the above quote.  That sentence is: “In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way.”  So notice that even CCC 109 in its entirety emphasizes the human aspect of Sacred Scripture.  Significantly, even the second part of the second sentence from CCC 109 reinforces that we can not separate the divine message from the human elements of Scripture, for note that God’s revelation is communicated by the human authors’ (“their”) words.  We risk slipping into a type of Docetism (a Gnostic heresy) if we do not see a fundamental intertwining of the divine message within real human words.  Just as we cannot separate the spiritual from the material in the sacraments (God is really present in the Eucharistic bread, not just symbolically), so too we can not eliminate the human aspect of Scripture as the means by which God expresses his Word.  They are mysteriously and wondrously intertwined into one reality. 

I would agree, then, that I too – just like CCC 109 in its entirety – emphasized the human aspect of Scripture.  But this is because the Church teaches us that this must be the starting point for understanding God’s Word in Scripture.  For, as CCC 110 (the very next paragraph in the Catechism) states: “In order to discover the sacred authors' intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking, and narrating then current.  ‘For the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts, and in other forms of literary expression.’”  So, again, we entered into the texts through their human quality and context because the Church teaches that this is the proper portal for any attempt to interpret properly the Word of God.

Maybe the words of Pope Benedict XVI – writing when he was then Cardinal Ratzinger – might be helpful.  In a wonderful book entitled In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1990), Benedict wrote “Indeed, Holy Scripture in its entirety was not written from beginning to end like a novel or a textbook.  It is, rather, the echo of God’s history with his people.  It arose out of the struggles and the vagaries of this history, and all through it we can catch a glimpse of the rises and falls, the sufferings and hopes, and the greatness and failures of this history.  The Bible is thus the story of God’s struggle with human beings to make himself understandable to them over the course of time; but it is also the story of their struggle to seize hold of God over the course of time.” (p. 18) 

Note that Pope Benedict calls Scripture an “echo” – so it is not history itself, but the reverberating effect of that history upon the people’s sense of understanding.  Further, he notes that Scripture is fully enmeshed with and in the “vagaries” of history so that he ends up calling Scripture “the story of God’s struggle with human beings to make himself understandable to them” and of human beings’ “struggle to seize hold of God.”  Benedict is a careful theologian, so his selection of the words “story” and “struggle” are not incidental.  We do not have some sort of objective historical record, pure doctrinal statement, or dispassionate theological treatise in the Bible, but rather the story of an encounter – a loving encounter of God with people of faith.  What a wonderful thing for God to reveal to us!

Now, with all that said, maybe the consternation that arose in some participants’ minds is because of this fact: the story is not over yet – we haven’t gotten to the end!  We’ve only talked about the Old Testament.  Again, maybe the words of Benedict are instructive, as he continues: “Only in the process of journeying was the Bible’s real way of declaring itself formed, step by step.  Consequently we ourselves can only discover where this way is leading if we follow it to the end.  In this respect – as a way – the Old and New Testaments belong together.  For the Christian the Old Testament represents, in its totality, an advance towards Christ; only when it attains to him does its real meaning, which was gradually hinted at, become clear.” (p. 18-19)

Well, Christ is the focus of our session together this Saturday when we discuss the New Testament.  I suppose we should have spent more time last session talking about what Pope Benedict goes on to call the “inner direction” of the Old Testament story – that is, that it prepares for the revelation of God in Christ.  As I read the Old Testament, it seems that the fundamental point which “God wanted to reveal to us by their words” is this: God is so faithful to us that God will not give up on loving us, even when we continually fail to love him as we should.  God just keeps striving or – to use Benedict’s words – struggling to make his love for us understandable to us.    This “inner direction” of the Old Testament points us directly to the mystery of the Christian faith: God loves us so much, in fact, that God ultimately even chose to become incarnate in the flesh so as to bring us into relationship with him.

I think the above reflections are also relevant to the second question:

2) You spoke of Scripture as being a "library of libraries."   Please relate this to the following quote from CCC 112:

Be especially attentive "to the content and unity of the whole Scripture." Different as the books which comprise it may be, Scripture is a unity by reason of the unity of God's plan, of which Christ Jesus is the center and heart, open since his Passover.

It seems to me that the underlying issue that the above question raises is that of objective truth versus relativism, a question that I was asked to address directly after lunch during our November session.  I suppose that some people might have found disturbing my discussion of the shaping effect of the cultural context if they erroneously assume that a concentration upon historical particularities implies a negation of CCC 112.  Possibly this led some to feel that my approach implied that the Bible reveals a certain development of theological understanding which they might see as undercutting the Bible’s “objective truth” about the “unity of God’s plan.” 

To address this issue, let’s use the specific example that gave rise to the question about objective truth versus relativism.  If you remember, right before lunch I had just finished talking about the two creation stories found in Genesis 1-3.  I claimed that neither was a literal historical account, but rather stories that took shape as the Jews confronted other ancient Near East creation myths – and that through the creation stories in Genesis 1-3 the Jews were striving to articulate their own theological views (contra those of other religions) about God’s relationship with the world.  So, for example, I claimed that Genesis 1 is neither history nor science, but rather a “realistic” story striving to communicate a fundamental theological point: God, through a process of ordering creation, is the creator of a good world.  I further asserted that it was the Jews’ confrontation with and reaction to the Marduk myth found in the Enuma Elish while in exile in Babylon in the 6th century B.C. that lead to this new insight and innovative articulation of God’s creative role. 

Maybe what bothered some participants is that I was saying that the Jews came to some new understanding of God through their encounter with another culture – and this seemed to challenge the participants’ sense of the Bible as containing objective truth.   But if this is problematic, then I feel comfortable with the company I keep, for Pope Benedict makes the same points.  Quoting once again from In the Beginning, Pope Benedict makes these comments in his discussion of Genesis 1:

“It was in the exile and in the seeming defeat of Israel that there occurred an opening to the awareness of the God who holds every people and all of history in his hands, who holds everything because he is the Creator of everything and the source of all power.  This faith now had to find its own contours, and it had to do so precisely vis-à-vis the seemingly victorious religion of Babylon . . . .  It had to find its contours vis-à-vis the great Babylonian account of Enuma Elish, which depicted the origin of the world in its own fashion.  There it is said that the world was produced out of a struggle between opposing powers and that it assumed its form when Marduk, the god of light, appeared and split in two the body of the primordial dragon.  From this sundered body heaven and earth came to be.  Thus the firmament and the earth were produced from the sundered body of the dead dragon, but from its blood Marduk fashioned human beings.  It is a foreboding picture of the world and of humankind that we encounter here . . . ” (pp. 21-22). 

  Now, we examined Genesis 1 against the exact same cultural and mythological context.  As I did, Pope Benedict dates the writing of this text in the exilic period – well after the time of Moses (someone in last month’s session had also wondered about this, since they assumed that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible).  But Pope Benedict goes on:

“Here we see the audacity and the temperateness of the faith which, in confronting the pagan myths, made the light of truth appear by showing that the world was not a demonic contest but that it arose from God’s Reason and reposes on God’s Word.  Hence this creation account may be seen as the decisive ‘enlightenment’ of history and as a breakthrough out of the fears that had oppressed humankind. . . .  To this something further must be added.  I just said how, gradually, in confronting its pagan environment and its own heart, the people of Israel experienced what ‘creation’ was.  Implicit here is the fact that the classic creation account [i.e., Genesis 1] is not the only creation text of Sacred Scripture.  Immediately after it there follows another one, composed earlier and containing other imagery [Pope Benedict is referring here to Genesis 2-3, which we too identified as a separate and earlier creation story].  In the Psalms there are still others, and there the movement to clarify the faith concerning creation is carried further: In its confrontation with Hellenistic civilization, Wisdom literature reworks the theme without sticking to the old images such as the seven days.  Thus we can see how the Bible itself constantly readapts its images to a continually developing way of thinking, how it changes time and again in order to bear witness, time and again, to the one thing that has come to it, in truth, from God’s Word, which is the message of his creating act.  In the Bible itself, the images are free and they correct themselves ongoingly. In this way, they show, by means of a gradual and interreactive process, that they are only images, which reveal something deeper and greater.” (pp. 23-25)  

I took the liberty to provide a rather extensive quote from Pope Benedict because I think it is instructive.  Pope Benedict asserts, as I asserted, that “the Bible itself constantly readapts its images to a continually developing way of thinking, how it changes time and again” in order to communicate the fundamental point about God: “the message of his creating act.”  Pope Benedict even says that the “images are free and they correct themselves ongoingly.”  My way of expressing this point is to talk about ‘biblical traditions in tension.’  Pope Benedict ends by stating that these are “only images, which reveal something deeper and greater.”      Now, some participants expressed to me that they had always assumed that the creation stories in Genesis 1-3 were literal, objective history – and that they had to be such or else the entire doctrine of original sin would crumble.  But this is not the case.  Again, let me cite Pope Benedict’s In the Beginning.  In his discussion of the creation of Adam story found in Genesis 2, he specifically states that the story of Genesis 2 is not about factual history, but a theological reality – a theological reality that teaches us that we are created by God for God:

“We cannot say: creation or evolution.  The proper way of putting it is: creation and evolution, inasmuch as these two things respond to two different realities.  The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God, which we just heard [Genesis 2], does not in fact explain how a human person comes to be but rather what he is.  It explains his inmost origin and casts light on the project that he is.  And, vice-versa, the theory of evolution seeks to understand and describe biological developments.  But in so doing it cannot explain where the ‘project’ of the human person comes from, nor his inner origin, nor his particular nature.  To that extent we are faced here with two complementary – rather than mutually exclusive – realities.” (p. 65)

    So Pope Benedict affirms that biologically we came to be through a process of evolution – a position that Pope John Paul II also held.  So the meaning of the Genesis 2 story is not to teach us science or history, but theology: what we are is a creation of a personal, loving God.  Further, in his discussion of the human fall found in Genesis 3, Benedict sees the story as reacting to the ancient Near East religions.  Specifically, just as we did in our session, he points to the snake as “taken from the Eastern fertility cults” and sees the snake as a symbolically standing for the temptation of these fertility cults (p. 82).  So Pope Benedict historicizes the story in the Israelites’ own religious experience – the snake does not represent an actual snake present in a historical primordial garden, but rather the temptation that the people experienced in the pre-exilic era to abandon the true faith for the fertility religions.

  Now, this does not mean that there is not a thing called original sin.  There is.  Pope Benedict goes on to say this about how the doctrine of original sin is rooted in the story of Genesis 3: “The account tells us that sin begets sin, and that therefore all the sins of history are interlinked.  Theology refers to this state of affairs by the certainly misleading and imprecise term ‘original sin.’  What does this mean? . . .  The human being is relational, and he possesses his life – himself – only by way of relationship.  I alone am not myself, but only in and with you am I myself.  To be truly a human being means to be related in love, to be of and for.  But sin means the damaging or the destruction of relationality.  Sin is a rejection of relationality because it wants to make the human being a god.  Sin is loss of relationship, disturbance of relationship, and therefore it is not restricted to the individual.  When I destroy a relationship, then this event – sin – touches the other person involved in the relationship.  Consequently sin is always an offense that touches others, that alters the world and damages it.  To the extent that this is true, when the network of human relationships is damaged from the very beginning, then every human being enters into a world that is marked by relational damage.  At the very moment that a person begins human existence, which is a good, he is confronted by a sin-damaged world.  Each of us enters into a situation in which relationality has been hurt.  Consequently each person is, from the very start, damaged in his relationships and does not engage in them as he ought.  Sin pursues him and he capitulates to it” (pp. 89-91).  Pope Benedict goes on to state: “Since the relationship with creation has been damaged, only the Creator himself can be our Savior.  We can only be saved when he from whom we have cut ourselves off takes the initiative with us and stretches out his hand to us.  Only being loved is being saved, and only God’s love can purify damaged human love and radically reestablish the network of relationships that have suffered from alienation.” (p. 91-92)

    Now, this Catholic way of understanding Scripture can be really, really shocking if someone has not been well catechized.  Even some of the Catholic media avenues which people might use to learn about the faith tend to talk about the Genesis creation stories in a very literalistic fashion that is very different from Pope Benedict’s perspective.  In many cases, this is not the fault of the individual.  We as a Church have to do a much better job of catechizing.  So, if this biblical perspective is all new to you, I can see how it might really be surprising and disturbing.  However, by seeing that we have in Scripture different accountings of the people’s journey to greater faith, then we see how we too might journey to God.  The unity of Scripture is this journey of faith toward relationship with God – this journey to Christ!

Now, let us turn to the final question:

3) Perhaps additional emphasis on this centrality of Jesus would alleviate much of the discomfort experienced by students as you described the historical context of Old Testament Scripture.   Please elaborate a little on this quote from CCC 128:

The Church, as early as apostolic times, and then constantly in her Tradition, has illuminated the unity of the divine plan in the two Testaments through typology, which discerns in God's works of the Old Covenant prefigurations of what he accomplished in the fullness of time in the person of his incarnate Son.

I think I already addressed this question to a great extent in the answer to the first question, in which I did indeed emphasize the centrality of Christ.

  You ask me to elaborate on CCC 128, which is simply expressing a truism about the role of typology in the history of biblical interpretation in the Church.  I can think of no better way to elaborate on CCC 128 than by citing the Catechism itself.  In CCC 129 (the next paragraph in the Catechism), it states: “Christians therefore read the Old Testament in the light of Christ crucified and risen. Such typological reading discloses the inexhaustible content of the Old Testament; but it must not make us forget that the Old Testament retains its own intrinsic value as Revelation reaffirmed by our Lord himself.  Besides, the New Testament has to be read in the light of the Old. Early Christian catechesis made constant use of the Old Testament.  As an old saying put it, the New Testament lies hidden in the Old and the Old Testament is unveiled in the New.”  Notice that the Church raises a caution in the use of typological readings: “the Old Testament retains its own intrinsic value as Revelation reaffirmed by our Lord himself.”  So it would be a grave error not to recognize this “intrinsic value” of the Old Testament on its own terms – a value that I was aware of trying to bring forward in the November session.

  Finally, I follow St. Thomas Aquinas, a Doctor of the Church, in holding that any typological sense – or any spiritual sense, for that matter – must be congruent with and built upon the literal sense (which, remember, is the meaning intended by the human author).  While other notable theological figures in Church history disagreed with him, Aquinas upheld the priority of the literal sense over the spiritual senses, like the typological.  Now, maybe that is too limited of a view of the typological sense, but again, I feel comfortable with keeping the company of the Angelic Doctor on this issue.