The Catholic Exegetical Landscape
In 1988 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was invited to give the keynote address at a conference bearing his name: Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: The Ratzinger Conference on Bible and Church.1 To be sure, the title was intended to inspire the notion that the ship was sinking and now was not the time to rearrange the deck furniture. While Ratzinger's address showcased real problems in biblical interpretation, he also underscored substantial gains in this discipline in modern times. What challenges the Church, Ratzinger claimed, was the continuing influence of the epistemology of the Enlightenment, particularly rationalism, empiricism and philosophical positivism. In particular, he focused on the so-called "Kantian split," which assumes a division between faith and reason, promoting the latter at the expense of the former. God, it appears, was not invited to the table of his own word but was relegated to the obituaries of the mid-1960s. This Bible was not God's word in human language but merely an expression of the human person acting in his or her religious mode of existence. According to Ratzinger, the main issue in biblical interpretation in the Church was not the propriety or impropriety of methodology but of philosophy. By what hermeneutical principles does exegesis proceed?
At the conclusion of his address, Ratzinger summarized what he considered the steps toward a solution to the current crisis of biblical exegesis. The final two steps that he delineated best portray the parameters of the Magisterium's guidance of biblical exegesis in the Church over the last century from Leo XIII's Providentissimus Deus to the present. First, Ratzinger exhorted a reexamination of the exegetical landscape to discover what is useful and what is not. Second, he claimed that the Bible, to be truly Scripture, is a book that has its rightful place within the living Tradition of the people of faith. I would like to take each of his observations and reflect on them as an examination of where we now stand and where we hope to progress.
Step One: A survey of the landscape and what is helpful
The first of Ratzinger's observations was pastoral in nature. He states emphatically:
What we need now are not new hypotheses on the Sitz im Leben, on possible sources or on the subsequent process of handing down the material. What we do need is a critical look at the exegetical landscape we now have, so that we may return to the text and distinguish between those hypotheses which are helpful and those which are not. Only under these conditions can a new and fruitful collaboration between exegesis and systematic theology begin. And only in this way will exegesis be of real help in understanding the Bible.2
Nearly twenty years after these remarks were made, Ratzinger sounded the same theme in an address to the Biblical Commission on the occasion of its hundredth anniversary. In his address, entitled "Relationship Between Magisterium and Exegetes," he said: "I would like to attempt to ascend Mount Nebo..., so to speak, to observe from that perspective the ground which we have covered in the last fifty years."3 The horizon that Ratzinger described involved a summation of the work of Pius XII's Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943), Vatican II's Dei Verbum (henceforth DV; 1964), and the Biblical Commission's work, especially Sancta Mater Ecclesia ("The Historicity of the Gospels," 1964) and The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (1993). These works of the Magisterium and of the Biblical Commission, the latter of which was reassigned a consultative role to the Magisterium's office of teaching through Paul VI's motu propio Sedula Cura in 1971, identified well-known landmarks on the horizon, such as the role of the historical-critical methods and new literary methods.
These ecclesial works functioned as road markers guiding the weary traveler on the way. For our part, the Church's teaching over the last fifty years–and to a large extent those works that span the last century, such as Leo XIII's Providentissimus Deus published in 1893–annunciate clearly the hermeneutical principles by which exegesis is to advance and by which we discover, as Ratzinger exhorted in 1988, what is helpful and what is not.
Among these landmarks, one stands out among the others as the single hermeneutical principle that governs and orders the others, the mystery of the Incarnation. The principle is stated in Pius XII's Divino Afflante Spiritu, but the version that is most well known appears in a recasting of Pius' words in Dei Verbum §13, which states:
In Sacred Scripture, therefore, while the truth and holiness of God always remain intact, the marvelous "condescension" of eternal wisdom is clearly shown, "that we may learn the gentle kindness of God, which words cannot express, and how far he has gone in adapting his language with thoughtful concern for our weak human nature?' For the words of God, expressed in human language, have been made like human discourse, just as the word of the eternal Father, when he took to himself the flesh of human weakness, was in every way made like men.4
The significance of this principle is recognized in John Paul II's acceptance and approval of the Biblical Commission's The Interpretation of the Bible of the Church, as he summarizes the work of both Leo XIII's Providentissimus Deus and Pius XII's Divino Afflante Spiritu. On the one hand, notes John Paul II, Leo responded to uncontrolled scientism and rationalism that characterized unfaithful exegesis, especially as found in liberal Protestantism; on the other hand, Pius reacted to those who proposed a purely spiritual or mystical exegesis, a return to the use of only patristic approaches to the biblical text that wholly ignored the positive advances of scientific analysis or the historical-critical method. "In both cases," writes the Holy Father, "the reaction of the Magisterium was significant, for instead of giving a purely defensive response, it went to the heart of the problem and thus showed (let us note this at once) the Church's faith in the mystery of the Incarnation."5 The entire second part of the John Paul II's address (§611) developed this theme under the subtitle "The Harmony between Catholic Exegesis and the Mystery of the Incarnation." Here the Holy Father stated the case directly again: "The Church of Christ takes the realism of the incarnation seriously, and this is why she attaches great importance to the `historicocritical' study of the Bible. Far from condemning it, as those who support 'mystical' exegesis would want, my predecessors vigorously approved" (§7).
The Biblical Commission's The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, which the Holy Father affirmed in this address, echoed these sentiments as it described the exegetical landscape just as Ratzinger had called for fifteen years earlier. Exegesis that is true to the incarnational nature of Scripture takes both the humanity and divinity of this inspired word of God seriously, using every means that is helpful in addressing the human authors and their historical circumstances and literary preferences for communication. Moreover, the divine word obtained in this description of the literal sense becomes the foundation for the spiritual sense (cf. also DV §12; CCC §116-117).
The mystery of the Incarnation corrects exegetical extremes that parallel the Christological heresies of the early centuries of the Church. On the one hand, there are those who recognize only the divinity of this divinely inspired word. The most commonly encountered expression of this form of biblical interpretation, especially in the United States, is biblical fundamentalism. John Paul II's critique goes right to the heart of the theological problem. He states:
A false idea of God and the Incarnation presses a certain number of Christians to take the opposite approach. They tend to believe that, since God is the absolute Being, each of his words has an absolute value, independent of all the conditions of human language... [T]hat is where the illusion occurs and the mysteries of scriptural inspiration and the incarnation are really rejected, by clinging to a false notion of the Absolute. The God of the Bible is not an absolute Being who, crushing everything he touches, would suppress all differences and all nuances. (§8)
The Biblical Commission also, taking its lead from this theological critique, thoroughly addresses the literalist interpretation of biblical fundamentalism: "The basic problem with fundamentalist interpretation of this kind is that, refusing to take into account the historical character of biblical revelation, it makes itself incapable of accepting the full truth of the Incarnation itself."6 Other expressions of this extreme emphasis of the divine over the human aspect of Scripture include the anti-intellectualist thrust of fideism,7 the rigid practice of dogmatism8–which either attempts to force dogmatic content upon biblical passages that do not contain it or reads the Scriptures only for their dogmatic content while ignoring the unique aspects of their referential communication–and finally, the exclusively "mystical" or purely spiritual interpretation that Pius XII denounced in Divino Afflante Spiritu.9
On the other side of the spectrum are those who, so emphasizing the human dimension of Scripture, cast the divinity of the word of God in darkness or restrain it as a prisoner of the Bible's own past. Ratzinger states the case well and points to the chief difficulty, that is, the misuse of the historical-critical method, in his "Preface" to the Commission's document, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church: "[T]he search for the original can lead to putting the word back into the past completely so that it is no longer taken in its actuality. It can result that only the human dimension of the word appears as real, while the genuine author, God, is removed from the reach of a method which was established for understanding human reality." In other words, historical analysis may make it possible for scholars to say what Paul, for example, meant by his Letter to the Romans, but one is at a loss to say what Romans means to us today. Any modern theological or pastoral meaning in this scenario is imposed on the text and not taught directly from Scripture.
Methodological analysis of Scripture that is driven by philosophical presuppositions antithetical and even hostile to the commitments of faith often remain latent and unexamined by many biblical interpreters. Writing in 1893 at the height of the modernist controversy that enshrined the maxims of rationalism and scientism, Leo XIII warned of the effects that these modes of thinking, now well established in our culture as secular humanism, pose to both faith and culture. These effects are only too obvious today. Fifty years later, in 1943, Pius XII, writing on the anniversary of his predecessor's work, carried forward those same warnings but opened the door to methodological analysis of Scripture. The Biblical Commission's Sancta Mater Ecclesia, published a little over a year before the release of Vatican II's Dei Verbum, endorsed the new criticism but also warned of the necessity to exclude "Erroneous Premises" from the employment of the method.
These same warnings are echoed both by John Paul II and the Biblical Commission. In his acceptance address for the Biblical Commission's The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, John Paul II writes: "For Catholic exegesis does not have its own exclusive method of interpretation, but starting with the historico-critical basis freed from its philosophical presuppositions or those contrary to the truth of our faith, it makes the most of all the current methods by seeking in each of them the 'seeds of the Word"' (§13). The Commission claims, following the Holy Father's presumption that such erroneous philosophical presuppositions may indeed be separated from the execution of methodology, that the historical-critical method, when used objectively, "implies itself no a priori." The Magisterium's and the Biblical Commission's assessment of methodological and spiritual or theological analysis of Scripture thus emphasizes the both/and approach of faith and reason, based as it is on the exigencies of the mystery of the Incarnation. That is, both faith and reason must play a part, as John Paul II's Fides et Ratio explains, in our understanding of the mystery of the human person and the appropriation of divine revelation.
On the one hand, reason has its rights. It is fully justified posing questions to the signification of divine realities as we find in Scripture, asking such questions as: What really happened? Is this account historically accurate? Who is the author and what were his circumstances? Even the spiritual sense, claims John Paul II in his acceptance of Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (§5), must offer such "proof of authenticity" and thus satisfy both reason's enquiries and faith's discernments. Reason's enquiries do not nullify faith but heighten it. John Paul II states this unique role of reason emphatically:
To assist reason in its effort to understand the mystery there are the signs which revelation itself presents. These serve to lead the search for truth to new depth, enabling the mind in its autonomous exploration to penetrate within the mystery by use of reason's own methods, of which it is rightly jealous. Yet these signs also urge reason to look beyond their status as signs in order to grasp the deeper meaning which they bear. (Fides et Ratio §13)
John Paul II's teaching in this respect is reminiscent of the inspiration for Vincent Van Gogh's famous painting "Starry Night." After completing the painting in 1889 in St. Remy-de-Provence, France, Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo about the painting: "That is the eternal question, is life all that there is of life or do we only know one hemisphere before our death? Speaking for myself I have no idea what the answer is but the sight of the stars always starts me thinking."10 The signification of divine revelation that is obtained by Scripture inspired by God is as much an invitation by God to ask questions as it is God's own offer to answer them. Far from the historicism, dogmatism and mysticism of false ways of interpreting Scripture, ways that presume to possess all the answers in tidy bundles, Scripture actually impresses more questions than answers and supplies at times answers to questions not yet asked, as if to inspire their asking. Biblical interpretation plays an important role in making questions and answers shine as clearly as the stars in the heavens.
The line of demarcation between faith and reason in the act of interpretation is difficult to define as Ratzinger stated to the Biblical Commission in his address marking its hundredth anniversary:
[I]t must be asked how far the purely historical dimension of the Bible extends and where its specificity, which escapes mere historical reasoning, begins. A question within the historical method itself could also be formulated: what can it in fact do, and what are its intrinsic limits? What other modes of understanding are necessary for a text of this type?
Throughout The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, the Biblical Commission describes the operation of faith consistently as a "lived affinity" with the divine realities of which the text speaks. Such faith is at once deeply personal and broadly communal: "Particular presuppositions, such as the faith lived in ecclesial community and the light of the Spirit, control its [the Bible's] interpretation" (p. 80; cf. pp. 77-78, 85).
This convergence of faith and reason as it deals with both text and mystery in the process of interpretation leads us to the second of Ratzinger's proposed steps toward a solution to the dilemma of biblical interpretation in the Church today, the role of the living Tradition of the Church.
Step Two: Interpretation within the living tradition of the Church
In Ratzinger's presentation in 1988, reflection on the role of the living Tradition of the Church was his concluding point. The Bible finds its real context not simply in the recovery of history but in the history of God's revelation or salvation history, which is the history of the People of God, who experience and pass on the unfolding works of God (CCC §53, 236; DV §2) by which he makes himself known. Salvation history provides the Bible's unique context wherein faith both dwells and operates. Ratzinger stated it thus:
The first presupposition of all exegesis is that it accepts the Bible as a book. In so doing, it has already chosen a place for itself, which does not simply follow from the study of literature. It has identified this particular literature as the product of a coherent history, and this history as the proper space for coming to understanding. If it wishes to be theology, it must take a further step. It must recognize that the faith of the Church is that form of "sym-pathia" without which the Bible remains a closed book. It must come to acknowledge this faith as a hermeneutic, the space for understanding, which does not do dogmatic violence to the Bible, but precisely allows the solitary possibility for the Bible to be itself. (pp. 22-23)
Ratzinger uses the term "sym-pathia" to indicate the essential space necessary for understanding divine realities. In an earlier paragraph of his presentation he speaks of "the inner dynamism of the word" and defines "sym-pathia" as: "[A] readiness to learn something new, to allow oneself to be taken along a new road. It is not the closed hand which is required [that is, predetermined methodology that operates from the pretension of having the only firm grip on reality], but the opened eye" (p. 18).
The Biblical Commission's The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church makes the Church's sacred tradition the signature characteristic of Catholic exegesis: "What characterizes Catholic exegesis is that it deliberately places itself within the living tradition of the Church, whose first concern is fidelity to the revelation attested by the Bible" (p. 88). In the same paragraph, the Commission notes that this ecclesial context does not exclude the unique demands of reason but includes them:
Catholic exegetes approach the biblical text with a pre-understanding which holds closely together modern scientific culture and the religious tradition emanating from Israel and from the early Christian community. Their interpretation stands thereby in continuity with a dynamic pattern of interpretation that is found with the Bible itself and continues in the life of the Church. (p. 88)
The Biblical Commission's teaching makes us realize that biblical interpretation is not a matter of individualized work but a work in communion with the Church, for it is there that the divine pedagogy is active through the Church's prayer, study, liturgy and care for the poor in real charity.
In the first part of this essay we devoted a good amount of attention to what Ratzinger stated was one of the important steps toward a solution to the Church's many dilemmas with respect to biblical interpretation. Reviewing our own recent history, we see clear landmarks. We note the necessity to account for the realism of the Incarnation, treating with balance both the divine and human aspects of this communication. We are to employ the insights and ways of knowing proper to both faith and reason, avoiding the extremes in each case. We are to examine philosophical presuppositions that may remain latent in our own world view and to exclude them from our thinking and our work. We are prompted to learn and then to employ various methods and approaches to Scripture, always with balance and moderation.
In the last part of our study we considered the unique characteristic of a biblical interpretation in the Church. For interpretation to be Catholic, it must consciously place itself in the context of the living Tradition of the Church. This does not mean correlating biblical passages to dogma, a strategy we rejected. It means indwelling the Tradition in such a way as to actualize the lived affinity with the divine realities of which the text speaks and of which the community of faith celebrates in all aspects of its life.
End notes
1 For the sake of maintaining a historical perspective, I shall refer to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger instead of the name he has chosen for his pontificate. Ratzinger's address, "Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: On the Question of the Foundations and Approaches of Exegesis Today," as well as the other papers presented at the conference, were published in a collection bearing the title of the conference: Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: The Ratzinger Conference on Bible and Church (edited and with a forward by Richard John Neuhaus; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), esp. pp. 1-23 for Ratzinger's paper. His address may be found also in Origins 17 (1988), 594-602.
2 Biblical Interpretation in Crisis, p. 22; Origins, p. 602.
3 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, "On the 100th Anniversary of the Biblical Commission: Relationship between Magisterium and Exegetes." The address may be found on the Vatican's website.
4 See also CCC §101-104, 112; cf. §65, 75.
5 From §4 in "His Holiness, John Paul II, Address on the Interpretation of the Bible in the Church" (Boston, MA: Pauline Books & Media), 1994, p. 14. The address was also published in the English edition of L'Osservatore Romano, April 28, 1993, pp. 3-4, 6.
6 Interpretation of the Bible, p. 73. For the full treatment of this topic by the Commission, see pp. 72-75. On p. 94 the Commission writes, "[I] t remains true that the exegete need not put absolute value in something which simply reflects limited human understanding."
7 See John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, §84, 91, 52, 55.
8 Interpretation of the Bible, pp. 89, 112.
9 See John Paul II, "Address," §5, 13; cf. Divino Afflante Spiritu §26-27, and Interpretation of the Bible, pp. 85-86 and CCC § 116.
10 Janice Anderson, The Life and Works of Vincent Van Gogh (New York, NY: Shooting Star Press, 1994), p. 64.
Andrew L. Minto, Ph.D. teaches Scripture, biblical hermeneutics and biblical catechesis at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio.This item 9536 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
