Reading Scripture: The Tradition

Nearly two decades before he was named Pope, then-Cardinal Josef Ratzinger surprised the scholarly world by proclaiming that Christians, himself included, no longer knew how to read the Bible. The church, he said, was experiencing a “crisis in Biblical interpretation,” and he predicted that it would take at least a generation to work out a way of reading that meets the new challenges facing scripture-readers today.

That generation’s work, it is fair to say, is still in progress. Faced with options like a thoroughgoing “historical-critical approach” that provides much useful insight but, left to itself, risks reducing scripture to the status of any other book; and like, at the opposite extreme, a literalist “fundamentalism” that insists on line-by-line inerrancy at the price of basic credibility -- many in the church have agreed with Ratzinger that a full account of a “third way” is desirable but not yet here.

We cannot, of course, solve the problem between now and June. But what we can do is dive into a rich source of ideas that will help us, individually and collectively, think more clearly about what the questions are and which sorts of answers are more and less viable, more and less attractive, today. That source is the “tradition” of the church, beginning with scripture itself: how did the authors of the New Testament read the Hebrew scriptures they knew? Later, how did church fathers read what they called the “sacred books”? What positions did, for example, Origen, Augustine, and Jerome take on the interpretation of metaphorical passages, on the number of possible meanings that one passage could have, and on what exactly it means to say the Bible is “true”? We’ll then go on to read medieval scholars and monastics who developed those approaches further (Bonaventure, Aquinas, Nicholas of Lyra, Hildegard of Bingen), and, time permitting, consider some samples of how the debates changed in the modern period.