The limitations of the Bible.

Abstract

The Bible, even for those accustomed to reading it, is in the words of Karl Barth a strange new world. The Old Testament, inherited from Pharisee Judaism, is written in a different language with a different geography and a much longer chronological span than the New Testament. In particular the Old Testament is an uncomfortable element in much Christian thinking. We must accept the limitations of both Testaments and search for their soul, which is so easily lost in scientific studies. **********

The strange new world of the Bible," to quote a phrase made famous by Karl Barth, is a world of many books and many voices, whose Hebrew canon, for example, we now realize represents the Pharisee tradition.

Thus in the Old Testament we hear the absolutes of the lawgiver, the searchings of the wise, an honest history of the past, the psalmists' delight in poetry, the prophets' demand for change today, the apocalyptists' promise of future salvation, the stormy relationship of a Job who can accuse God of using him as a target at which to fire arrows (16:12-13).

Among the many traditions not easily reconcilable with each other, which form the Old Testament, there was wide room for the critical expressions of prophets, the recognition of uncertainty and doubt, and even the rejection of widely accepted beliefs.

The idea of limitations will shock some with their view of the perfect inspired Bible. Others have embraced a hermeneutic of suspicion toward the Bible, finding much of it inherently patriarchal--even oppressive--when it should be liberating. Still others have found the hermeneutic of suspicion too quick to dismiss texts, teaching and traditional interpretations. Instead they have proposed a hermeneutic of trust, which invited texts to speak afresh in new situations, despite obvious limitations.

John Calvin had well spoken of divine accommodation to our human limitations and human weakness. Rather the Bible tends to provide a warts-and-all description of human nature, which is often shocking, from its view of an angry sweating God who punishes to the brutality of the conquest of Palestine which is sanctioned by Yahweh, to the picture of a swearing Peter denying Christ, to Jesus' own violence in the Temple.

I have a certain sympathy with John Bowden's amazement (pp. 80-81) that what is missing in the Christian tradition is the Jewish touch of humor and the sound of laughter in the face of the most terrible absurdities. Yet one has only to look at the text of Job or the ending of Mark to see that some texts are missing and that our textual problems are quite likely insoluble. In particular, admirers of the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) must have been quite surprised to see, at the end of 1 Samuel 10:27, the addition of a brief paragraph concerning the Ammonites. It explains the reason for the conflict in chapter 11. This unprecedented addition to the text has not been found in any Biblical translation for the last 2000 years. It is given in fragmentary form in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls and is supported by the first-century Jewish historian, Josephus (Antiquities VI v.1).

The Christian is generally influenced by Jesus' own use of the Bible, as in Matthew where Jesus is described as "fulfilling" it (Matt 5:17). Jesus own use of the Bible is less predictive (yet see Matthew 26:31, 52-54) but rather marked by a blunt engagement with the moral and religious dimension of the Bible. This includes Jesus' well-known summary of the Law in two love commandments, his more extensive exposition of the meaning of the Torah (5:21-48) and his selection of priorities (23:23). Thus for the early Church Christ "fulfilled" the Old Testament and became its goal and its true meaning--in Paul's expression "the end of the Law" (Rom 10:4).

Nevertheless, Christians have oscillated between wholehearted affirmation of the older Testament and a virtual rejection of it. Particularly since the second century Gnostic Marcion there have been people who were embarrassed by and even hostile to the Old Testament, especially its vengeful God in contrast to the loving God of Jesus. The fact is that the Old Testament, inherited from Judaism, written in a different language, with a different geography and a much longer chronological span, is the much larger part of the Christian Bible while a considerable part of the New Testament involves interpretation of the Old Testament. The New Testament has some 300 direct Old Testament quotations and probably several thousand additional allusions to the Old Testament Despite the great importance of the Bible for Christians, in sharp contrast, Christianity cannot properly be said to be a religion of the Book. It is rather a religion focused on Jesus.

According to the Second Vatican Council (Constitution on Divine Revelation, 15-16) the Old Testament is a prophetic prediction of Christ and the bearer of a promise which is not complete until Jesus. Its principal purpose was to be a preparation for the coming of Christ:

   The principal purpose to which the plan of the old covenant
   was directed was to prepare for the coming of Christ, the Redeemer
   of all and of the messianic kingdom, to announce this
   coming by prophecy (see Lk. 24:44; Jn. 5:39; 1 Pet. 1:10)
   and to indicate its meaning through various types (see 1 Cor.
   10:12).

   For, though Christ established the new covenant in his blood,
   still the books of the Old Testament with all their parts, caught
   up into the proclamation of the Gospel, acquire and show forth
   their full meaning in the New Testament (see Mt. 5:17; Lk.
   24:27; Rom. 16:24-25; 2 Cor. 14:16) and in turn shed light
   on it and explain it."

One cannot forget that the early Christians did not have a New Testament for a considerable period of time. They followed a Jesus whose Bible was the Old Testament. In applying the Old Testament to their situations, they were guided, according to Werner H. Schmidt of the University of Bonn (p. 389) by three key ideas:

* The God of the Old Testament is the Father of Jesus.

* Jesus is the promised messiah, the Christ.

* The new community is the true, chosen people of God.

Schmidt goes on to mention developments that arose because of such events as the destruction of the Temple. Thus the Old Testament sacrifices were abrogated by the death of Jesus. Baptism instead of circumcision became the sign of membership of the community. Gradually many ceremonial and legal features of the Old Testament ceased to bind, and the law lost its meaning as a sign of unity. Schmidt quotes the extreme view of Immanuel Kant, who developed the position of Semler, that the founding of the Christian Church stood "in no essential connection whatever" with the ecclesiastical faith which preceded it.

According to Schmidt, three basic objections against the Old Testament have been made since Spinoza (1632-1677) and Semler (1725-1791):

* Particularism or nationalism--such a national religion is the mark of a limited and past stage of civilization.

* Legalism--bringing the threat that the Christian religion will be infiltrated by legalism.

* This-worldliness--the Old Testament according to Kant (p. 117) has no belief in a future life. Christianity is in danger of being secularized by Old Testament expectations of and concentration on the present world.

Kant (p. 118) believed that Christianity completely forsook the Judaism from which it sprang because it was based on a completely new principle. Schleiermacher (1768-1830), who came closest since Marcion to rejecting the Old Testament, practically denied any theological relationship between the two Testaments and placed the Old Testament on the level of Greek and Roman thought. Maintaining that it did not share the dignity and inspiration of the New Testament, he proposed the transposition of the two Testaments, thus emphasizing the priority and inspiration of the New Testament while turning the Old Testament into an appendix. By the beginning of the twentieth century the liberal developmental concept of "progressive revelation" was widely used to describe the theological relationship between the two Testaments. Even books as shocking as Joshua can reveal a lot about what can be expected from human nature. Few however would agree with the widespread allegorical interpretation that the commands to destroy the inhabitants were commands to eradicate vice from the soul.

Peter C. Craigie (p. 11) highlights the problem that "one of the dominant representations of God in the Old Testament is that of Warrior." He wonders "why was it necessary for so much of the literature of war to be presented as part of the revealed Scripture." But arguing that this was probably not a problem to people of Old Testament times or to writers of the Old Testament (p. 12, n. 2), he finds that the Old Testament God of War and the New Testament God of Christian faith are completely antithetical. Does not the New Testament command us to love one another, even our enemies (Luke 6:27)? Is not God described as love (1 Jn. 4:16)? Further, we should never forget how the prophets spoke of a future time when the weapons of war would be transformed into instruments of peace.

According to Claus Westermann, in the Preface to his collection of essays representing the major Protestant scholars' approaches to the Old Testament in the context of the Christian Church and its theology, the two Testaments have a common point of departure, and "the Old Testament must be allowed to tell its own story" (p. 11). Further: "It is commonly said today that in order to understand the Old Testament, we have to listen to the New, and that in order to be able to interpret the New Testament we must know the Old" (p. 12).

The New Testament, however, also suffered much from the Enlightenment and from the rise of the natural and historical sciences. Post-Enlightenment people had great difficulty in literally believing in angels, demons, miracles, resurrection and ascension, the second coming of Jesus on the clouds of heaven, and much else.

The morality of the Old Testament shows both growth and limitations, as John L. McKenzie has well pointed out. The limitations include "the acceptance of slavery, polygamy and divorce, the double standard of sexual morality (stricter on women), a remarkably intense hatred of foreigners, inhumanity in war, and a certain laxness in regard to mendacity and theft. In these instances Israelite morality fails to rise entirely above that of its world, though even in these areas it is somewhat superior" (The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 1305).

McKenzie concludes that "The remarkable feature of Israelite morality is that it contained the principles by which its limitations could be overcome" (Ibid; cf. Craigie: Twain: 387). This appears to be a better approach than, with some scholars, to see the Bible as a "smorgasbord of resources, some of which may be helpful at one time, others at another" (Collins: 602). For Mark Twain time and practice have corrected the Bible while retaining the text.

One thinks, in this context, of the famous comment of the painter van Gogh and his well-known answer from the resurrection stories: "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" McKenzie concludes that the fulfillment often mentioned in the New Testament is not necessarily the fulfillment of a prediction but of a hope, destiny or promise. Promise is a more accurate word to describe the relationship between the Old Testament and New Testament. This allows for the freedom, new beginnings and independence of the New Testament, whose fulfillment can exceed and even perhaps, correct the expectations of the Old Testament such as are found in large parts of Genesis, Exodus and the Prophets. Jesus was a surprise to Judaism: nobody foresaw what actually happened or how he would achieve fulfillment. Jesus is the key to understanding the Old Testament.

Hugh S. Pyper concludes that

   The Old Testament remains an inescapable but uncomfortable
   element in Christian thought. Much of the New Testament is
   addressed to communities living in the expectation of an imminent
   end-time. It shows limited interest in the pragmatic concerns
   of individuals and communities who are trying to ensure
   their continued survival. The Old Testament, however, is
   preeminently a book about survival, which has itself survived and
   underpinned the survival of the Jewish people. The Ten Commandments
   are still cited as the foundation of civic life and the
   laws of Leviticus are still pressed into service in contemporary
   debates on sexuality and family life. Whether thereby we are assured
   of an immovable ethical foundation rooted in God's will or find
   ourselves shackled with the outdated cultural and political
   prejudices of an ancient Levantine society is a matter of
   disagreement among Christians. Those concerned with the theological
   justification of war, the rights of women, the ecological
   consequences of what is Seen as a biblically based instrumental
   attitude to the natural world, or with the issue of homosexuality
   still argue vehemently over the status of the Old Testament
   [Hastings: 497].

Pyper sees liberation theology, whose call to social justice, exodus and promise of restoration, has inspired oppressed communities to identify with the Old Testament, as a twoedged sword in such matters. Thus some American settlers justified the extermination of the native Americans by seeing them as Canaanites. The ideologies of colonialism and capitalism which liberationists denounced were in fact often propped up by images drawn from the Old Testament.

In his study of unity and diversity, James D.G. Dunn concludes that the Old Testament provided a bond of unity in first-century Christianity:

   but not the Old Testament as such, not the Old Testament in
   itself, rather the Old Testament interpreted. It was the Old
   Testament as interpreted in the light of the revelation of Jesus
   which helped to unify the different Christian churches in the
   first century--just as it was their differences of interpretation
   which again underlay the diversity within first-century
   Christianity. Jesus again stands at the center--the traditions about
   him and the Christian's present relation to him through the
   Spirit. The Old Testament therefore does not rival Jesus as
   the foundation of Christian unity, for the first Christians read it
   only from the perspective of the Jesus revelation [101-02].

The New Testament

According to Michael J. Gorman (pp. 88-89.), the 27 writings of the New Testament despite their diversity, have six basic commonalities that shaped the Church and inspired believers:

* Centered on Jesus--the primary focus is on Jesus and his significance.

* Eschatologically conscious--the writings do not describe a people waiting around for the end of the world but a people living in the "last days" promised by the prophets and inaugurated by Jesus.

* Scripturally defined--they quote and echo the Old Testament to understand both Jesus and themselves.

* Focused on discipleship--they recount a story or teach doctrine above all to encourage communities to follow Jesus faithfully.

* Counter-imperial--a growing consensus sees most if not all New Testament documents as implicitly or explicitly counter-imperial, proposing a Lord, Savior, Gospel and Polity that differed from the cult of the Roman emperor and other pagan cults.

* Expectant of suffering--almost all the writings (the 'martyrs' canon) indicate a persecuted writer or audience or both.

Raymond E. Brown, in his fascinating study, The Churches The Apostles Left Behind, has much to teach us here. His work is an examination of seven different churches after the death of the apostles: three in the heritage of Paul, one in the heritage of Peter, two in the heritage of the Beloved Disciple and one (St. Matthew) addressed by the First Gospel.

Thus, on Acts he insists that the fullness of the Canon must be taken seriously lest the triumphalism of Acts, where all setbacks are temporary and quickly turn out for good, become impossibly romantic at a period of numerically shrinking Christianity. We need the Old Testament, which describes how God's people in Israel

   shrank from twelve tribes to one, how religious institutions
   failed (monarchy, priesthood, sacrificial cult) and how Israel
   learned more about God in the arches of the Temple destroyed
   by the Babylonians than in the elegant period of that Temple
   under Solomon. Placing the long Deuteronomic history alongside
   the brief history of the Christian movement in Acts may
   warn Bible readers that God's message to His people is not
   an unconditioned promise of increasing numbers to the ends
   of the earth [p. 71].

I like Brown's comment on the incipient blandness of the Pastorals:

   Paul might not have been able to meet several requirements the
   pastorals would impose on the presbyter-bishops. "Not quicktempered"
   (Titus 1:7) would scarcely describe the Paul who
   called the Galatians "fools" (Gal. 3:1). "Dignified" (1 Tim.
   3:2) would not fit the Paul who wished that his circumcising
   adversaries would slip with the knife and castrate themselves
   (Gal. 5:12) and who could utter such vituperation as "Their
   God is their belly" (Philip 3:19). Rough vitality and a willingness
   to fight bare-knuckled for the gospel were part of what
   made Paul a great missionary, but such characteristics might
   have made him a poor residential supervisor. The Pastorals are
   listing qualities necessary for someone who would have to get
   along with a community for a long time; fortunately for all,
   perhaps, Paul's missionary genius kept him on the move. (p. 35)

Claire Schenot Burkat (p. 28) is devastating on Paul:

   His sermons were over their heads. His opinionated views
   alienated his colleagues. Co-workers found him boastful, even
   arrogant. A physical disability drove him to over-function in
   ministry. The first two congregations he led rejected his
   leadership, and, unable to still their internal strife and
   bickering, he went on to a third. By some measures of success, his
   ministry was a failure .... This was the apostle Paul."

A third example from Brown is his honest view of the four weaknesses of the Johannine tradition "shaped by polemic and because it claimed unchallengeable guidance from the Paraclete." "Noting these weaknesses," he remarks, "is particularly important for ecumenical discussions today between Protestants and Roman Catholics, for the sixteenthcentury division was also bitterly polemic, involved excommunication and accusations of being antichrists, and sought to justify positions through appeals to the Spirit and to the common scriptures. If we learn some of the problems of the first-century division, we may learn some of the problems of the sixteenth and of the twentieth" (p. 112).

The four weaknesses were as follows:

* "The one-sidedness of a theology shaped in polemic, ultimately leading to exaggeration and division."

* "The unbridgeable chasm resulting from polemics and expulsion, leading to a loss of heritage."

* "Extreme hostility towards outsiders, confining love to 'the brethren'. The fourth Gospel describes the adversaries of Jesus in extremely harsh terms, especially 'the Jews.' The devil is their father ..."

* "Uncontrollable divisions caused by appeal to the Paraclete ... when believers who possess the Paraclete disagree with each other."

We should not fail to mention the 1993 document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission (The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church), which recognized that there were strengths and weaknesses in virtually every one of the methods used in scientific biblical scholarship, while at the same time rejecting a fundamentalist approach.

Scripture--The Soul of Theology

The examples which we have selected have placed a very different emphasis on Scripture, "The Soul of Theology" (its life-blood, its center, its basis, its heart) than is often stressed. John Barton (p. 19) asks in the opening words of the Canadian literary critic, C. Northrop Frye (p. xviii)

   The Bible is dearly a major element in our own imaginative
   tradition, whatever we may think we believe about it. It insistently
   raises the question: Why does this huge, sprawling,
   tactless book sit there inscrutably in the middle of our cultural
   heritage like the "great Boyg" or sphinx in Peer Gynt, frustrating
   all our efforts to walk around it?"

He concludes that "much comment on the Bible is based on what it is assumed to contain or what the Bible "must" be like, rather than on an actual reading of it" (p. 19). He points out that on the whole the Gospels are nothing like any Old Testament narrative books. Likewise Paul's epistles resemble nothing in the Old Testament. The Apocalypse, which describes itself as "the book of this prophecy" (22:10), is less like the Old Testament prophets than the genre of apocalypse.

If soul is what makes us alive and gives us life, and theology is God-talk, then our task is clear, despite the obvious limitations of all our talk and all our writings, even the Bible. Vatican II (On Divine Revelation, n. 24) adopted a felicitous concept of Scripture as the soul of theology from Pope Leo XIII's Providentissimus Deus (1893). Recently, when I taught a graduate course about Mark's Gospel, I was delighted to come across a new commentary on Mark by M. Eugene Boring. The author asks, "What is Mark's story about?" It is about Jesus, he replies, who appears in almost every scene. It is about the disciples who accompany Jesus and are the goal of his final revelation in 16:7:

   The real answer, however: the story is about God, who only
   rarely becomes an explicit character, but who is the hidden actor
   in the whole drama, whose reality spans its whole narrative
   world from creation to eschaton, and who is not an alternative
   or competitor to the view that regards Jesus as the principal
   subject. To tell the story of Jesus is to tell the self-defining
   story of God [p. 3].

With all its limitations, this is what the Bible is all about; its very soul. Despite the huge production of recent biblical scholarship, many scholars would insist, I think, that we have lost much of the soul of what biblical studies should be and have no passionate, significant message for our times.

Works Cited

Barton, John. 1991 .What Is The Bible. London, UK: S.P.C.K.

Boring, M. Eugene. 2006. Mark. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

Bowden, John. 1977. Voices in the Wilderness. London, UK: SCM Press.

Brown, Raymond E. 1984. The Churches The Apostles Left Behind. New York, NY: Paulist Press.

Brown, Raymond E., et al. 1989. The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. London, UK: Chapman.

Burkat, Claire Sehenot. 1993. "Five Myths of the Perfect Pastor," Dialog 32.

Collins, John J. 2004. Introduction To The Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis, MN, Fortress Press.

Craigie, Peter C. 1978. The Problem of War in the Old.Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdemans.

Dunn, James D.G. 1993. Unity and Diversity in the New Testament. 2nd ed. London, UK: SCM Press.

Frye, C. Northrop. 1981. The Great Code: The Bible And Literature. London, UK: Melbourne & Henley.

Gorman, Michael J. 2006. Scripture. An Ecumenical Introduction to the Bible and Its Interpretation. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers.

Hastings, Adrian. 2000. The Oxford Companion To Christian Thought. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Kant, Immanuel. 1794. Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. (1960 ed.) New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Schmidt, Werner H. 1999. Old Testament Introduction. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

Twain, Mark. 1923. Europe and Elswhere. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers.

Westermann, Claus. 1964. Essays On Old Testament Hermeneutics. Richmond, VA: John Knox Press.

Sean P. Kealy, S.T.L.(Gregorian University), L.S.S. (Biblical Institute, Rome), M.A. in Classical Studies (Dublin), holds the Noble Dick Endowed Chair in Academic Leadership at Duquesne University, (Pittsburgh), where he is Professor of Biblical Studies ([e-mail]).A member of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, he has published widely including commentaries on Acts, Luke, John, and the Apocalypse in addition to histories of each of the four Gospels. He is currently researching a two volume history of Mark's Gospel.