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.