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.