So What's Catholic About It?
Johnson, Luke Timothy
SO WHAT'S CATHOLIC ABOUT IT? The state of Catholic biblical scholarship Luke Timothy Johnson ca ~ n what sense might biblical scholarship as practiced in North America these days be...
...I entered the thoroughly non-Catholic Ph.D...
...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...
...it's scholarship, all right, and of an impressively high order, but what's Roman Catholic about it...
...maybe it was Catholic, but was it really scholarship...
...n the either/or perspective that has dominated I the study of Christian origins, the New Testament is set apart from what precedes it and what follows it...
...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...
...B hen Catholic scholars fought for assimilation into a scholarship dominated by the historicalcritical approach, they did not perhaps realize four things that we are now better able to appreciate...
...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...
...And if so, how do we go about recovering our loss, without relinquishing that hardwon victory...
...Second, this model promised more than it could deliver...
...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...
...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...
...Parable versus allegory thus stands as paradigmatic: either Jesus or tradition...
...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...
...It is always either/or rather than both/and: not the ways in which Jesus' sayings gained greater clarity or significance Commonweal | 3 January 16, 1998...
...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...
...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...
...You remember the classic sequence: the first generation holds onto old country ways in order to maintain identity...
...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...
...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...
...Only a fool would slight the enormous growth in real knowledge generated by these presuppositions...
...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...
...Have we perhaps lost as much as we have won by so wholeheartedly and uncritically changLuke Timothy Johnson, author of The Real Jesus (HarperSanFrancisco), is the Woodruff Professor of New Testament at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University...
...All biblical scholars are indebted to the historical-critical approach...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...I was born the year Pius XII's Divino affiante 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...
...From the mid-nineteenth century until Divino affiante spiritu in 1943, many would have regarded the term Roman Catholic biblical scholarship as oxymoronic...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Third, it claimed exclusive ownership of academic respectability...
...Today, the term Roman Catholic biblical scholarship sounds equally strange...
...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...
...I do not want to deny the power of either/or...
...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...
...Rather, I appeal to an understanding of ecumenism that celebrates the special gifts that each religious tradition might offer to other traditions...
...Biblical studies exemplified ecumenicity because the historical-critical approach ensured neutrality, objectivity, and lack of sectarian bias in interpretation...
...The state of Catholic biblical scholarship Luke Timothy Johnson ca ~ n 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...
...ing the character of biblical study...
...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...
...Because history alone can accomplish such discrimination, it alone is criticism's legitimate instrument...
...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...
...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...
...None of us with any sense of the alternative would want to relinquish such gains or abandon what is productive in that perspective...
...Sounds like a midlife sort of question...
...Commonweal | ~1 January 16,1998 The study of the parables, for example, came down to this: Did Jesus say it or not...
...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...
...Or perhaps the question of a third-generation immigrant...
...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 second generation is embarrassed by the old language, old manners, old food, and seeks complete assimilation into the new world...
...By no means am I suggesting a turn away from the spirit of ecumenism and a return to triumphalism...
...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...
...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...
...Let us grant that the triumph of historical criticism among Catholic scholars was a great victory, but is it also only a partial victory...
Vol. 125 • January 1998 • No. 1
