So what's Catholic about it?: the state of Catholic biblical scholarship.

In what sense might biblical scholarship as practiced in North America these days be called "Catholic," or in what sense should it be Catholic? This century in particular invites such a meditation. From the mid-nineteenth century until Divino afflante spiritu in 1943, many would have regarded the term Roman Catholic biblical scholarship as oxymoronic; maybe it was Catholic, but was it really scholarship? Today, the term Roman Catholic biblical scholarship sounds equally strange; it's scholarship, all right, and of an impressively high order, but what's Roman Catholic about it?

Indeed, the indistinguishability of Catholic scholarship has been a matter of some pride as pioneering figures moved from the margins to the heart of academic respectability, symbolized by the embrace of the "historical-critical method" - an approach that not only sought the "historical" meaning of the text but also considered historical reconstruction as the main point of studying the Bible. Biblical studies exemplified ecumenicity because the historical-critical approach ensured neutrality, objectivity, and lack of sectarian bias in interpretation.

I was born the year Plus XII's Divino afflante spiritu was issued, was a minor seminarian in the Tridentine mode, was a Benedictine novice before Vatican II who still remembers the sonorities and silliness of Gregory the Great's Moralia in Latin. Lured to the study of the New Testament in the monastery, I extravagantly admired Barnabas Ahern and Bruce Vawter and John McKenzie, and cheered the breakthroughs of Roland Murphy and Raymond Brown and Joseph Fitzmyer. I entered the thoroughly non-Catholic Ph.D. program in New Testament at Yale as a monk and since have taught in a state university department of religious studies and at two Protestant seminaries.

On the basis of my past twenty years in such settings, and from the perspective - perhaps idiosyncratic - of that experience, more and more these days I ask myself whether the dramatic change in Catholic biblical scholarship has been entirely positive. Let us grant that the triumph of historical criticism among Catholic scholars was a great victory, but is it also only a partial victory? Have we perhaps lost as much as we have won by so wholeheartedly and uncritically changing the character of biblical study? And if so, how do we go about recovering our loss, without relinquishing that hard-won victory?

Sounds like a midlife sort of question. Or perhaps the question of a third-generation immigrant. You remember the classic sequence: the first generation holds onto old country ways in order to maintain identity; the second generation is embarrassed by the old language, old manners, old food, and seeks complete assimilation into the new world; the third generation, realizing what it has lost and sensing that the next generation will have even less, tries to remember how those old recipes went. They don't want to go back to Italy or Mexico, but they worry about their children's future in a world that has nothing Italian or Chicano about it.

When Catholic scholars fought for assimilation into a scholarship dominated by the historical-critical approach, they did not perhaps realize four things that we are now better able to appreciate. First, what was called a method was in fact a model - not only a way of getting at the original voice of the text, but a paradigm with its own specific logic and limitations. Second, this model promised more than it could deliver. Third, it claimed exclusive ownership of academic respectability. Fourth, it was not neutral but carried with it the specific theological presuppositions - which get spelled out in terms of certain mental reflexes - of the Protestantism from which it had derived, presuppositions that tend to get expressed in terms of either/or.

The study of the parables, for example, came down to this: Did Jesus say it or not? In such research the "historical method" seeks more than what the stories might have meant in the symbolic world of the first century, although the method uses such linguistic and social knowledge. From first to last, the inquiry aimed at historical reconstruction: determining the earliest version of the respective parables and the course of their development, as well as drawing conclusions concerning the "historical" (that is, authentic) Jesus as opposed to the portrayal of him in the church's tradition, first of all in the Gospel narratives themselves.

Fundamental to the exercise was the premise that "the church" (as found in the Gospels) could and must be distinguished from the original teaching of Jesus. Thus, the "Parable of the Sower" in Mark 4:1-9 is taken to be from Jesus, whereas the allegorical "interpretation of the parable" in Mark 4:13-20 is considered to be from the early church. The purportedly literary distinction between a parable (with only one point) and an allegory (with many points) became an ironclad criterion for distinguishing Jesus from the tradition. Not only is it assumed that parables are better than allegories, but that the teaching of the historical Jesus was more authoritative than the understanding of his teaching embedded in the Gospel narratives.

It is not difficult to recognize in this approach the unspoken but clear implication that the church, already in the Gospels, betrayed Jesus' words, and that allegory in the Gospels is the first step in a disastrous history of interpretation from which history alone can rescue readers. Parable versus allegory thus stands as paradigmatic: either Jesus or tradition. History is the instrument of the either/or, that separates the authentic from the counterfeit, the original from the copy, the pristine primitive from the corrupted development. Because history alone can accomplish such discrimination, it alone is criticism's legitimate instrument.

I do not want to deny the power of either/or. Only a fool would slight the enormous growth in real knowledge generated by these presuppositions. All biblical scholars are indebted to the historical-critical approach. None of us with any sense of the alternative would want to relinquish such gains or abandon what is productive in that perspective.

At the same time it must be acknowledged that in the broadest sense, the historical-critical method has failed to deliver what it seemed to promise: it has not and cannot supply a scientifically verifiable alternative version of earliest Christianity or of "the historical Jesus." In addition to falling short of its own goal, by claiming scholarly legitimacy solely for itself, the historical approach has failed to encourage the practice of other modes of critical inquiry into the Scriptures. Interpretive practices of the tradition such as typology and allegory are scorned as "precritical," and the elevation of history over every other epistemology distorts the very meaning of "critical."

It is precisely at this point that I think Catholic scholarship can make a crucial contribution to the next generation of scholars, but only if what is distinctively Catholic in sensibility is not abandoned by those still able to summon it. By no means am I suggesting a turn away from the spirit of ecumenism and a return to triumphalism. Nor am I proposing a definition of this particular guild that would in any fashion marginalize the participation of the Protestant and Jewish colleagues who in recent years have done so much to enlarge and enrich its conversations. Rather, I appeal to an understanding of ecumenism that celebrates the special gifts that each religious tradition might offer to other traditions.

In this spirit, what is properly "catholic" about Catholic biblical scholarship, I propose, is to be found in the conviction that critical scholarship is not simply a matter of separating and opposing, but also a matter of testing and reconnecting.

A PURE GOSPEL?

In the either/or perspective that has dominated the study of Christian origins, the New Testament is set apart from what precedes it and what follows it. Jonathan Z. Smith (in Drudgery Divine) has brilliantly illuminated the way in which the study of Christian origins has been shaped by Protestant - above all Lutheran - theological presuppositions. Christianity's development into Catholicism is seen as a decline, the corruption of the pure gospel by a recrudescence of Jewish influence (in structure and law) and pagan culture (in the sacraments).

It was this commitment to the notion of a "pure gospel," of a moment of revelation so uniquely untouched by any human influence that it is self-validatingly from God, that required a purging of the dross from the New Testament writings themselves. Thus the impulse to find the "historical Jesus," not as a human person of the past as complex and unknowable as any other historical person, but as a fixed source of the good news (even if it ends up being a bit pedestrian) untouched by the corruptions of the church. Thus also (using many of the same criteria) the need to distinguish the authentic Paul from the inauthentic Paul, so that the sacred moment of origins can be distinguished from the corruptions of a profane development.

It is always either/or rather than both/and: not the ways in which Jesus' sayings gained greater clarity or significance through their transmission and literary deployment, but only how they were distorted and obscured; not the ways in which Paul's perceptions were deepened by Ephesians, but only how they were dimmed.

Real history, however, is always a matter of both/and. There are new developments, but every historical origin bears in itself, and passes on, elements of what preceded and helped create it. To fixate only on the moment of origins is to be driven by theological rather than historiographical concerns. Proper historiography, I think, should be concerned with all the ways in which the old and new intermingle. If history offers lessons, one of them might be the inevitability of such admixture. And despite the recent renewal of the historical Jesus search - a pure example of theology driving history past its competence - there are encouraging signs that the defensive either/or posture in the study of Christian origins is being modified in the direction of the both/and.

Concerning the historical study of the world that shaped the New Testament, Catholic scholarship should be open to discovering all the ways in which both Judaism and Hellenism pervade earliest Christianity. There is certainly no theological motivation for suppressing that influence. The truth of Christianity does not need to be secured by denying all truth or beauty elsewhere. There is every reason to celebrate God's capacity for self-revelation to both Jews and pagans. These traces of God's work are the surest pledge that God is also capable of revealing Godself to Christians. The affirmation of elements both of continuity and distinctiveness is congenial to Catholic historiography and Catholic theological instincts.

Catholic New Testament scholarship can also, in turn, embrace church history. The isolation of the study of the New Testament from that of subsequent Christian life and literature is as little intelligible to a Catholic sensibility as the botanist's neglect of oaks in favor of acorns. From a Catholic perspective, there is no historical or theological reason to consider the development of Christianity into the patristic period as a decline or corruption, and every reason to regard it as an organic growth out of the same complex factors of culture and religious experience as those which generated the New Testament itself, and therefore deserving of the same attention. From a Catholic perspective the study of the New Testament should be preoccupied not only with the world that produced the New Testament but equally with the world that the New Testament itself produced. Anyone who has worked seriously with patristic and medieval scriptural interpretation, for example, knows that it cannot simply be dismissed as aberrant; even at the level of the sensus literalis, one can gain at least as much insight from Bede as from the average recent homiletic commentary. But I am suggesting a more fundamental enlargement of vision, to include all the ways in which Scripture was actualized in the prayers, sermons, and spiritual teachings of the patristic and medieval church.

Why should the scholar trained in the discipline of New Testament studies not leave this up to colleagues in other fields? One reason is that those trained in the first century milieu are able to establish a conversation between the New Testament text and its later uses that respects the differences between the first and subsequent centuries in a way that the patristic authors themselves did not. The second reason is that discovering how a text has been understood reveals also how a text can be understood, and therefore might have been understood - not only by fourth-century commentators but also by Paul and James and their first readers.

LOYALTY & CRITICISM

The story of criticism's emergence has consistently been couched in terms of a struggle for freedom of inquiry against the constraints placed by tradition. The choice was thought to be clear: on one side, dogma, tradition, law, sacraments, and miracles (or if you prefer, superstitions ancient and modern); on the other side, free and critical inquiry as found in the historical method. Nineteenth-century German scholarship drew this equation so clearly that it is small wonder the Roman Catholic hierarchy suspected the historical-critical paradigm.

In hindsight, the repressive actions taken by Roman authorities against specific scholars still appear as morally reprehensible, as do analogous rumblings and sputterings and fulminations and sometimes worse today. At the intellectual level, however, their instincts were perhaps not entirely wrong. We are all familiar with the way in which the introduction to the New Testament for young college students begins with the premise that what students learned in church was mostly wrong. Even if not intellectually convinced, students must adopt (at least for the purpose of passing the course) a set of so-called "critical views" that are often an alternative set of dogmas, only ones approved by the academy.

The result is an academic study of the Bible that is ever more removed from the concerns of communities for whom the texts of the Bible have existential significance, and ever more responsive to the expectations of an academy that is not merely secular but actively antireligious in character.

As Stanley Hauerwas has wittily observed (in Unleashing the Scriptures), the pope has always known what Stanley Fish has recently discovered. The reading of texts is always in substantial measure shaped by the premises and practices of a reading community. No scholarship is utterly disinterested. All scholarship is both socially located and ideologically committed. Two important consequences follow. First, it is mandatory for scholars to know and to declare their loyalties. Second, it is essential to expand the notion of critical inquiry beyond the realm of the merely historical critical. I think that Catholic scholars today are well positioned to undertake these tasks.

Loyalty to the church's teaching and practices is no more contrary to the free exercise of the intelligence than is loyalty to the norms of the academy; loyalty is not the opposite of criticism but the condition for genuine criticism. Loyalty (or, if you will, faith) does not demand the sacrifice of the intellect to any one rendering (even any one authoritative rendering) of the tradition. It does demand the affirmation of that tradition as the starting point of any inquiry; it does require the most careful attention to authoritative renderings of that tradition; and it does ask that the task of criticism take place within the conversation of the community for whom the tradition has deep and existential import and that the critic participate in the tradition's embodied practices. The advantage for Catholic scholars is that, despite the alarms and confusions of recent decades, the Catholic tradition remains sufficiently coherent to command such loyalty. Criticism still has something to address, and does not yet have to bear the burden of replacing a living tradition.

Once one grants that development is not necessarily decline, that God's revelation takes place in the church's tradition as well as in Scripture, that God can lead the community into an ever deeper understanding of faith, then history becomes an increasingly inadequate instrument of criticism. It is by no means an accident or grievous misunderstanding that, as the historical-critical method gained its freedom to be truly what it wanted to be, it came to be seen as having less and less interesting or useful things to say by those still committed to discourse within the tradition. The Catholic intellectual tradition has continued to understand that criticism has theological, philosophical, moral, and aesthetic dimensions that are at least as important as the historical. I am by no means advocating reading historical criticism out of the conversation. Engaging the "historical" or "literal" meaning of the text is necessary for the responsible reading of Scripture, just as the attempt to accurately identify the historical realities of earliest Christianity is an invaluable element in any debate over Christian identity. But the historical moment does not exhaust the process of criticism. The faith community's debate over its identity and action should involve multiple critical perspectives.

RESPONSIBLE READING

One of the more bizarre manifestations of the either/or impulse has been the literary dismemberment of the Bible. In the name of history, compositions are chopped into sources, and these sources, like specimens on a slide, are sliced into ever finer layers of redaction. And like some home laboratory experiment in cloning, these textual samples are used to reconstruct the putative histories of hypothetical communities. Small wonder if casual observers sometimes wondered what biblical studies had to do with the actual Bible.

The literary sensitivity gained (not least by Catholic scholars) through contact with contemporary literary criticism and through the rediscovery of classical rhetoric has gone a long way toward recovering some sense of the biblical compositions in their literary integrity. It is a sign of renewed sanity to hear discussions about the "voice of compositions" and the need to hear the "diverse voices of compositions within the canon," even if those conversations have not yet made significant progress toward translating this literary gain into theological usefulness. But at least in some circles, it is again possible to talk about the literal meaning of the text with the shared understanding that such meaning must take into account a composition's literary integrity and literary form.

I suggest that, having secured this much sanity, Catholic scholars might be healthy enough to consider another look at their own rich tradition of polyvalent interpretation. Catholicism, I propose, ought to be comfortable with biblical texts having multiple meanings.

The necessity of securing a single, historically fixed, meaning of a text by means of exegesis is, after all, a function of that either/or known as the principle of sola scriptura. Catholicism-and Luther was surely right in this - is closer to Judaism than it is to Protestantism in this important respect. As an observant Jewish community is structured by halakah, so is Catholicism. And as Jewish scholars are freed by their strong identity formation to engage Torah haggadically, that is, not only as a collection of rules but above all as a source of wisdom, so are Catholic biblical scholars freed to engage Scripture in a variety of imaginative ways as a source of transforming wisdom. Jewish scholars would not, I think, admit the legitimacy of a choice between halakah and haggadah, for these modes of interpretation are mutually dependent yet serve distinct functions. So a Catholic scholar might resist the choice between either the literal meaning or the allegorical, for the Catholic scholar likewise would recognize that these modes of interpretation are mutually dependent and serve distinct functions.

Rather than a "right" reading of the text, therefore, we properly look for "responsible" readings, by which we mean interpretations that are both responsible to the text and responsible to the community of readers that is the church. Understood this way, the literal sense of the text is the indispensable instrument of discernment and decision making in the community of faith, and historical criticism continues to play an indispensable role in maintaining the "otherness" of the text that protects it from manipulation.

But not every reading of the text within the church is for deciding halakah. Much reading is for wisdom and delight. In such reading above all, the community as well as individual readers can enter into the imaginative world constructed not by this composition alone or that one, but by all the voices in the Bible and all the voices of faith that have also lived within the world imagined by the Bible. Allegory may no longer be to our taste, although we would be foolish (even as scholars) to declare we have nothing to learn from such brilliant readers as Origen and Augustine. Can our minds and hearts not still profit from the delicate interplay of literal, moral, spiritual, and ecclesial dimensions of the "Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard" (Matt 20:1-16) found in Origen's Commentary on Matthew? Indeed, I wonder whether the purposeful playfulness found in some postmodernist readings of the Bible might not rightly claim a share in the noble heritage of allegory.

I am not certain how much of what I called at the start a midlife reflection is really only my personal midlife reflection, or how much I alone am the third-generation immigrant who senses as much loss as gain in the new world so recently won. But if I am not being merely nostalgic, while not wanting to go back we need to find some new ways forward, ways into a new millennium that have deep roots within the past twenty centuries of the Catholic tradition.

Luke Timothy Johnson, author of The Real Jesus (HarperSan-Francisco), is the Woodruff Professor of New Testament at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University.

Michelle Moore

Surviving in Sand

California, 1992

I knelt to watch where shoreline merged with the pitch and plunge of ocean - you seemed a god, the taproot of creation and the waves' stanzaic thrum.

Beneath your hands the sand appeared to gather and beg shape, each sump and runnel mended and amended then shored up by the bondstones

of devotion. This much can be said: we are always building monuments with t he grit of bones and gravel, the sediment of former definition,

of cliffs and columns called back down like the harsh tidings of heaven, the hardwater of metamorphics which could explain how you had come to be

there, composing in sand, a lonely god at play, each small-scale vision given to the moon's disposition, another dawning lost on the ocean's tongue