Heaven on Earth?

Theological Interpretation in Ecumenical Dialogue

Hans Boersma, Matthew Levering, Hans Boersma, Matthew Levering

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118551929
• eBook ISBN: 9781118551943
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This collection assembles essays by eleven leading Catholic and evangelical theologians in an ecumenical discussion of the benefits – and potential drawbacks – of today's burgeoning corpus of theological interpretation. The authors explore the critical relationship between the earthly world and its heavenly counterpart.

• Ground-breaking volume of ecumenical debate featuring Catholic and evangelical theologians
• Explores the core theological issue of how the material and spiritual worlds interrelate
• Features a diversity of analytical approaches
• Addresses an urgent need to distinguish the positive and problematic aspects of today's rapidly growing corpus of theological interpretation

Part I

Reading the Fathers

1

“In Many and Various Ways”: Towards a Theology of Theological Exegesis

Brian E. Daley, SJ

Texts are everything in the modern (and post-modern) world. Since the rise of philosophical hermeneutics with Heidegger and Gadamer and Ricoeur, since the days of deconstructivist literary criticism and the growth of contemporary theories of philosophical and literary interpretation, scholars in the humanities have tended, increasingly, to see their work as dealing above all with written productions as their objects of study: texts that conceal as well as disclose the writer’s intended meaning in written, time-bound, culturally determined words; texts that always involve both the reception and the destruction of older traditions of thought and language; texts that challenge the readers who come after them to enter and rearrange their world, like the furniture in a living-room.

For Christians, this focus on hermeneutics and textual theory can feel both natural and alienating. On the one hand, Jews and Christians and Muslims—perhaps more than any other set of religious traditions—regard their holy texts, their “Scriptures,” not just as the historic monuments of a sacred heritage, but as the place of God’s continuing revelation: the foundation of their faith’s present understanding of the reality of God, the chief guide towards how God calls us to act now. Our holy Scriptures form a book constantly in the process of being understood for the first time, a collection of writings that, by its very significance for their religious tradition, requires constant re-interpretation and re-application. On the other hand, for the faithful of all of these traditions, the text of what they regard as Scripture is not an object to be toyed with or even objectified, but a human, linguistic set of voices witnessing to an ultimate reality that is the reason all the other realities we know exist at all. The book of Scripture, unlike all other books, is something sacred, human words communicating the Word of God; as such, it transcends time, and even its own original historical context. So the text of Scripture, precisely as Scripture, acquires for what are sometimes called “the religions of the book” both an urgency, a religious normativity, that no other writings in those traditions, however valuable, possess, and at the same time a translucency—an invitation to continuing reflection and interpretation— that other religious works can never have. What believers seek in them is not simply information, or historical evidence of ancient religious thought, but the reality of God as he speaks and acts in our midst.

Reading and interpreting Scripture correctly, then—discovering its meaning correctly so that we can understand it and live by it—presents us with unique challenges, if only because the one whom believers take to be speaking in and through the text is God, not simply a historical human author or editor. At the same time, human authors and editors, as well as translators and interpreters through the ages, have clearly been involved in the production of Biblical texts from their remotest origins. To know what the Biblical text means requires that, as far as possible, we know what these authors meant, and take that “original meaning” as a starting-point and guide for determining what it might mean for us today.

So reading the Bible and understanding it, in a way that allows us to take its content and meaning seriously, is clearly a complex, even paradoxical process that calls into play both a sophisticated conviction of God as creator, mysteriously yet really involved in human thoughts and actions, and of the ordinary human circumstances of literary authorship and the communication of meaning. In the words of the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, from 1965:

Those things revealed by God, which are contained and presented in the texts of Holy Scripture, were written under the influence of the Holy Spirit. … In the process of composition of the sacred books, God chose and employed human agents, using their own faculties and powers, in such a way that while he was acting in them and through them, they committed to writing, as genuine authors, everything which he willed—but only what he willed. Since, then, everything that the inspired authors or “sacred writers” affirm should be considered to be affirmed by the Holy Spirit, the books of Scripture should be confessed as teaching firmly, faithfully, and without error that truth which God wished to be sealed in the sacred books for the sake of our salvation. … But since God, in Sacred Scripture, has spoken in a human way through human beings, the interpreter of Sacred Scripture—in order to grasp what God has wished to communicate to us—must carefully investigate what the sacred writers really intended to signify, and what it has pleased God to reveal to us in their words.¹

This paragraph tries to walk a fine line between a more traditional understanding of divine inspiration, which saw the authors of the Biblical books as passive instruments for communicating the thoughts of God, and a more modern, historical and critical approach to the Biblical text, which approaches these works first of all as human compositions, written by particular writers in particular circumstances that inevitably frame their range of possible meaning for future readers.

The long tradition of Christian theology, East and West, has regarded the books of the Bible, and the various layers and sections that make them up, as being the definitive norm for our understanding of who and what God is, and how God acts in our world. For thinkers of the Western Enlightenment, however, the very notion of a God, who is genuinely transcendent, actually communicating in direct, intelligible and specific terms with creatures, seemed awash in contradictions; there may be a transcendent first cause of beings in the world whom we call God, it was sometimes argued, but information is communicated to human minds through language, action, and symbol, all of which are enacted within history, by finite historical agents. This emphatically inner-worldly understanding of historical reality, and of how history is investigated and facts ascertained, still stands in the background of the modern historical criticism of Biblical texts. Yet to many believers today who read Biblical texts in a spirit of faith, simply seeking to reconstruct the circumstances and possible “original intention” of Biblical texts is not enough to let us discover their meaning as Scripture: their significance through the centuries, and today, for the community of faith.

To conceive of the works contained in the Bible—narrative, moral and ritual commands, praise and lament, wisdom teaching and theological reflection—as embodying God’s Word to humanity in more than simply a metaphorical sense requires, first, an understanding of how God acts in the world that allows for him genuinely to sustain and steer human speech and action for his own purposes, without infringing on the full, conscious activity of human prophets, poets and redactors. And it implies, too, that the ideas expressed in Biblical books, or the events narrated by Biblical authors, may well take on new significance, beyond the “surface” meaning of fact or law, when received as Scripture by the community of faith in later generations. So to understand the Bible as the Word of God—to read it as Bible, and not simply as a collection of disparate religious texts of varying ages—the interpreter needs to understand both God and the continuing meaning of human words: to be both a theologian and a linguistic, literary and historical scholar.

I. Oral Traditions

For early Christian writers, in fact, it was clearly the understanding of Jewish faith in which they shared, the faith heard and professed in their Churches—centered on the conviction that God’s promise to Abraham and God’s covenant at Sinai had found their fulfillment in Jesus—which was the primary claimant to being the vehicle of God’s saving revelation. Justin, for example, in his lengthy Dialogue with Trypho (written probably in Rome in the early 160s) makes relatively little direct reference to written documents about Christ,² although it is clear he is familiar with at least the sayings of Jesus recorded in the Synoptics. What he declares, in the dialogue’s opening narrative, is that he has come to Christianity as a result of looking for the best available “philosophy,” the way of life best suited to lead a person to happiness and hope.³ Having been directed eventually to the Christian way, Justin is able to interpret the corpus of Israel’s Scriptures as finding their true, if hitherto hidden, meaning in Jesus’ life. Scripture, as written text, is for him the confirmation of a preached and lived message about who Jesus is.

Irenaeus of Lyons, writing his monumental treatise Against the Heresies some twenty-five years later, emphasizes that the disciples of Jesus first proclaimed the Gospel of salvation verbally (praeconaverunt), and only “afterwards, by the will of God, handed it down to us in written form (in Script...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Directions in Modern Theology Book Series
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Introduction: Spiritual Interpretation and Realigned Temporality
• Part I: Reading the Fathers
• Part II: Reading Scripture
• Part III: Reading in Contemporary Context
• Index