Sometimes, we spend a lot of time focusing on our problems, especially things that may or may not even happen. It’s basic human nature to be somewhat pessimistic, thanks to a brain that wants to protect us from harm. After all, if we assume that shadow behind the tree is a tiger, we’re ultimately safer than if we assume it’s a cuddly, friendly dog. Even the ancient Israelites had this problem. There are 150 Psalms and only four of them are devoted to thanking God!

I’ve been thinking a lot more about the little things in life, from wine and coffee, to more deep things like God and Church. The morning cup of hot coffee before work. The chill in the air as October comes. How much I love wine and how much I love chocolate. My joy in attending mass and doing the Liturgy of the hours before I crawl into a nice warm bed.

I’ve developed a nice habit of coming up with five things I’m grateful for each day and incorporating them into family prayer at night. Even if we’re just thankful for each other, it really helps us bond. You may want to try it to.

Of course, appropriate for Lent (and all times):

One of the scribes came to Jesus and asked him, “Which is the first of all the commandments?” Jesus replied, “The first is this: Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.” The scribe said to him, “Well said, teacher. You are right in saying, He is One and there is no other than he. And to love him with all your heart, with all your understanding, with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.” And when Jesus saw that he answered with understanding, he said to him, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God.” And no one dared to ask him any more questions (Mark 12:28-34 NAB).

…Bless the Lord, all powers,
sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever…
Bless the Lord, all rain and dew,
sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
Bless the Lord, all winds,
sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
Bless the Lord, fire and heat,
sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
Bless the Lord, winter cold and summer heat,
sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
Bless the Lord, dews and snows,
sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
Bless the Lord, nights and days,
sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
Bless the Lord, light and darkness,
sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
Bless the Lord, ice and cold,
sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.
Bless the Lord, frosts and snows,
sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever…

From Daniel 3, “Song of the 3 Young Men”

…or a defense of the Old Testament (that may not sound like it to some readers).

This year in class I had the kids read a lot more Scripture, and this is going to increase even more in the upcoming year. It is not that I was opposed to Scripture before (of course not!), but that as I am approaching my fourth year, I am able to do more things that I want to with the curriculum. Last year, we started reading a lot more of the Old Testament together at school, and this coincides with my effort to read through the Bible again in my own time. I have really enjoyed reading the Old Testament, but there was a time when the Old Testament was a bit of an embarrassment for this Christian (although, unlike some ancient and modern folk who would cut-up the canon, I never felt the need to resort to that). In fact, reading the Old Testament often brings up questions like “how can the Bible say that when we don’t do that?” and “Those people sure don’t act like Christians!”

In seminary, some of my professors told us, “Jesus isn’t in the Old Testament” and seemed to be disappointed that Christians even bothered to use the Old Testament. This is why it is in fashion to call the Old Testament the “Hebrew Scriptures.” This is not a Catholic, or classically Christian, position. While certainly recognizing the relationship of the first testament to the Jewish people, for Catholics, the Old Testament is important because it contains the history of salvation, God’s progressive revelation to mankind, and sets the stage for the Incarnation. I do see value in studying the first testament from the perspective of the Jewish people, but we must not neglect the study of it from a Christian perspective either! This is why I find the Old Testament so interesting. The Old Testament is, from a Catholic perspective, part of the development, the special events of salvation history leading up to the “good news” of the story. The “happy ending,” the incarnation, puts the Old Testament in proper perspective. Once in perspective, I think we can appreciate the events and teachings of the Old Testament using the multiple senses of Scripture, but because we are viewing the Old through the lens of the New, the more troubling parts are placed in their proper perspective. The Catechism explains it thusly:

Christians therefore read the Old Testament in the light of Christ crucified and risen. Such typological reading discloses the inexhaustible content of the Old Testament; but it must not make us forget that the Old Testament retains its own intrinsic value as Revelation reaffirmed by our Lord himself. Besides, the New Testament has to be read in the light of the Old. Early Christian catechesis made constant use of the Old Testament. As an old saying put it, the New Testament lies hidden in the Old and the Old Testament is unveiled in the New.

It is very hard to explain the Old Testament in this way to those who insist on taking every word of the Bible literally, or to those that don’t believe the New Testament is the lens through which the old is read. However, the Fathers of the Church certainly understood the value of the Old Testament placed within a proper context. On a related note, people who know me, know that I am reluctant to quote the Old Testament when explaining Catholic morality, unless I first explain the context of the Old Testament. This is because for every part of the Jewish law that Catholics follow, there are those that we don’t, and some people suggest we are being inconsistent. I don’t think we are inconsistent, although the fundamentalist, both the Christian and anti-Christian, might disagree.

So for Catholics, Jesus is certainly “in the Old Testament,” albeit in a much more hidden way than the New, but he is there, so much so that St. Justin and other Fathers believed the theophanies contained in the Old Testament were incarnations of God the Word. We should not only read the Old Testament regularly, but should contemplate it as inspired Scripture, containing the earlier, yet incomplete, parts of salvation history.

All of us have probably heard it before: Jesus didn’t miraculously multiply the loaves and fish, but rather he encouraged the people to share. Fr. Jay, my pastor, took this theory head on during mass this weekend and thoroughly debunked it. He argued that the sharing theory undermines Catholic teaching on the Eucharist and the Bible doesn’t imply sharing at all. And, for the coup de grace, he noted that the people wanted to make Jesus king following this incident. Who would risk Roman wrath by making a guy king because he got people to share?

Last week he preached on contraception and this week he debunks trendy Catholic biblical scholarship. I’m lucky to have this guy as a pastor.

I went to Barnes and Noble this weekend and got a chance to actually visit a bookstore since I normally do most of my shopping online. It was, however, nice to check out some of the various Bibles out there and actually look inside.

The first interesting one I saw was the Green Bible. I’m sure it was made in an eco-friendly fashion, but the oddest part was that it includes words about nature and the earth in green text. While it’s an interesting concept, it still strikes me as a waste of money, or better yet an attempt to get others to waste their money (I’m sure they’ll find quite a few takers).

The second “unique” Bible was the American Patriot’s Bible, which combines Scripture with themes from US history. I love Scripture and am generally proud of my country, if not a lot of my countrymen (and women)…but…this is way too much. Although it looks like the writers were as sensitive as possible, the whole endeavor strikes me as idolatry.

The final Bible that I examined was the new Orthodox Study Bible with the Septuagint translated for the Old Testament. It has many notes from an Orthodox perspective. Although it comes from an evangelical convert apologetic angle, it still looked helpful. It’s definitely the only one of the group that I’d buy if money were more plentiful.

I also noticed that someone had put little fundamentalist tracts in all of the Catholic Bibles. I took care of that.

Ok, before you think I am crazy because of this title, please hear me out…

As a member of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, I get their quarterly publications, and their annual collection of presentations from  their yearly meeting. Their 2007 publication (from their 2005 meeting), After 40 Years, has some great essays relating to the impact of Vatican II. One of the essays I enjoyed the most is Dei Verbum: Sacred Scripture Since Vatican II, by Rev. William Kurz.

From Dei Verbum:

However, since God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men in human fashion, the interpreter of Sacred Scripture, in order to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us, should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words (12).

Kurz argues that Scripture scholars after Vatican II have used critical tools to “investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended” but have been unresponsive to the second part of the council’s exhortation: “to find out what God wanted to manifest by means of their words.” Kurz believes (as I do) that many Scripture scholars, even Catholic ones, downplay or deny the role Scripture has in the life of the Church as an inspired book. Kurz is correct when he asserts that since the Enlightenment, scholars have been reticent to accept “metaphysical presuppositions that the Bible is in actuality the word of God written in human words.” In other words, Vatican II called scholars to study the Bible as if it is the word of God, and many modern Catholic biblical scholars just can’t do this.

Kurz suggests that in order to rectify this situation, besides employing critical study, we have to recognize the “Christological unity of Scripture centered around the incarnated son of God,” and let this shape our exploration of Scripture. This is the way of the Church Fathers. However, imagine saying something like this at a conference of Biblical scholars! Nonetheless, had you said something like this to the Fathers and Medieval theologians, you would have gotten nods of agreement.

So where does the mystery novel come in? Well, one issue you have to deal with when asking what meaning God attaches to the words of Scripture is “what to do with the Old Testament?” Modern scholarship tends to take the view that “Jesus isn’t in the Old Testament,” so don’t bother finding him there. In fact, it is in fashion to criticize the New Testament authors for finding Jesus there. However, denying Jesus is in the Old Testament is pure heresy from a classical Christian perspective. Even a basic reading of the New Testament tells us that the early Christians believed strongly that the Old Testament indeed spoke of Jesus, in a clear fashion. Kurz tries to look at the Old Testament from an Apostolic and Patristic perspective, and borrows an analogy from Duke professor David Steinmetz to explain the relationship of the two testaments, that the Bible is like a mystery novel. From Kurz:

As readers progress through mystery story narratives, they are often distracted or confused by evidence that turns out to be either misleading or irrelevant. Finally, in the last chapter of the mystery narrative, the detective hero summarizes what really happened and reveals who the murderer was. The detective ignores all the false leads in order to trace out the relevant plot lines that point to the actual killer and circumstances.

Once one knows what happened, one cannot read re-read the original mystery novel the same way a second time…

Similarly, once the New Testament’s second narrative explains what was really going on in God’s plan and in the story of salvation in the Old Testament, Christian readers will no longer be able to re-read it in the way the original Hebrew readers read it. By hindsight, Christians can distinguish which threads of salvation history were less pertinent, and which were components of God’s saving plan. For example…contrary to many expectations, God’s design did not feature restored Davidic kings liberating God’s people from oppressive empires like Rome by physical warfare. Instead, seemingly minor plots and themes, such as the “suffering servant” motifs in Isaiah or the “persecuted righteous man” in Wisdom, took on far greater importance than would have been noticed by earlier readers of the Old Testament books and proved to be at the heart of God’s plan.

Kurz observes in the notes that there is definitely value in attempting to read the Old Testament from the perspectives of the original authors, even if we know the ending, so he is careful to suggest that we should not abandon the practice of trying to read the Old Testament as the original authors and audience would have. Nonetheless, I think Kurz gives us a fascinating way of approaching the relationship of Old and New Testament: the Bible as mystery novel.

Over at Catholidoxy, Irenaeus has posted on Bart Ehrman, and raised the issue that biblical scholar Ehrman’s fundamentalist faith was not adequate enough to address intellectual and existential questions that he had, so he lost his faith.

I enjoyed this post because I was introduced to critical biblical study in 1999, in two classes, one devoted to the Old Testament and another devoted to the New. In the New Testament course, Ehrman’s book was the textbook (this is the last time I will mention Ehrman’s name, so the title of this post may be a little misleading!). At first biblical criticism was kind of scary for me. It challenged me to look at the Bible in a different way. There were quite a few evangelicals in the class, including myself, my brother Jonathan, Robbie (a friend who is still an evangelical Methodist minister), and a girl involved in the Navigators organization. We all had good chances to discuss our reactions to the class, and we all had been friends beforehand (I knew Robbie from a Greek class).

While biblical criticism was difficult for me to accept at first (it seemed disrespectful and improper), ultimately I have accepted the importance of moderate biblical criticism (I say “moderate” because as Christians the Bible is still the Book of the Church, and there are limits to every critical method). I think I was able to put biblical criticism into perspective for a variety of reasons. First, I had actually read the Bible, and I did not believe, for example, that every word of Leviticus was of the same importance as the words of the Sermon on the Mount. Thus, I knew that the Bible had to be interpreted, even if I maybe couldn’t have vocalized this concept very well at the time. Second, I was also reading the Church Fathers while I was studying biblical criticism, which helped me see the importance of the Church in biblical interpretation. Also, the Fathers didn’t necessarily read every word of the Bible literally either; they allegorized the heck out of it, and they knew the objections of modern scholars (for example, Irenaeus knew about, and addressed, the translation issue of Isaiah 7:14). Third, I began to understand Christianity as a living religion based on a living person, the Word of God, Jesus Christ. This is not to say I don’t have a high view of Scripture, because I do, but my faith is not in a book, but in Jesus Christ. I was reading many Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican authors during this time as well, and seeing orthodox writers in these Churches embrace biblical criticism helped me put critical study in perspective. John Paul II, C.S. Lewis, and many others embraced biblical criticism to some extent. Finally, I had the intellectual capacity to determine which parts of critical study went “too far.”  I guess you could say that I applied critical thinking to the critical methods themselves. In other words, I wasn’t going to go from uncritically assuming the Bible was literally true and completely inerrant to uncritically accepting the validity of every conclusion of modern biblical scholarship! I have seen fellow students do just this, going from fundamentalists to embracing and spreading the gospel of skeptical critical study.

Unfortunately, the Navigators girl who took the class with us did not have the tools to make sense of the class. She took the view (sadly encouraged by some Navigators leaders) that if the Bible had even the smallest error, then Christianity fell apart. It seems as if her faith was in the Bible, or at least what she assumed the Bible was supposed to be about, not the person the Bible points to, Jesus Christ. If the Bible could talk, it would most certainly tell us not to let an error in it hinder us from following Christ! Unfortunately, the local Navigators tended to dimiss her concerns rather than address them head on. I honestly think that my journey toward Catholicism (which included a time in the Anglican church) helped me put the Bible in perspective. Had I approached biblical criticism without the aid of the Fathers, the Church, and modern orthodox writers, I may have ended up where this girl ended up. I don’t know where she is today, but I pray that she has come back to the faith.