How is the Bible true?
Garvey, John
tion to eject Hussein's army. Slobodan Milosevic is an internal aggressor. He attacks what he portrays as destructive movements inside his country's borders. When his country was...
...Precisely...
...There is a reali~ beyond our accounting, and we need a language richer than the language of history to begin to get at it...
...Origen knew that Paul did not write the Epistle to the Hebrews, but he knew that what mattered was the text, not the author...
...A liturgist friend whispered into my ear about imperial Rome...
...the chronologies of John and the synoptic Gospels differ, and these and other differences (how many angels were at the tomb after the Resurrection, and what did they say...
...On the other hand, violence can make a difference when it has a direct effect on what is happening...
...NATO's experience in Bosnia demonstrated that force can change Milosevic's mind...
...Europe's reaction to the situation is depressingly familiar...
...A radical Commonweal 7 March 27, 1998 cleavage is made between the idea of the objective and the subjective...
...What if Jesus himself never said it, but this was Luke's way of getting across part of Jesus' teaching...
...Quem queritis...
...They lowered the cross from the ceiling and detached it from its metal fixtures...
...An elegant and aesthetically pleasing metaphor may be dead wrong, and a homely one right on target...
...Our impassioned ancestors must have intended books like the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament to be historical documents, bearing the literal truth, not the metaphorical truth they embody today...
...However, this is not going to happen...
...Next to this richness, a distinction between literal and metaphorical truth seems pretty thin...
...When Europe recognized those countries' independence, it turned Belgrade's action into international aggression--but did nothing to stop it...
...The church determined which biblical books would be considered canonical largely in reaction to Marcion, who wanted to exclude all of the Old Testament and much of what we regard as the New Testament...
...There was quiet...
...The part of Jesus was sung by a young man...
...Is this not an essential question of our Western, psychological religion...
...And you can read Jonah as a wonderful (and funny) fable, and the account of the three young men in the fiery furnace, in Daniel, was plainly something to be recited aloud...
...If the Serbian authorities do not call off their campaign of militarized police repression in Kosovo, as demanded by the Contact Group, the argument can be made for attacking those forces...
...I was so used to the Sunday joy of the place, the grace of the marble statuary, the excitement of the congregation, and the radiance of the stained glass windows on a sunny morning--bright like a summer garden...
...When his country was Yugoslavia, he tried to prevent secession by Slovenia and Croatia...
...The visual effect was like the movement of a centipede turned upside down...
...What was sacred becomes secular...
...John Shekelton LIFT HIGH THE CROSS Joining the Savior on Good Friday went to Good Friday services last year on a cloudy afternoon...
...The ministers and choir, most robed in white, walked throughout the church, some feathering incense into the air...
...I heard again the solemn, heavy sound of the old man's song...
...The Passion was sung by choir and cantors...
...I watched her position her feet on the ground, attempting to find her balance, I supposed...
...This time he may have started something he cannot, or will not, stop, and which the international community is unwilling to stop...
...The very sensible American initiatives already in place to influence the sitnation in Kosovo--a big and visible U.S...
...Facts and history do not exhaust reality, and metaphors either point to something true or they do not...
...Europe and the United States contemplate an arms embargo, diplomatic isolation, etc., for Serbia, but Russia resists strong measures...
...troops stationed in Macedonia, active diplomacy in Belg r a d e - have been possible because practically no one in Washington noticed them...
...Armed intervention is pointless when, as in Iraq in February, no coherent explanation can be supplied as to how bombing will make a difference to how the despot behaves...
...I wondered if years of prayer and contemplation had intensified the core of him...
...The episode in Daniel may or may not have had its roots in some royal wickedness, but it is so charged, as something to be recited, that you have to see that something more than history is involved here...
...Was he lying about history...
...My problem is with the too simple distinction between "literal ~uth" and "metaphorical truth...
...And what could history have to do with the Song of Songs...
...Milosevic could let Slovenia and Croatia go because his aim was a greater Serbia...
...As he sang I heard another voice in my mind...
...I am not sure that this is true--or it is at least not nearly so simple...
...But he cannot now let Kosovo go because it is the focus of Serbian nationalism...
...When Jesus spoke of the prodigal son and his merciful father, or of the Pharisee and the tax collector, he was telling stories...
...However, his career has rested on provoking nationalism and creating wars...
...There are truths that are historical, and more than historical...
...Our modern idea of history is relatively recent, and limited: just the facts, please...
...Life is a drama of personalities, relationships, insights, and denouements...
...Military intervention would find little popular support...
...One of the points Oates wanted to make in her piece is that it isn't that simple, and she is right...
...It was not the beauty of the old monk's voice that haunted me, although his singing was fine...
...Luke puts his different version of the same set of teachings on a plain...
...What matters is what is said: love your enemies, forgive one another as God has forgiven you...
...The faithful trudged in, hunkered down, kept their coats on...
...Not even a fundamentalist would deny that there was no historical prodigal son--but Jesus says, "There was a man who had two sons...
...The rest really is distraction, because the more you hang around these words, the more you can see the consistency and understand that the different nuances also instruct, like midrash...
...At each of the four quadrants of pews, they sent the cross above the crowd, individual congregants keeping it aloft and moving it along with their arms...
...The service began with a processional measured by a pulse of kettle drums...
...The point here is not history...
...This day was different...
...I have a 1960 recording of the Passion from the Abbey of Saint Pierre de Solesmes in which an elder of the community sings the part of Jesus...
...They are identifiable military targets and the actual instruments of Milosevic's power...
...My problem is not with the idea that our ancestors may have had a different approach to these things than we do, nor do I deny that they may have thought Jonah was really swallowed by a huge fish...
...There is nonetheless some reason to think that Milosevic will back off...
...information operation, U.S...
...The United States has threatened to act without renewed UN approval in Iraq...
...There is exactly the same stalemate that prevented construct';ve and collective European action when the old Yugoslavia came apart...
...The point is not to add new history to old history, or to claim that the Exodus account is deficient as history...
...and there are truths that can be expressed metaphorically, but they are more than metaphors...
...I was on edge...
...As the ministers carried the cross to our quadrant, I noticed an old woman in a faded blue-cloth coat two pews ahead and to my left...
...We are talking about something more than history here...
...This has to do, finally, with recovering a way of understanding that we have lost...
...When the cross approached, buoyant and alive--even dangerous--she raised her veined hands high, cupping them slightly, sig.Commonweal 8 March27, 1998...
...But was the Bible ever intended primarily as "history" or "literal truth," and can this be separated from "metaphorical truth...
...The ministers were bringing the cross down so they could pass it over the congregation--literally...
...And because of the limitations of our own mindset, we can run the danger of saying that if it isn't "fact" or historical, it must be "merely" metaphorical...
...D _9 1998, Los Angeles Times Syndicate n a good op-ed page piece in the New York Times (February 26), Joyce Carol | Oates makes a statement with which I have to disagree, at least in part: "The truth of one era becomes, as if by an artist's sleight of hand, the mythology of subsequent eras...
...What we have to see is that the prodigal son and his merciful father are, in a way we must learn to understand or miss the point of Christianity, more real than (say) Warren Harding or the Teapot Dome scandal...
...He seems to have mistakenly assumed that the United States, and therefore Europe, would ignore renewed repression in Kosovo...
...What we have to understand is that something as real as the Resurrection--which I believe truly happened--cannot be confined by history, which is only our account of things...
...The legal objection to interference in other countries' internal affairs has not inhibited the United States in the past, in Central America and Southeast Asia...
...What can be done about people like Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein...
...After the singing of the Passion, the ministers moved back into the center of the church where there hung a tall, simple plank cross...
...This approach to what we read and what we hear has always been part of biblical understanding...
...Matthew has Jesus speak from a mountain (to be like Moses...
...The compilers of the Hebrew Bible also had no problem with contradiction: the two creation accounts in Genesis differ, to take only one example...
...His power has from the start rested on the nihilistic exploitation of that nationalism...
...It proved unattainable, and he abandoned the Krajina Serb minority in Croatia, and the so-called Republika Srpska in Bosnia...
...But the Balkans are another place, and Kosovo's fate is widely, and not unreasonably, thought by Americans to be distant from any American national interest...
...were noted early on...
...He still had a mild tremolo, and I heard the words of Jesus vibrating as if they were sung for the first time with an exhausted emotion...
...In one commentary on the Exodus, the angels who rejoice when the troops of Pharoah are drowned are told to be silent by God: "How dare you rejoice when my creatures, the Egyptians, are dying...
...Whom do you seek...
...For exampie, when the church compiled the New Testament it knowingly included some contradictory accounts...
...He takes calculated risks, and the downside of what he has done this time is considerable...
...She had turned around to look back with the rest of us as the cross bearers approached our section...
...I was surprised that the brooding, city-wide atmosphere had sifted into the vast space of the Basilica of Saint Mary in Minneapolis...
...This could be the most important meaning of tradition, which means "what is handed on...
...As a "lesson," bombing has always proven illuso~ policy...
...No one dared talk about armed intervention, although the United States once warned of military // action should the Kosovo Albanians be attacked...
...The genealogies of Christ offered by Matthew and Luke, for example, are different...
Vol. 125 • March 1998 • No. 6
