How is the Bible read in your community?

(originally posted for my online course, but felt it relevant enough to be placed here, as well)

The ways in which the Bible was constructed was never a topic of conversation, or of a sermon or homily when I was growing up. I knew the Bible, as I think everyone around me did, as a complete book. The book of Matthew was written by some guy named Matthew, and the book of Psalms belonged to a guy named Psalm (I’m sure I thought that was true when I was three). Genesis was written down at some point by someone else, and sometime after the flood, someone else recorded the names of the previous generations. In other words, the Bible was a collection of “complete books” -- I don’t think we thought of them as themselves collections of writers and traditions all coming together into a cultural unity.

I don’t think we thought the Bible and the church working in concert to each create the other. Certainly, I don’t recall any conversations about considering the Scriptures in light of the historical or cultural modalities of the time and place in which they were written. Everything was about how it could be applied to my life, or our lives. One point I am certain we didn’t talk about was the concept of how the Old Testament was a book about Jesus, as is mentioned in Harrington’s text. It certainly pointed to it, but the comparative stories were brought up seemingly as special insights of the preacher, instead of as Inspired Word of God pre-figurations of Jesus Christ.

In my current experience, the Bible is becoming more and more a weapon of the fundamentalist Christian to use against people. I have friends who have always been on the fundamentalist edge of the range of Christianity. Since the increase in extremist terrorism, and especially since the attack that destroyed New York’s twin towers, their fundamentalism has taken a decidedly nasty turn. The greatest commandment, said Jesus, is Love. Is that not so? Yet my friend, and even more so his in-laws, have taken the opportunity to suggest that Scripture supports violence against Islam, discrimination against homosexuals, and even--although they would never admit it--racism and classism against those in urban areas. The sister-in-law claimed that the Bible says that you shouldn’t use charity to help someone physically capable of working themselves. It is this kind of thinking that I think Dei verbum calls “a kind of intellectual suicide” -- that which takes Christians away from the total meaning of life in Christ and allows them to take a cafeteria-style approach to Christian ethics.

My favorite concept in the opening chapter is the idea of “both/and” -- that Catholic interpretation can accommodate both the Divine Origin of the Bible as well as recognize the contribution of human authors who wrote the books of the Bible “in a certain time and place.” I recognize this more fully now when the lectors announce “A reading from the the book of Isaiah,” for example. It is recognition of the time and place of its composition, of the human author who composed it, and of its Divine Origin. I am sure that those in my church do not recognize this dichotomy any more than I did before I read this chapter.

In terms of the books of the Bible, it is difficult to know how the people of the community feel about what is in their Bible. My fundamentalist friends deny the Apocrapha and claim that they were “added” by the Catholic church, rather than removed by the Reformation. But the most important understanding that I gained from Chapter Two--and the one that I think gets forgotten much of the time--is that “the Old Testament was the Bible for the earliest Christians.” In other words, for those who became Christ’s first disciples and his first church, the Old Testament was their Scripture, and it was a book about Jesus. The “Use and Abuse” article mentioned that too often it is the prophecies that those who abuse the Bible focus on, not the parts of the Bible that deal with morals, values, and traditions. It’s true of my fundamentalist friends, too. They want to find justification for their end-of-the-world scenarios, and it usually starts with the destruction of some group of people.

For most in my community, I would venture to guess that reading the Bible is not a priority. I would guess that this is true around the country, except in the most devout homes. We hear the Bible on Sundays at Mass, and many in this class probably read it every day, but what of our less devout friends (I put myself in the "less devout" category)? In the end, it's likely a book that is either somewhere on a shelf in their house, or altogether absent. Because of who I am and where I find time, I have an app on my iPhone that allows me some time to enter Scripture when I can, even if it's not a quiet place in my own own.

Apparently, I'm not very bright

Ok, so maybe it's not fair to sell myself short. What is fair is to say that I've been having a lot of "A-ha!" moments as I've been reading How Catholics Read the Bible by Daniel Harrington, S.J. I'm sure you'll read about a few of these if you keep coming back, but let me share only a couple today. 

Both/And

First, let's talk about "either/or" vs "both/and." Catholicism, according to Harrington (and I believe him), "Catholicism encourages 'both/and' rather than 'either/or' thinking." The Bible is both of divine origin and including "the necessary contribution of the human persons who composed the books of the Bible. In other words, the Bible is "'the Word of God in human language'." 

Too often for my taste, I hear of literal interpretations of Scripture that are used to either marginalize the dignity of human persons, or even to condemn those persons out of hand. 

I rememberJoseph Campbell talking about literalists getting "stuck in the metaphor"--not that the Bible is metaphor and therefore, untrue, but that the metaphor is necessary for human understanding. The Bible can be both expressed in metaphor and true and necessary for salvation. 

This realization, especially in these terms of both/and makes the dynamic between "Bible as human document" and "Bible alasDivine  Document" much easier to synthesize. 

The Old Testament and Jesus 

So, here's my intellectual confession. I am about to make a statement about the Old Testament that may be obvious. But I never realized it until the concept was put into these terms in Harrington's book. 

I always thought about the Old Testament as a book that contained the Jewish histories and Wisdom books (although I never knew even those terms until recently, but you get it). Then I came across this sentence in Harrington's book:

For early Christians the Old Testament was a book about Jesus Christ, and the paschal mystery provided them with the interpretive key for it. 

Well, Duh!

I had never thought of it in these terms. Why? I think because we always talked in my childhood churches about the Old Testament as a book of prophecy and history. But the thread wasn't explicitly connected. Or if it was, I missed it. 

Dei Verbum encourages Catholics to take a "christocentric" approach to reading the Old Testament. Of course! It's the book with all the models who pre-figure Christ. When I was young, I only considered these models as similar to Jesus, not as pre-figurations (is that a word?). 

Coming to this realization makes my experience of faith more logical (in a good way), more connected to history, and more in line with a kind of rational sense than without it. 

Why didn't I think of that? Because apparently, I'm not very bright... but I'm getting better. 

Where I'm Coming From

From stories to learning

I grew up in a Christian home. We prayed. We went to church. You know the story. We were not bound by church or doctrine so much as by the message of the minister. If we felt a spirit of love and forgiveness, we stayed. Even simpler, if we liked the minister, we stayed. If it became about guilt, an overly sombre-mindset, or the calling down of fire and brimstone on the wicked, we left. We attended Congregationalist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches. Church was where we heard stories of love, forgiveness, moral behavior, community, salvation, and more, but I never knew the doctrinal differences among these. It just never came up. 

By the time I got to college, I had left the church (lower-case "c") entirely. I majored in Philosophy (my first love), English Literature, and minored in World Religions, History, and created an unofficial music performance minor. I would later earn a secondary education certificate, another major in American Literature, another minor in Sociology, and my master's degree would be in Humanities. None of which really had any bearing on my faith or lack thereof.

What changed for me was a kind of calling, but it happened in a very intellectual framework. I had been reading C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, the last book on my shelf that I had never opened. My aunt had purchased the book for me as a gift upon my graduation from high school. I placed it on my shelf and ignored it for six years. Finally, I was poor, working on my teaching certificate, living alone, bored and had read everything on my shelves. So one night I picked it up and read it. 

Even though my experiences while reading the book literally changed my life, I've never gone back to re-read it. I got out of it what I needed at the time. It opened me back up to the possibility of God and spirit. 

It would be another six years before I started going back to church occasionally and another eight years before I converted to Catholicism.

I have always found inspiration in the intellectual. The more I understand, the more I can integrate knowledge into my own life, the more I can accept and believe. Knowledge of the church, of the Bible, of the Catechism, of science, only strengthens my faith, even when challenges confront me. These challenges are met through rationality guided by faith. I believe in miracles. Why shouldn't I? Have you seen the universe?

Note: I have begun this blog as I go back to taking coursework through the University of Dayton Virtual Learning Community for Faith Formation (VLCFF). It may be that I continue this outside of that learning experience and it may be that only I ever read these posts.