Ratzinger’s gift:
Faith-filled exegesis
by Dr. Jeff Mirus
March 29, 2011
Perhaps the most important thing about Pope Benedict XVI’s second volume,
Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, is that it raises the bar for Biblical exegesis. Scholars may be shocked by this statement, but I’ll say it again. Benedict XVI is giving us a remarkable example of how reading, reflecting and commenting on Sacred Scripture should be done.
Before explaining exactly what I mean, it may be helpful to review the Magisterial status of the book. Simply stated, this is not an act of the Magisterium. It possesses no ecclesiastical authority.
As Benedict himself said in the foreword to the first volume: “It goes without saying that this book is in no way an exercise of the magisterium, but is solely an expression of my personal search ‘for the face of the Lord’ (cf. Ps 27:8). Everyone is free, then, to contradict me” (pp. xxiii-xxiv).
Whatever impact the grace of office has on Benedict the writer, it is not the impact of Authority. That is why I have entitled this essay “Ratzinger’s Gift”.
But it is precisely this raising of the bar in Scriptural exegesis that constitutes Ratzinger’s great gift. Some have suggested that the Pope has revived “lectio divina”, the traditional habit of reading Scripture prayerfully to seek the joy and nourishment of God’s presence in His word.
But when you or I engage in lectio divina, it does not generally involve attention to the original languages, a study of what other great commentators have written, and the deliberate unraveling of obscure and possibly even disputed themes. These things are the work of exegesis (the critical explanation or interpretation of a text).
However, one of the problems that has afflicted Scripture studies during the intense and progressive secularization of academia over the past two hundred years is that exegesis has been so frequently set against lectio divina.
Whereas the Fathers of the Church seemed to be able to combine the two, modern figures have found this exceedingly difficult. The difference, in most cases, has been a matter of both faith and professionalism.
Many commentators have not approached the Bible with any significant faith in its Divine inspiration; and even believers have been constrained by their professional “duties” to ignore the enormous benefits of faith in their studies.
The result has been the dissociation of scholarship from lectio divina, as if the two are incompatible or even opposed.
One of Joseph Ratzinger’s greatest gifts to the Church is his demonstration that this is not the case, to show that a genuine scholarly inquiry under the light of Faith yields abundant fruit in an understanding of the text that is at once more thorough and more profound.
Benedict’s new volume demonstrates this achievement repeatedly. In Chapter 1, he explores textual and historical data to penetrate the episode of the cleansing of the Temple (Mark 11), and to demonstrate how Jesus has become the new Temple.
In Chapter 2, he carries this theme forward, incorporating the work of historians and exegetes to show that the Christian community was so reoriented to Christ as the foundation of its relationship with God that it was unfazed by the destruction of the Temple in AD 70—a destruction which fundamentally altered Judaism. Also in this chapter is a deep examination of the so-called eschatological discourse, the meaning of the end times and the intervening “time of the Gentiles.”
In Chapter 3, the Pope explores the washing of the feet. In the context of ancient philosophy, he explains how Christ’s self-giving marks a new kind of descent from the Divine to the human. Unlike the Divine emanations of the philosophers, which return to God by shedding the material, Christ both embraces and purifies human nature. Thus the way of self-emptying and martyrdom is a way not of escaping creation but of restoring all of creation to the Father.
And in Chapter 4, Benedict examines the specific wording of the high-priestly prayer of Christ, explicating through its long exegetical history key themes of eternal life, sanctification in truth, and making God’s name known, so that all may be one. His exploration of this oneness as rooted in truth and mission leads inevitably to apostolic succession, Scripture, and the Creed — that is, to the constitutive elements of the visible Church.
Throughout these rich treatments we find that Benedict must unlock a layered text in which Our Lord frequently expresses Himself in Old Testament figures, images and even quotations. This fact alone gives new relevance to the history of the Jewish people, to an analysis of the OT texts, and to the trajectory of the Divine Plan over time.
My point is that at every turn Benedict pulls in whatever is relevant. It might be linguistic analysis or the redaction of the early texts; it might be ancient history or the teaching of various philosophical schools; it might be seminal insights from past commentators, both Catholic and Protestant.
Always there will be a close reading of the text itself in light of its antecedents in the Old Testament, and of its thematic resonance in other portions of the New.
And in the background, we see Benedict’s judgments silently illuminated by the analogy of Faith — the fact that Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium of the Church are all informed by the same Holy Spirit, and so must point together to the same Truth.
Many of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church have addressed Scripture in this way as well, not because they were professional exegetes, but because they were learned persons, often even scholars, who brought whatever they knew to bear on improving our understanding of Christ and of the Scriptures which speak of Him.
Benedict not only recognizes this great tradition but alludes to its necessity in the foreword to the second volume when he explains that God works through an entire community, looking backward and forward, in inspiring the full meaning of the Biblical text (see my earlier comments, Benedict’s Second Volume and the Historical Critical Method).
Ratzinger’s gift is to show how even modern scholars (of which Pope Benedict XVI is obviously one) can fruitfully explore everything that relates to the text in a way that is not only compatible with but actually inspired by their Faith.
In the Pope's own words, he has attempted “to develop a way of observing and listening to the Jesus of the Gospels that can indeed lead to a personal encounter and that, through a collective listening with Jesus’ disciples across the ages, can indeed attain sure knowledge of the real historical figure of Jesus” (vol II, Foreword, p. xvii).
I missed Dr. Mirus's first essay on JON-2 when it came out last week, so here it is:
Benedict’s second volume on Jesus
and the historical-critical method
by Dr. Jeff Mirus
March 24, 2011
Jesus of Nazareth Part II is out, and I’m working my way through it, not only to pass along the highlights but for spiritual reading. The Pope’s first volume (see Benedict’s New Book, The “Our Father” according to Benedict, and A Final Note on Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth) was a luminous and spiritually rich commentary on the person of Christ. This second volume focuses on Our Lord’s salvific mission from His entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection: in other words, Holy Week.
But the very first nugget which caught my attention in a book sure to be characterized by a rich vein of gold is the Pope’s comments on historical criticism in his Foreword.
After all, the Pope’s project in this two-volume work is to recover a full awareness of the person of Jesus, a project necessitated in part by the mangled and fragmented portrait left over after the historical-critical method of Scriptural exegesis that has dominated the past two hundred years. Indeed, in the Foreword to the first volume, Benedict had written:
Historical-critical interpretation of a text seeks to discover the precise sense the words intended to convey at their time and place of origin…. [But] it is important to keep in mind that any human utterance of a certain weight contains more than the author may have been immediately aware of at the time….
At this point we get a glimmer, even on the historical level, of what inspiration means: The author does not speak as a private, self-contained subject. He speaks in a living community…. which is led forward by a greater power that is at work….
Neither the individual books of Holy Scripture nor the Scripture as a whole are simply a piece of literature. The Scripture emerged from within the heart of a living subject — the pilgrim People of God — and lives within this same subject…. [And] likewise, this people does not exist alone; rather, it knows that it is led, and spoken to, by God himself, who—through men and their humanity — is at the deepest level the one speaking.
I’ve risked a long quotation here — though vastly condensed from the original, as suggested by the ellipses — because it sets the stage so beautifully for what the Pope says in the Foreword of his second volume.
I’ll get to that in just a moment, but first let’s take a brief look at what the reign of historical criticism has meant. We’ll do this by taking just one example.
Recently most right-thinking Catholics (by which of course I mean Catholics whose conclusions mirror my own!) were annoyed to learn that the latest translation of the New American Bible has replaced the word “virgin” with “young woman” in Isaiah 7:14: “The virgin shall be with child, and bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.” The passage is cited in St. Matthew in reference to the virgin birth of Our Lord (Mt 1:23).
Now there is some grounds for this change. The word “almah” in Hebrew can mean a young, unmarried woman in a rather generic sense, or it can mean more specifically a virgin. But generally in the Old Testament, when “virgin” is unambiguously intended, a different and more precise word is used, such as “betulah”.
The exegete who approaches this text exclusively from the historical-critical point of view argues that Isaiah, in his own time and place, could not have had the birth of Christ in mind. Rather, the problem with which he was directly concerned was the siege of Jerusalem by the combined armies of Syria and the Northern Kingdom around 735 BC. The conception of a child by a young woman was to be a sign that the siege would be lifted and Jerusalem would continue to flourish.
And that’s as far as the historical-critical method can take us, working alone and in isolation from other interpretive insights. So those who rely exclusively on this method assert that this text of Isaiah was fulfilled over seven hundred years before the birth of Christ and has nothing to do with Our Lord at all. Moreover, St. Matthew was clearly wrong, on the basis of the historical-critical method, to appropriate the text as he did.
You can see, therefore, why in his first volume, in discussing his own exegetical methods, Pope Benedict stresses that each portion of Scripture must be read in the context of the whole, and that each Scriptural passage is pregnant with meaning because its authorship is rooted in a community actively inspired and led by God according to His own Providential plan.
Thus an early prophecy by Isaiah can operate at multiple levels, with one clear application in Isaiah’s own time, and another that becomes clear only later. And St. Matthew is perfectly justified in appropriating this more distant and deeper meaning to Christ, in whom all of Scripture finds its goal and unity.
What, then, does historical criticism do for us? Does it have any value at all? Actually, yes, because the more we know about the circumstances in which a particular passage was written, and about the immediate application of that passage, the richer is our understanding of the many ways in which that particular set of circumstances suggests a moral or a spiritual lesson, or foreshadows later developments, or otherwise illuminates God’s saving action at multiple levels throughout history.
To understand the historical context of Isaiah’s utterance is to understand more thoroughly God’s salvific power — His ability to prefigure the work of His Son not only in words but in historical events — just as the historical details of the Exodus foreshadow and enrich our understanding of what it means for Christ to save us from sin.
But to lock ourselves within the historical-critical method, as if each passage must be limited to what was naturally evident at the time it was recorded, is to deny not only the implications of the Sacred text in the communitarian tradition but also the revelatory presence of God in the life of the community, as well as the supernatural agency at work in Biblical inspiration.
To put this in a single word, an excessive reliance on historical criticism denies not only the importance but the very existence of theology.
Benedict himself explores a variety of exegetical insights starting in the very first chapter of his new volume, when he unpacks the meaning of the cleansing of the Temple.
In so doing, he begins immediately to reveal the great depth of his appreciation of the person of Christ as Savior. He explores the historical situation, and finds that it resonates with other elements in the history of the Jewish people, elements which already invest the text with a power beyond its literal meaning.
But the Pope is always open as well to the presence of God in this history, and of course to God fulfilling this history in the work of His only begotten Son.
All of this provides the context for the very first gold nugget Benedict offers in the Foreword to the second volume, where he continues the comments on the historical-critical method quoted above:
One thing is clear to me: in two hundred years of exegetical work, historical-critical exegesis has already yielded its essential fruit. If scholarly exegesis is not to exhaust itself in constantly new hypotheses, becoming theologically irrelevant, it must take a methodological step forward and see itself once again as a theological discipline, without abandoning its historical character.
It must learn that the positivistic hermeneutic on which it has been based does not constitute the only valid and definitively evolved rational approach; rather, it constitutes a specific and historically conditioned form of rationality that is both open to correction and completion and in need of it.
Following this comment, Benedict mentions that a particular Catholic theologian (whose unfortunate name the Pope kindly omits) labeled his book a Christology from above, “not without issuing a warning about the dangers inherent in such an approach.”
But it is precisely Benedict’s point that God works in and through a community, so that His presence and His action is not only above, but below and even within, a presence which cannot be ignored without reducing the Biblical text to something less than it really is.
What the Pope calls for is “a properly developed faith-hermeneutic” as “appropriate to the text”, which “can be combined with a historical hermeneutic, aware of its limits, so as to form a methodological whole.”
He states that this is “an art that needs to be constantly remastered”, and he does not “presume to claim that this combination of the two hermeneutics is already fully accomplished in my book.” Rather, he hopes his book is a significant step in the right direction. He concludes on this important point:
Fundamentally this is a matter of finally putting into practice the methodological principles formulated for exegesis by the Second Vatican Council (in Dei Verbum 12), a task that unfortunately has scarcely been attempted thus far.
Those who follow Pope Benedict’s lead in this — and there is growing evidence of such a movement already in progress —will effect a true renaissance in the study of the Word of God. In this way, Scripture will live once again as the living text of the people of God — that is, it will become once again what it was always intended by God to be, the Book of the Church.
One must appreciate Dr. Mirus's focus on the methodology of the Holy Father's work in the JESUS OF NAZARETH books, who makes them read so 'easily' - provided one does so undistracted and focused - that one might tend to forget the enormous work it took to distill all of his research and study into the final, literally- delightful product of a mind that harmonizes faith, science and reason so naturally. Reading and re-reading the JESUS books, I find myself mentally intoning all the time, "Thanks and praise be to God" for giving us Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, a mantra that only heightens the incomparable euphoria of the experience.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 30/03/2011 17:35]