Seeking Shalom

The Journey to Right Relationship between Catholics and Jews

Philip A. Cunningham

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781467443845
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Ecumenism & Interfaith

The amazing, historic journey of Jews and Christians coming together.
In this book Philip Cunningham traces the remarkable developments in Catholic-Jewish relations over the last fifty years. Centuries of antipathy and suspicion, Cunningham says, have largely given way to a new, mutually enriching relationship between the two traditions of Judaism and Catholicism.
A specialist in Christian-Jewish relations, Cunningham recounts the amazing, historic journey of Jews and Christians coming together in light of both Scripture and theology, covering the period from Vatican II up to the present day. After fifty years of significant dialogue, Cunningham suggests, Catholics and Jews are now on the threshold of building true shalom  between their two communities, experiencing the Holy One anew in each other's distinctive and edifying ways of walking with God.

Part One

Scripture

Chapter 1

The Word of God in Human Language:
The Catholic Biblical Renaissance

Introduction

For the past seventy years or so, major developments in Catholic thinking on biblical hermeneutics — the methods of interpreting the scriptures — have made crucial contributions to positive relations between Catholics and Jews. These developments can be seen in relevant ecclesial documents, beginning with a 1943 encyclical of Pope Pius XII and intensified with the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 Dei Verbum, The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation. These were followed by several pertinent studies by the Pontifical Biblical Commission.

In order to grasp how a virtual renaissance in the Catholic understanding of the Bible played a crucial role in the process of seeking shalom, one must understand the pertinent biblical documents. Ecclesial texts in regard to Catholic-­Jewish relations are also helpful, because they utilized certain aspects of the emerging church teaching on the scriptures. This chapter explores the question: How does the Catholic tradition understand the nature of the Bible and its proper interpretation? It should be kept in mind that these are developing teaching traditions. Some of the earlier documents that will be quoted below introduced concepts that later documents took up and elaborated upon.

“What the Sacred Writers Really Had in Mind”

The year 1943 was very important for Catholic biblical scholarship. Previously, Catholic scripture scholars were discouraged from reading texts in their original languages, and from employing archaeological discoveries, or “scientific” methods of biblical textual analysis. They were officially prohibited from utilizing the analytical or critical tools that had developed in other academic disciplines, such as literature, which had been applied to biblical texts by other Christians, particularly Lutherans and other Protestants in Europe. Catholic scholars were also required to work from the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, which dates back to the late fourth century. They could not study scriptural texts in their original languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek.

These restrictions began to disappear in 1943 when Pope Pius XII issued his encyclical — an authoritative papal letter — entitled Divino Afflante Spiritu (Inspired by the Divine Spirit). This instruction required the use of the original languages and urged interpreters to “go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East with the aid of history, archaeology, ethnology and other sciences, and accurately determine what modes of writing, so to speak, the authors of that ancient time would be likely to use, and in fact did use.”1 This fundamental orientation of trying to go back into the original context of a biblical writing became a defining principle of the Catholic approach to the Bible. With this approach the reader or interpreter must appreciate the biblical writings in their historical contexts (e.g., what were the circumstances at the time of the text’s composition? why was the author writing?) and in their literary contexts (e.g., what genre of writing is it? what types of argumentation, metaphors, figures of speech, and/or prevailing cultural conventions of the time are employed?). Both historical and literary investigations are needed to understand the original contexts of the scriptures.

In preparing his encyclical to mark the anniversary of a previous pope’s statement on biblical topics, Pius XII realized that by 1943 there had been many important archaeological discoveries of both physical and textual artifacts that were crucial to understanding the ancient biblical world. No one could know, of course, that only four years later the single most important biblical archaeological find of the twentieth century would occur with the unearthing of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These texts brought to light the amazing creativity and diversity of late Second Temple period Judaism and totally revised the understanding of the world of the New Testament. Pius XII had already concluded in 1943 that the critical study of archaeology and history was essential to discerning the meanings of biblical texts, but this was made even more self-­evident with the finding of these scrolls from Qumran by the Dead Sea.

Pius XII’s acceptance of and even mandate to use critical scholarly tools to interpret the Bible was ratified and deepened by the Second Vatican Council, which issued in 1965 Dei Verbum, The Dogmatic Constitution on the Divine Revelation. The title is significant because a dogmatic constitution has the highest level of authority among the various types of documents issued by a council. And a council of all the Catholic bishops of the world in union with the bishop of Rome, the pope, has the highest teaching authority within the Catholic tradition. Dei Verbum, then, articulated Catholic dogma when it stated: “Those things revealed by God which are contained and presented in the text of sacred scripture have been written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.”2

That the Bible was inspired by the Holy Spirit was not a new idea, of course, but the orientation set forth by Pius XII twenty-­two years earlier quickly followed in the conciliar document: “Seeing that, in sacred scripture, God speaks through human beings in human fashion, it follows that the interpreters of sacred scripture, if they are to ascertain what God has wished to communicate to us, should carefully search out the meaning which the sacred writers really had in mind, that meaning which God had thought well to manifest through the medium of their words.”3

In other words, a concern for the scriptures’ historical contexts implies an effort to try to get into the perspectives of the sacred writers. Although according to Christian faith the Bible is the word of God inspired by the Holy Spirit, its actual writers were human beings, immersed in particular cultural and social situations, and so shaped by human modes of thinking and language. In Catholic understanding, the interpreter must reckon with this reality.

Recalling that in these documents one can trace a development of thought, it is today more evident that Dei Verbum’s injunction to discover what “the sacred writers really had in mind” represented an overly optimistic view of our ability to get into the minds of people who lived thousands of years ago. There are limits as to how much today’s readers can really know about the thinking of, say, Isaiah of Jerusalem in the eighth century b.c.e. Later ecclesial documents reflect an awareness of this limitation, and suggest that it is the modern interpreter’s concern to be aware of the realities of the ancient world that is crucial. The guiding principle is that in the sacred writings divine inspiration is mediated through human authors. The Bible is the word of God expressed in human speech.

Dei Verbum went on to note that the interpreter of the Bible

. . . must look to that meaning which the sacred writers, in given situations and granted the circumstances of their time and culture, intended to express and did in fact express through the medium of a contemporary literary form. Rightly to understand what the sacred authors wanted to affirm in their work, due attention must be paid to the customary and characteristic patterns of perception, speech and narrative which prevailed in their time, and to the conventions which people then observed in their dealings with one another.4

This is a pivotal move. For example, in the Genesis 1 creation account, the writers describe the placing of the stars in the underside of the inverted dome of the sky that rests upon a flat earth. By understanding that the scriptures reflect the cultural perspectives of their authors, it should not be disconcerting for readers today to recognize that the Genesis writers thought that the world was flat and so depicted God creating a flat earth. Twenty-­first-­century readers do not happen to share that cosmology, that view of the earth’s shape, but they can appreciate that the significance of the text lies in the authors’ religious claim that God is the creator of the universe. Genesis 1 is not important to Christian (or Jewish) faith for its pre-­scientific understanding of the shape of the cosmos.

That the authors of this text were motivated by religious concerns in their imaginative description of the world’s creation is evident in the otherwise puzzling conclusion that God rested on the seventh day after completing all these labors. This element is not about divine fatigue but about establishing the Sabbath as holy. The writers ended their creation narrative in this way to encourage their contemporaries to obs...