Catholic Biblical Scholarship

by Peter Brown

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What can be done to improve Catholic biblical scholarship? Benedict is keenly aware that there is no easy answer to this question. Beginning with the encyclical Providentissimus Deus in 1893 and culminating with the landmark Pius XII encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu in 1943 the Church has in principle embraced and indeed enthusiastically encouraged modern biblical research. But this embrace paradoxically has always had aspects of awkwardness and unease. The openness to modernity was based on the desire to penetrate more deeply into the riches of Scripture while maintaining and fostering the treasures already possessed by the Church as seen in the traditional reading of the Bible. In many ways, the struggle over the correct approach to biblical interpretation is emblematic of the Church's attitude to the modern world in general: very welcoming of what is good but very suspicious of that which undermines the Church and her mission. Achieving the right balance between world openness on the one hand and discernment of spirits on the other has been the central challenge of the Church in the modern age. The Church cannot turn back the clock with regard to the Enlightenment and modern thought but she must at the same time hold fast to the Tradition that she has been entrusted with handing down. This tightrope act between wholesale embrace of modernity on one extreme and the wholesale rejection of contemporary scholarship on the other has been an endeavor most difficult to maintain.

Benedict, before his elevation to the papacy, had in fact written and commented extensively on the relationship between the Church and biblical exegesis. He is clearly not entirely happy with the state of Catholic biblical scholarship. His views taken as a whole however seem to reflect his nuanced approach to the modern age generally and are thus not easily typecast as either "conservative" or "liberal." According to Benedict, to understand Catholic biblical scholarship and its sometimes-strained relationship with the Magisterium in the current age, it is necessary to go back to about the dawn of the twentieth century. The Bible was under heavy attack in those days at the hands of European scholars, particularly in Germany. Their methods on any number of grounds had the effect of calling into question nearly everything the Bible affirmed. Their criticisms were highly sophisticated by the standards of their day. The critics were well schooled in the biblical languages and profoundly familiar with the biblical text and used this knowledge fundamentally to deconstruct the canon of Scripture by relativizing its message. Instead of the Bible of the people of God, the one of Divine origin and witnessing to eternal truths, they endeavored to show that the Bible actually represented a series of evolving human-based theological ideologies. These theologies, far from representing immutable truths about God, were in fact oriented to sociological or political goals that furthered the temporal interests of the theologians themselves. The priests, for instance, would write biblical literature that would promote sacrifice, liturgy, Temple worship, and whatever else advanced their religious agenda. Other religious factions would promote Israel's kingly traditions and write texts that provided the pretext for the Davidic dynasty anointed by God and predestined to rule the world without end under a future Messianic figure. As one might expect, these scholars thought very little of Hebrew traditions and saw in the New Testament (at least in the earliest historical strata of Paul) an attempt to purge the Jewish religion of its outdated ceremonial practices and anachronistic world-view. The "New Testament religion" for them was in essence a commitment to personal moral excellence apart from interference from priests, liturgies and ceremonial rigmarole. Only later, with the emergence of the Church was the pure Gospel once again "corrupted" with new variations on the same old hide-bound rituals (such as sacraments) and new religious authorities (like priests and bishops) to impose burdens on the people with the effect of preserving themselves in power. The rise of "early Catholicism" coincided with the decline of the primitive kerygma. It is not difficult to see that this scholarship was heavily jaundiced both with anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism as well as a kind of warmed over Lutheranism (i.e., the "real" gospel is a rejection of Jewish "works of the Law" — and by implication a rejection of the Catholic hierarchy, liturgy and sacraments as well.) But unlike Lutheranism, there was little sense of transcendent truth that is an essential part of any authentic Christian worldview. Many of the first generations of "higher critics" labored under two key assumptions. The first was that all truth claims were made to advance the interest of the person making the claim (Nietzcheanism); the claim to possess truth was essentially a will to power. The second was that ultimate truth itself was just an eschatological ideal to which evolving truth claims and counter claims constantly strived through history to attain (Hegelianism).

Given this, it is not too difficult to see why at the dawn of the twentieth century the Magisterium and the newly formed Pontifical Biblical Commission utterly closed the door to much higher criticism, believing its philosophical and theological presuppositions to be utterly incompatible with Church teaching. This attitude on the part of the Magisterium toward modern biblical criticism, which prevented Catholic scholars from pursuing whole lines of academic inquiry, mostly characterized the Scripture scholarship for the first half of the twentieth century in the Catholic Church. The fact that the Magisterium ran an unusually tight ship in this time period had several effects on the scholars' attitude to Church authority. Rather than seeing the Church's teaching office as an aid to fruitful scholarly inquiry, they came to see the Church as an intrusive pest, which had gone far beyond its mandate of teaching on faith and morals. The Church had issued numerous binding rulings on purely historical questions like the dates of composition of biblical books, the identity of the authors, and whether the authors used other sources in writing the work. Catholic scholars looked longingly to their Protestant and secular counterparts who seemed to have much greater freedom in nearly every respect. Catholics felt, not unjustifiably, that their scholarship was not being taken seriously since it could not directly engage in the scholarly conversation that seemed to exist everywhere but in the Catholic Church. Catholic exegetes, much like physicists being forbidden to explore Einsteinian relativity, felt artificially chained to the past. Beyond this, there were a number of exegetes who, in testing the limits of Pontifical Biblical Commission rulings, were stripped of their teaching posts. Benedict recounted this with some sense of regret in his 2003 address to the biblical commission.¹

The irony of all this was that "high criticism" was causing shockwaves in the Protestant world, since believing Protestants after all were committed to the authority of Scripture as well as its historicity. Both had been greatly undermined by early uses of historical criticism. Particularly difficult to deal with was the sudden popularity of a German pastor and brilliant biblical scholar named Rudolph Bultmann. Though he was undoubtedly influenced by the rationalism of the German biblical guild, which I have summarized above, he did not proceed from a desire to destroy the Bible's credibility. On the contrary, his goal was to make the real truth of the Bible accessible to modern man, for whom miracles and other supernatural occurrences were a stumbling block. In other words, Bultmann wanted to adapt the gospel message to people who doubted the supernatural order and just needed the transforming power of the kerygma itself. The original gospel message was Pauline and it emphasized deep personal and existential transformation with little interest in historical facts about Jesus. The crucifixion and the resurrection were all that mattered to Paul and the latter need not have been an historical event itself. The truth of Paul was that faith in the resurrection was all that mattered and not the fact of the resurrection itself. Paul's mystical experience on the road to Damascus illustrated how the transforming power of the kerygma could be received apart from any concern with the actual event of the resurrection. In the early Church, Bultmann was fond of saying, Jesus need not so much have risen from the dead as that he "rose into preaching."² The gospel stories were nearly wholly legendary accounts of Jesus that the Church had adopted only later ultimately because the evangelists could never quite break from their Jewish obsession with historical narrative. Bultmann never supposed that form criticism could peel back the various layers of "legendary" material in the gospels and extract the historical core. The legend for Bultmann was an essential part of the gospel stories that could not be removed. His idea of "demythologization" did not call for removing myth from the story — this would presuppose that authentic historical information about Jesus was actually recoverable and this view Bultmann all but rejected. He wanted not to remove myth but to reinterpret it existentially and thus refashion it to meet the needs of his audience — much as the gospel writers themselves had allegedly transformed the primitive ahistorical kerygma of Paul into purported events of history for their own pastoral needs. Nonetheless, Bultmann assumed a great deal of creativity on the part of the gospel writers — a creativity, which for various motives was used to shape the "historical Jesus" into the "Jesus of faith." Naturally, this approach assumed that large portions of the Bible were in fact little more than the accumulated theological imagination of the early Church. This insinuation did not sit well with much of the believing Protestant world, even to the part reared on the concept of "faith alone." "Faith alone" in Bultmann's sense was "faith alone" irrespective of the historical events upon which "faith" was ostensibly based. Bultmann's methodology signaled a wake up call for Protestant scholars who had flirted with modern approaches but wanted to maintain some connection to confessional Christianity. Demythologization had brought to a head the problem of history for Christian believers. Could the message of the gospel in and of itself have power to save if the message was completely independent of things that actually happened? Could Christianity remain in any sense Christian and completely capitulate to the historical challenge of the Enlightenment by setting the gospel permanently adrift from its historical moorings? The ensuing confusion in the scholarly milieu moved many to a biblical fundamentalism defined by a thorough going rejection of all modern exegetical science. Still others lost their faith entirely. But more than a few scholars realized that the new scholarship could only really be controverted on scholarly grounds. After all, they did not have a Magisterium to silence Bultmann. The only real way to defend the basic biblical narrative in academic circles was to master the modern scholarly methods and use them to point out the many historical and philosophical flaws in Bultmann's "demythologization" methodology. His a priori rejection of the supernatural was neither "scientific" nor "rational," by his own standards and his view that the early Church was uninterested in the historical Jesus could not adequately explain how the stories about Jesus originated in the first place.

About this time, Pius XII released his landmark 1943 encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu that was by all accounts the "magna carta" for modern Catholic biblical scholarship. With the overall goal of defending the Bible's basic reliability and historical character, as well as deepening the Church's biblical knowledge, the pope allowed for the first time scholars to subject the biblical text to literary criticism as well as what he termed the "historical method," which certainly included historical criticism. Catholic scholars were permitted to reinvestigate questions of authorship, datings of biblical books and sources used by authors — all with the goal of defending the Bible and more deeply penetrating into its mysteries. The Pope obviously had no desire to open the floodgates of hypercritical rationalism or introduce the "demythologization" of Bultmann into Catholic exegesis — his desire was quite the opposite. It is debated even today how far the Pope really wished to go in opening the door to contemporary biblical science. But it is indisputable that by the 1940s Rome's attitude was changing. Far from the mostly defensive posture of early Magisterial statements, there was a conviction on the part of Pius XII that the Church in the long run had nothing to fear from the many historical challenges to the Bible. There was an implicit confidence that modern scholarly methods if neutrally applied would ultimately vindicate the Bible's many truth claims and above all the historical accuracy of its portrait of Jesus.

— Nonetheless, there were many bumps along the road into modernity for Catholic exegesis. Catholic scholars, like Father Raymond Brown, who came of age after Divino struggled to carve a niche for themselves. On the one hand, they had no desire to embrace the more corrosive criticism which had already worked its way through the Protestant world and indeed Brown did much to keep the more extreme "demythologization" out of Catholic scholarship. They knew that this was not what Pius XII had in mind, and Brown, contrary to what many think, did labor to remain faithful to Church teachings — at least as he understood them. He was always very careful never directly to challenge the Church on any point of defined dogma. On the other hand, though the scholars were Catholic and indeed because they were Catholic, they did not want to be seen as simply carrying water for the Magisterium. This image of the Catholic scholar hampered in his pursuit of the truth by backward, reactionary Church officials was one that had to be shaken if Catholic scholarship could ever gain respectability. No one would take their exegesis seriously if they were seen to be just uncritically repeating past dogmas or recycling the mantras of fathers and doctors. Brown labored above all to be "objective" while still being Catholic, though like most modern scholars his methods always seemed to suppose a tension if not a dualism between loyalty to the Church and the practice of historical criticism.

Moreover, Brown undoubtedly picked up a degree of bitterness from Catholic scholars of the previous generation. The older scholars were happy with their new found academic freedom and the ultimate vindication of modern scholarly methods but they undoubtedly were angry that Divino was so late in coming and that many of their productive years had been lost. Brown, and other scholars of his generation, were conditioned to see the freedom to use critical methods as hard fought gains which should never be surrendered to more conservative, obscurantist elements in the Church who naively advocated turning back the clock to a more "pre-critical" era. Like most of his generation, Brown also came to believe that biblical fundamentalism was a far greater threat to Catholic biblical studies than the abuses of historical criticism. There is no doubt that in the course of their struggle for independence and respectability of peers many scholars of Brown's generation and the one after were a bit more apt to cling to critical theories than perhaps they otherwise would have been inclined to. For them it was the season to establish and defend the legitimacy of critical methods in the Church, and not the season to confront that method's many shortcomings. Catholic scholars had something to prove and they quickly set about trying to prove it. If they occasionally took issue with the interpretive tradition of their own Church, at least they would never be accused of fudging matters so that their own private theology took precedence over the critical meaning of the biblical text. Brown himself labored for objectivity too because he taught most of his career at a non-Catholic institution and was heavily involved in the post-Vatican II ecumenical outreach. In no way should one question his sincerity, but it is difficult to avoid the impression that personal motivations and professional considerations were partially at work in the way he approached the biblical text.

Even today many ask what good has come from "higher level criticism." Another way of asking this question is "has Pius XII's vision for Catholic biblical studies been realized?" or was it a colossal mistake to allow critical methods to gain preeminence in the Church? Many people would look at historical criticism and wonder whether anything has been learned by the new techniques. A person could not be faulted for believing that "historical criticism" as it has been practiced has only served to cast doubt over many biblical teachings that were once accepted without difficulty. Benedict himself has often spoken critically of the "hermeneutics of suspicion" which seems to corrode the modern approach to biblical text. But, for Benedict, returning to a "pre-critical" era in which the knowledge gained over the past two centuries is discarded is simply not an option for Catholic biblical studies.³ To run from history and historical questions is ultimately to run from the incarnate nature of God's word — a maneuver no less repugnant to faith than denying the humanity of Jesus. The very humanity of Scripture is the sole means to attain to its divinity and yet it is just this humanity that makes possible the useful employment of modern scholarly tools — inasmuch as the same tools have been used to penetrate the depths of other ancient literature. Moreover, one cannot effectively address Jesus to the contemporary age if one ignores the fact that modern man does indeed dare to ask if Jesus really was the sort of person that the gospels make him out to be. And no one with even a casual exposure to popular literature, movies and cable TV shows can deny that the Jesus of the Bible is only one of many available for public consumption. The fact that the Church for the first seventeen centuries flourished without facing these sorts of historical challenges does not mean that they can be avoided now.⁴

In truth, the situation in Catholic biblical scholarship is a bit better than it was a generation ago. After years of throwing every possible skepticism at the Gospel stories, most scholars today no longer doubt the basic historical character of a good portion of the Gospel accounts of Jesus' many miracles, or the gospel accounts of his passion. Even the Resurrection, formerly relegated to mystical subjectivism, is frequently treated to be in some sense "historical," so as to account for the historical fact of the early Church's faith. Few believe that the basic portrayal of Jesus in the Gospels is a total fabrication of the New Testament writers and the early Church. The much-publicized Jesus Seminar, once darling of the media, does not represent most Catholic New Testament scholarship. The very fact that the more revisionist reconstructions of Jesus must resort to hypothetical reconstructions of non-canonical texts (e.g. Q and the gospel of Thomas) is a tacit concession to one striking fact: the synoptic gospels, even when read critically, vindicate the traditional portrait of Jesus at least in its broad contours. The Bultmannian flight from history is seen today as quite passé and unnecessary.

Still the reflexive liberalism in Catholic biblical studies persists in many quarters. As critical methods are clung to as hard fought gains, more than a few have suspected that Catholic exegesis suffers from an identity crisis.⁵ The Catholic guild has indeed seen the vindication of modern methods of biblical interpretation developed mostly by Protestants but at great cost. The virtual declaration of independence from the Magisterium in the 1960s by Catholic scholars has resulted in reams of scholarship unhelpful to the Church, whatever its merits otherwise. The struggle since that time has been to use modern tools in a manner that shores up rather than undermines the later tradition of the Church. What has long been needed is an exegesis that combines the best of the ancient and modern approaches while fully aware of the shortcomings of each — an approach that is post-critical not pre-critical.

Benedict's own corpus and comments on biblical interpretation suggest definite ideas as to how modern approaches to the Bible can be successfully integrated into "faith's hermeneutic."⁶ Indeed the importance of reconciling academic exegesis with its ecclesiastical counterpart has been a salient theme of his writings on scripture since at least Vatican II. Benedict surprisingly does not think that Catholic scholars' problem is that they are too critical. On the contrary, they are insufficiently critical of limitations inherent in their own methods.⁷ Take for instance modern scholarship's assumption that the Bible can only be "objectively" interpreted apart from the Church's life and tradition. As a matter of historical fact however there would be no Bible to interpret at all apart from a Church to receive it, believe it, and center its liturgical worship around it and the divine events it describes. A biblical criticism that does not recognize the inextricable historical unity of Bible and Church adopts a fundamentally unscientific and unhistorical posture toward revelation.⁸ The word of God's natural home is in the midst of the people of God, especially at worship. The limitations are as severe in studying the Bible outside the Church as they are in studying a species of trout outside its native pond. A biblical science that does not realize this in a self-critical way is inherently limited in its approach to sacred text.⁹

An objective posture toward interpreting the Bible, Benedict reminds us, does not entail approaching the text without prejudices but rather approaching it with the correct prejudices — prejudices that befit the objective nature of the thing being studied. Catholic exegetes must be at least methodologically open to the possibility that God can indeed intervene in history and bring about events which do indeed carry the meaning with which he vests them. They should at least admit the possibility that such events can in principle occur which have no exact precedent in history and cannot therefore be compressed into existing categories of human thought and experience. In other words, not every supernatural occurrence can be treated in purely worldly terms.¹⁰ This can be true while at the same time one recognizes that the human words of scripture as well as the faith of the Church can be a true source of knowledge about events of the past. Not all knowledge of the past can be derived or authenticated from historical science. An historical criticism that at least does not rule out these possibilities a priori will be of tremendous benefit to the people of God.

But we must also stop to absorb the shockwaves of explosive statements of Benedict's like this one: "the normative theologians of the Church are the authors of Sacred Scripture."¹¹ This is a view that would revolutionize Catholic theology if even a fraction of its impact were ever felt. In truth, the Church has never so much denied this. The Church fathers themselves seem to have coined the term "theologian" to describe none other than John the Evangelist, the author of the "spiritual gospel." But an honest look at the tradition would suggest that in practice the "normative theologians" of the Church might be more apt descriptions of St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas than men like Matthew, Mark, Luke, John or Paul. The biblical writers were the purveyors of the raw data of revelation by which one could construct a theology to address practical or speculative questions of later ages. The traditional exegesis of the New Testament emphasized tapping the text for divine meaning. This was good as far as it went for the fathers and doctors were very effective in most cases in deriving or demonstrating doctrine right from the inspired words of Scripture. The only disadvantage of this was that they sometimes treated the narrative itself as an egg to be cracked through to obtain the nutritious yolk of God's word. The importance of the egg itself was often missed. Often they did not read Luke as Luke or Paul as Paul but were interested mainly in the bottom line of truth apart from identification of truth with the author and his historical situation. Both the Church fathers and the scholastics tended to take isolated affirmations of Scripture and quickly press them into theological service sometimes quite apart from the literary context or the intentions of the original authors. Moreover historical questions about the sources used by biblical writers and their particular literary style in conveying truth were usually not even asked. The unsystematic character (real or imagined) of patristic and medieval exegesis has made it most difficult to incorporate the insights of the ancients into the modern discussion, even when there has been a desire to do so.¹²

But in treating the biblical authors as "normative theologians" Benedict resembles not a sola Scriptura Protestant so much as a prima Scriptura Catholic. Indeed, it is an implicit embrace of the historical critical approach to biblical text, when this method is neutrally applied. Perhaps the biggest gain of modern scholarship is the realization that the gospel writers were not artless chroniclers of facts but inspired theological commentators on the Christ event. And asserting the theological content of the gospels need not be done at the expense of their basic historical character. This was one of many false dichotomies pre-supposed by the first waves of critical scholars. There is no reason in principle why gospel narratives cannot be both theological and historical. N.T. Wright speaks for a generation of conservative yet critical Protestant scholars in affirming that the gospels are "more than history and biography but not less."

But reckoning with the reality that the gospel writers shaped their material with motivations other than purely historical or doctrinal offers much untapped potential. Good use of source criticism can help us see not only the pieces but occasionally gain a glimpse of the whole glorious puzzle as well. Luke for instance, is not giving us merely a "blow by blow" factual account of Jesus' life and times but is in fact telling the story in such a way that he is deliberately invoking themes of the Book of Isaiah. Indeed, Luke-Acts is in fact a highly stylized, carefully compiled commentary on Jesus, wherein the use of Isaianic citations and allusions is meant to drive home the reality that the exodus and restoration of Israel that the prophet described are being fulfilled in the Church in the first century.¹³ There is further evidence that Luke wishes us to connect the imminence of Christ's kingdom with Eucharistic table fellowship and indeed that Luke sees the kingdom of God as in some sense Eucharistic.¹⁴

Paul's writings too shine in dazzling new light when viewed in the apostle's own historical context. Paul emerges as more the one profoundly interested in harmony between Jew and Gentile in the Christian Church — the harmony to which emphasis on circumcision posed a threat — and less the crusader against some proto-Pelagian brand of works-righteousness. It seems increasingly likely that the center of his theology was ecclesiological and not soteriological — a modern critical insight which if true holds tremendous promise for recovering a fully Catholic Paul that historically minded Protestants can accept! And this Paul can be affirmed without sacrificing the crucial later insights of St. Augustine on grace, election and original sin.¹⁵

It is clear that good use of biblical criticism holds great promise not only for theology but for preaching and ministering to the Word as well. But Catholic homilists often are unable to make skillful use of the best of modern scholarship in unpacking the riches of God's word. This is because the visions of Pius XII and Benedict XVI for Catholic biblical studies ironically have been realized more in conservative evangelical circles than in Catholic ones. A Protestant groomed in nearly any confessional tradition will naturally gravitate to the biblical authors as normative theologians and will tend immediately to appreciate the doctrinal, pastoral and homiletic applications of his work. But in Catholic circles both in the U.S. and Europe it must be candidly admitted that exegesis is usually practiced far more as a technical philological and literary discipline than a theological one. Early historical critics like Raymond Brown did advance some biblical theology but often in a way that pointed out holes below the water line in the bark of patristic and scholastic theology while doing little to suggest how the leaky hull might be patched up. Because of the mutual mistrust and the fragmentation in the academy, Catholic exegesis has tended to pay only passing attention to Catholic theology, while Catholic theology often makes precious little use of the results of biblical scholars. Because of the compartmentalization, very few contemporary theologians wade comfortably both in fields of scripture and systematic theology. Scripture as "the soul of sacred theology" remains a future hope rather than a present reality.

But there is every reason to be optimistic for the future of Catholic biblical scholarship. Benedict has never wavered in his belief that the Bible itself is fundamentally one with the living tradition of the Church — both in her later theology and her worship in the liturgy. This oneness is an ontological fact rooted in the incarnation of Christ and an historical fact rooted in the very nature of revelation. It is, in short, not merely one of a chorus of scholarly hypotheses. Benedict is quite aware that it will take some time for scholarship to catch up so to speak with "faith's hermeneutic." When this takes place the Church will have shown that her interpretive traditions are not only the oldest and the most venerable but also the only ones that can survive a thoroughgoing critical scrutiny. Catholic readings of Scripture will be at once most in keeping with true Christian teaching and living but also the most academically respectable. When this occurs, the Church will have put to rest the historical challenge to the veracity of the Holy Scriptures and will have enriched her knowledge of the Bible immeasurably. Benedict's corpus suggests many philosophical and exegetical avenues for how this might ultimately be done. As the ideas of Benedict begin to make their mark on the Church, we may well be on the cusp of a golden age in Catholic biblical study.

End Notes

1. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, "Relationship between Magisterium and Exegetes," Address to Pontifical Biblical Commission in L'Osservatore Romano Weekly Edition in English (July 23. 2003) 8.

2. R. Bultmann, "The Primitive Christian Kerygma and the Historical Jesus," in C.E. Braaten and R. Harrisville, The Historical Jesus and the Kerygmatic Christ (New York: Abingdon, 1964) 15-42.

3. Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: The Ratzinger Conference on the Bible and the Church ed. Richard John Neuhaus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989) 114.

4. Biblical Interpretation in Crisis 133 "We can only give the Gospel to our age if we have an answer to the fundamental ideas of our time."

5. L.T. Johnson, "So What's Catholic about it?" in Commonweal January 16, 1998.

6. J. Ratzinger, Behold the Pierced One: An Approach to a Spiritual Christology, (San Francisco: Ignatius 1987) 44-45.

7. Biblical Interpretation in Crisis, 6- 16.

8. Brown for his part would wholeheartedly agree with this critique. See Biblical Interpretation in Crisis, 123. But in evaluating his own magisterial work Introduction to the New Testament at least one of his peers found its ecclesial sense lacking. It was a good as historical critical treatment but offered little in the way of contemporary pastoral and theological applications of Biblical text. See The Future of Catholic Biblical Scholarship, 146.

9. Biblical Interpretation in Crisis, 129 see also J. Ratzinger, The Nature and Mission of Theology. (San Francisco: Ignatius 2002) 45-50 for the dependence of all theology upon the Church.

10. Biblical Interpretation in Crisis, 17.

11. J. Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press 1987) 321. In truth, this is the premise of Benedict's own approach as private theologian and not necessarily as the leading Church official. However, a study of his writings finds that he thinks that the primacy of Scripture is enshrined in Vatican II as well and thus normative for the Church.

12. L.T. Johnson, The Future of Catholic Biblical Scholarship, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2002). Use of the fathers and doctors seems no more a salient feature of Johnson's own writings than the rest of Catholic exegesis however.

13. See for instance D. Pao, Acts and the Isaianic New Exodus, (Grand Rapids: Baker 2002).

14. S. Hahn, "Kingdom and Church in Luke Acts: From Davidic Christology to Kingdom Ecclesiology," in Reading Luke: Interpretation, Reflection, Formation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan 2005).

15. For a popular survey of the New Perspective on Paul see N.T. Wright, What Paul Really Said (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1997).

Mr. Peter Brown has degrees from Yale University and Franciscan University of Steubenville. Currently he works as a research intern at Catholics United for the Faith and is a freelance writer and lecturer on a wide variety of theological topics. He will soon be pursuing doctoral studies in Scripture and Biblical theology at Catholic University of America. He is married to Elizabeth who is active in post-abortion speaking and ministry. They live in Steubenville, Ohio. This is Mr. Brown's first article for HPR.

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