Ecumenical
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[edit] The Churches and the Scriptures Today
[edit] Historical Criticism
The historical-critical method, from its beginnings in the 18th century, has an anti-ecclesial impetus. More specifically, it was the “doctrines of the church” that were attacked as unhistorical or “late.” Remember Lessing’s distinction between the “religion of Christ” (what Jesus himself believed about himself and everything else) and “Christian religion” (what later generations (falsely) believed about Jesus). At first, the Roman Catholic Church instrumentalized historical criticism (e.g., textual criticism) to promote its own solution for the “obvious” problems of the Protestant scripture principle, that is, it promoted its teaching magisterium as the necessary and sufficient context for the interpretation of the Scriptures.
[edit] Tradition
However, some radical representatives notwithstanding, even higher criticism is putting on a more churchly, constructive garb now. The way this is done is by means of the notion of “tradition.” “Tradition” has come to be seen as the mediating entity between, e.g., Jesus and us. Often it is identified with the process of interpretation and reinterpretation of what was said and done in the past. This is, e.g., how the gospels are said to have come into being: Jesus said or did something. His disciples and other bystanders see and hear it in their own personal way (in their “faith”). In a process of oral transmission their “impression” of what Jesus said or did is shaped and reshaped. And finally, their orally transmitted remembrances are, not without further modifications, gradually put into writing.
Did Jesus really say what he is said to have said according to the gospels? Critically speaking, one could say, “No, this is not what the real Jesus said.” This would have been the older, critical paradigm that sought to reconstruct the “real Jesus” after destroying the “Jesus of faith” preserved in the gospels. However, these days people say, “Yes, this is what the real Jesus said, as he was understood by the community of faith.” We, today, are bound by this interpretation of the community in the sense that we always have to refer to it. But, on the other hand, we also need to formulate what Jesus means for us today; not all ancient interpretations are equally valid anymore. In other words, we see an ongoing creative process of tradition that connects “us” to the early church and, ultimately, to Jesus.
[edit] Tradition, Scripture, and Traditions
These issues have been formulated by the Commission of Faith and Order of the (liberal) World Council of Churches in 1963 by distinguishing between “Tradition” (Jesus Christ), “Scripture” (witness to Jesus Christ), and “traditions” (interpretations of the Tradition in time and space), cf. Barth’s three forms of God’s Word (Christ – Scripture – preaching). However, as clearly seen by a 1998 study document entitled A Treasure in Earthen Vessels: An Instrument for an Ecumenical Reflection of Hermeneutics the critical truth-question still needed to be asked: What is a faithful interpretation of Christ and what is a distortion of the gospel? Are different interpretations by necessity mutually exclusive or complementary?
Both questions are answered by the 1998 document in moral terms: Faithful is that interpretation of the gospel which advances the equality of all people and thus ends racism and sexism and, additionally, is ecologically friendly in the context of the local interpretative community (church as “hermeneutical community”). Higher criticism is, understood in this context, not a problem per se. – If this faithfulness is present, then it is a moral imperative of dialoguing to respect the partner in dialogue and to begin to see his contextual interpretation as complementary to one’s own, as one valid expression (among others) of Christ. – Soberly considered, we are dealing with a kind of moral Christian fundamentalism here: agreement in a few moral fundamentals is enough for visible church union.
[edit] The Roman Catholic Church
The Roman Catholic Church, after a more eclectic reception of modern biblical scholarship, has come to embrace it fully, yet not without typical cautions. The 1943 encyclical letter, Divino afflante Spiritu, by Pope Pius XII is usually considered as a turning point in this development. A further milestone was the dogmatic constitution, Dei verbum, of the 2nd Vatican Council (1965). In its document, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, published 50 years after Divino afflante Spiritu in 1993, the Pontifical Biblical Commission, chaired by Jos. Card. Ratzinger, first defends the historical-critical interpretation of the bible over against those who, frustrated by the plurality of results, seek “simpler,” more “direct” avenues into the Scriptures. This is done because the Commission finds that this “method” as such can be distinguished from certain all-too critical presuppositions of some of its users. Used rightly, it can open the understanding of the rich, dynamic process of production and redaction which resulted in the final forms of the text, which alone express God’s Word.
The Commission then discusses more recent, more literary approaches to the biblical texts (rhetorical criticism, narrative criticism, semiotics) which study the texts as we have them today regardless of the historical development leading up to them. It furthermore discusses “canonical criticism” (B. Childs, J. Sanders) which emphasizes the importance of the religious community in the formation of the canon of sacred scriptures. Especially for the interpretation of the OT, Jewish exegesis old and new is highlighted in the document. Reader-response criticism is seen as potentially dangerous because it is not seen to provide criteria for distinguishing between “right” and “wrong” reader responses.
Furthermore, anthropological approaches to the scriptures are discussed (sociology, anthropology, psychology) as well as contextual hermeneutics (liberation theology and feminist theology).
Finally, the “fundamentalist” approach to the Scriptures is discussed; and it alone is explicitly characterized as “dangerous because it attracts people who seek biblical answers to their life’s problems”! The complaints against this approach are many: it is unscientific, literalistic (not recognizing figures of speech); it regards the Scriptures as the only norm for faith and life and thus separates it from the living tradition of interpretation (not recognizing that the interpretative community, i.e., church, was there prior to the Scriptures!); it holds to a verbal doctrine of inspiration; it disregards differences in form and style of the human writers; it improperly applies the doctrine of inerrancy to historical and scientific facts; in the gospels, it does not distinguish between what is “apostolic” and what goes back to Christ himself and thus disregards the complex process of tradition leading from the latter to the former; it, finally, is intellectually narrow and might lead to a “sacrifice of the intellect.” – One begins to see why higher criticism and Catholicism can cooperate so nicely in the field of biblical interpretation: they share many presuppositions.
In discussing modern philosophical hermeneutics, the document highlights the approaches of M. Heidegger, P. Ricoeur, and H.-G. Gadamer. Gadamer, e.g., points out, on the one hand, that there is a historical distance between an ancient text and “us,” but he, on the other hand, asserts that true understanding is nonetheless possible if there is a “merging” of the horizons of the text and of that of the interpreter. This “merging” will occur only if there is an organic, living connection between the modern reader and the ancient text.
The document goes on to discuss the ancient distinction between literal and spiritual sense, which it sees basically vindicated by modern hermeneutics (multiple levels of meaning), in the following sense: the literal sense is the sense (literal or figurative) understood by the human author at the time of writing; the spiritual sense is the sense which the Christian faith, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, discovers in reference to Christ. At times, these two senses are identical (mostly in the NT); at other times, they are different (as mostly in the OT). The spiritual sense can, understood as a gradually deepening of the understanding of a given text since its writing, also be described as sensus plenior, “fuller meaning.” The deeper, fuller understanding of Is. 7:14 in Mt. 1:23 is an example for this kind of enriching interpretation within the bible.
What now is, taking all these modern developments into account, the specific Catholic way of reading the Scriptures? The Commission states that not a specific methodology in reading the texts per se is the characteristic mark of Catholic interpretation – it shares all the commonly accepted scholarly methods that have been developed in the past because it too regards the biblical texts as written by human authors who were condition by their historical and cultural contexts. However, Catholic interpretation is that interpretation of Scripture which consciously stands in the line of the living tradition of the church whose chief goal it is to preserve the revelation which is witnessed in the bible.
In other words, it has already been taking into account the discovery of modern philosophical hermeneutics that it is impossible to read a text without a certain “pre-understanding.” Its pre-understanding ties closely together the modern sciences and that tradition which originates in Israel and comes to us through primitive Christianity. This inner relatedness is, again based on modern philosophy, the presupposition for every meaningful exegesis of Scripture.
Biblical texts are expressions of traditions which already existed before them. Different texts of the Scriptures reread different traditions in different ways, depending on the “creativity of the author.” This is true already within the OT, but it is true even more so between OT and NT where reinterpretations of older traditions take place (“fulfillment”), as exemplified by Jesus’ own “personal and original attitude” toward the OT. Likewise, the authors of the NT have reread and reinterpreted the OT in light of Easter, which allowed them to see the additional, spiritual meaning of certain OT texts.
All in all, according to the Pontifical Commission, the bible itself is the product of an ongoing process of interpretation; its texts are witnesses of the faith of the community in its unity, but also in its diversity. It has emerged in a living dialogue between itself and related faith traditions. This is also the way to follow today in the interpretation of Scripture: within the community of believers (church) and in a vivid dialogue with it under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, so that the ancient texts can be asked new questions and so that new answers can be heard. Obviously, based on developments in the Catholic Church of the 19th century, the papal teaching office plays a crucial role in formulating these new answers in a definitive way.
[edit] Synthesizing Historical Criticism with Church Doctrine
The Catholic Church, as seen above, has certainly demonstrated in the past 100 years that there can be a synthesis between historical criticism and church doctrine. In its own way, it has continued the efforts of compromising conservative Protestant scholars in the 19th and 20th century who, on the one hand, felt that “historical criticism” (and the diachronic methods this term stands for: textual criticism; literary criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, tradition criticism) is an inevitable part of theology, but who, on the other hand, did not want to go the way of the radical rationalists or historicists of all times and basically reduce biblical Christianity either to an accumulation of reasonable moral truths or to a religion of the ancient Near East without any relevance for “us” today.
Following such men as Martin Kähler and Karl Barth and also the “ecclesial” synthesis of the Roman Church, modern conservative Protestant theologians have been setting forth their model. A leader among these is certainly Brevard Springs Childs (UCC) of Yale. These modern conservatives claim a mediating position, that is, they share an antipathy against individualistic liberalism on the one hand and “fundamentalism” on the other hand: the former pursues criticism too far (presently for the sake of its own social agenda in the church; traditional theology has already been dealt with in the 19th century); the latter not far enough (or not at all).
Childs, e.g., proposes to focus our attention on the texts as they now stand in the context of the biblical canon. While Childs agrees with the older critical school that the texts emerged in a lengthy history of production and redaction / tradition, he would also argue that the individual texts and books have taken on a new meaning by having been placed by the community of faith (Israel/Church) in a larger context, namely, that of the canon. Exegesis is therefore for him a much more literary than historical endeavor. More important than the “events” behind the texts seem to be the texts themselves and the “theology” they convey, especially in their current canonical context. E.g., the OT as a whole he wishes to read, first, as a Jewish book in its own right. But then it also needs to be reread in the context of the larger Christian bible, as pointing to the true subject matter of the entire Scriptures, Jesus Christ.
R. Jenson, further developing Childs’ approach of canonical criticism, asserts that the most basic hermeneutical principle for the right interpretation of Scripture is “the life of the church” itself. God, so Jenson, uses the liturgy, the devotional life, the catechesis, and the preaching of the church to open the Scriptures to the people today. Based on this, he develops a number of individual rules to understand the bible rightly: Scripture is to be read as a whole. Scripture is to be read as a single narrative. In order to be understood, the “general plot” has to be known prior to reading the individual text. The place where this knowledge is preserved is in the Christian church. This knowledge has come to be called “rule of faith,” that is, e.g., the doctrines contained in the Apostles’ Creed. Clearly, Jenson suggests reading the Scriptures in light of church doctrine.
As already Childs, Jenson does not argue in favor of totally abandoning historical criticism. However, he sees its primary role in seeing the Scriptures in historical perspective. This is not to mean, according to Jenson, to open a “nasty ditch” between the contemporary community of faith and the biblical one; but it does mean to give historical depth to the bible. – The question is: does this allow for “different theologies” in the Scripture (e.g., different “emphases” between Jesus and Paul), so that we too could rejoice in at least a certain degree of diversity, even as we are reading the one bible in the one church (ecumenism)?
