Surviving in Sand

...enters the new church and makes racial slurs about the integrated assembly, Sonny faces the intruder calmly...

...Nineteenth-century German scholarship drew this equation so clearly that it is small wonder the Roman Catholic hierarchy suspected the historical-critical paradigm...

...Criticism still has something to address, and does not yet have to bear the burden of replacing a living tradition...

...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...

...Catholic New Testament scholarship can also, in turn, embrace church history...

...In a fit of rage, Sonny slams his son's baseball bat against his rival's skull, then flees under an assumed name, "Apostle...

...The rest of the movie recounts the fugitive's effort to create a new congregation in Louisiana, an undertaking that meets with success just before the law doses in...

...There is every reason to celebrate God's capacity for self-revelation to both Jews and pagans...

...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...

...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...

...I don't know who's been fooling me--you or the devil...

...Second, it is essential to expand the notion of critical inquiry beyond the realm of the merely historical critical...

...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...

...His rage for salvation isn't plainly distinct from the rage that prompts him to crack a man's head open...

...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...

...it does require the most careful attention to authoritative renderings of that tradition...

...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...

...Most Americans with religious convictions feel there is nothing incompatible between their beliefs and their civic existences...

...He plays "Sonny" Dewey, a Pentecostal preacher in Texas, a man as unshaken in his faith as he is unstable in his moods...

...It does demand the affirmation of that tradition as the starting point of any inquiry...

...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...

...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...

...The choice was thought to be clear: on one side, dogma, tradition, law, sacraments, and miracles (or if you prefer, superstitions ancient and modem...

...Catholicism-and Luther was surely right in this--is closer to Judaism than it is to Protestantism in this important respect...

...When he keeps vigil outside the house where his wife is sleeping with her lover and toys with a loaded revolver, this minister hasn't forgotten God: he is talking to God, grumbling against God, egging God on to do something about his misery...

...on the other side, free and critical inquiry as found in the historical method...

...Catholicism, I propose, ought to be comfortable with biblical texts having multiple meanings...

...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...

...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...

...not the ways in which Paul's perceptions were deepened by Ephesians, but only how they were dimmed...

...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...

...RESPONSIBLE READING ne of the more bizarre manifestations of the either/or impulse has been the literary dismemberment of the Bible...

...There are new developments, but every historical origin bears in itself, and passes on, elements of what preceded and helped create it...

...But when the tough threatens to shatter the preacher's organization, he is doing the same thing physically as Sonny's wife did organizationally, and Sonny's response becomes, once again, violent...

...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...

...Why should the scholar trained in the discipline of New Testament studies not leave this up to colleagues in other fields...

...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...

...On stage, leading white, black, and Hispanic congregations in prayer, Dewey bellows, sings, stomps, dances, claps, whirls, performs...

...The faith community's debate over its identity and action should involve multiple critical perspectives...

...No scholarship is utterly disinterested...

...I think that Catholic scholars today are well positioned to undertake these tasks...

...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...

...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...

...These traces of God's work are the surest pledge that God is also capable of revealing Godself to Christians...

...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...

...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...

...As an observant Jewish community is structured by halakah, so is Catholicism...

...Yet he's no fraud...

...The reading of texts is always in substantial measure shaped by the premises and practices of a reading community...

...he really believes he is literally opening the gates of heaven to those who hear him...

...The Apostle has a genial, open-air look and a v i b r a n t , f o r w a r d - t h r u s t i n g rhythm, yet possesses dark undertones...

...First, it is mandatory for scholars to know and to declare their loyalties...

...Commonweal | ~ January 16,1998 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...

...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 the historical moment does not exhaust the process of criticism...

...The surges of sensuality that drive him to adultery also drive him to the lusty worship of God...

...But not every reading of the text within the church is for deciding halakah...

...But, sick of his infidelities, Sonny's wife takes a younger preacher to her bed and worse---much worse from Sonny's point of view--she conspires to get her husband evicted from his own congregation...

...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 Commonweal | 5 January 16,1998 of wisdom, so are Catholic biblical scholars freed to engage Scripture in a variety of imaginative ways as a source of transforming wisdom...

...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...

...I'm mad at you, Lord...

...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...

...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...

...Much reading is for wisdom and delight...

...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...

...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...

...Small wonder if casual observers sometimes wondered what biblical studies had to do with the actual 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...

...Anyone who has worked seriously with patristic and medieval scriptural interpretation, for example, knows that it cannot simply be dismissed as aberrant...

...Proper historiography, I think, should be concerned with all the ways in which the old and new intermingle...

...In a second confrontation, Dewey wins the youth over with prayer in a scene surely meant to show the cli...

...I am by no means advocating reading historical criticism out of the conversation...

...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...

...he story of criticism's emergence has consistently been couched in terms of a struggle for freedom of inquiry against the constraints placed by tradition...

...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...

...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...

...When a young troublemaker, for no apparent reason (a redneck angel sent to wrestle with a latterday Jacob...

...At the intellectual level, however, their instincts were perhaps not entirely wrong...

...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 ofsola scriptura...

...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...

...Real history, however, is always a matter of both/and...

...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...

...And like some home laboratory experiment in cloning, these textual samples are used to reconstruct the putative histories of hypothetical communities...

...ost of the noble monstrosities of moviemaking----Griffith's Intolerance, Gance's Napoleon, yon Stroheim's Greed, Branagh's HamletIhave been the work of actors or ex-actors...

...The truth of Christianity does not need to be secured by denying all truth or beauty elsewhere...

...All scholarship is both socially located and ideologically committed...

...The man is daemonic (which,of Commonweal I 6 January 16,1998 course, is much different from demonic...

...loyalty is not the opposite of criticism but the condition for genuine criticism...

...To fixate only on the moment of origins is to be driven by theological rather than historiographical concerns...

...There is certainly no theological motivation for suppressing that influence...

...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...

...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...

...Two important consequences follow...

...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 this isn't the way of Sonny Dewey...

...If history offers lessons, one of them might be the inevitability of such admixture...

...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...

...Even after he builds a new life and congregation for himself, there remains something turbid and maniacal in Sonny's conduct...

...The affirmation of elements both of continuity and distinctiveness is congenial to Catholic historiography and Catholic theological instincts...

...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...

...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...

...As Stanley Hauerwas has wittily observed (in Unleashing the Scriptures), the pope has always known what Stanley Fish has recently discovered...

...So it comes as no surprise that a film as amazing and as frustrating as The Apostle is the work of Robert Duvall, who wrote, directed, and financed it, and in the title role gives the greatest performance of his career...

...He has the charisma of Mick Jagger and the rawthroat power of Joe Cocker, and about as much sexual restraint as your average rock star on the road...