How to read Scripture
Garvey, John
HOW TO READ SCRIPTURE Tradition vs. zeitgeist he Vatican has suspended its dialogue with the Anglican Church, following the decision of its American branch to consecrate as a bishop a man who left...
...There is little attempt to see what may be wise in a tradition we are tempted to abandon...
...It is assumed to be the correct, en-lightened view...
...1830 Nurturing body, mind & spirit Graduate Programs/SICS 4000 Dauphin Street Mobile, AL 36608-1791 Phone: (251) 380-3094 Fax: (251) 460-2190 www.shc.edu/sics E-mail: grad@shc.edu CHARLOT Commonweal 9 January 16, 2004 pret Scripture accordingly...
...In point of fact, though, we no longer believe that monks who have nocturnal emissions are victims of demonic succubae, nor are they morally culpable...
...Some defenders of the traditional understanding of marriage as limited to male and female partners use the Bible to make their case, and it is a strong one...
...New from Brookings Institution Press and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life Lifting Up the Poor A Dialogue on Religion, Poverty & Welfare Reform Mary Jo Bane and Lawrence M. Mead paper, 0-8157-0791-6, $16.95 It's often said that the two things one should not discuss in polite company are religion and politics...
...The hooks in this series break that mold...
...We know, as our forefathers did not, that this is simple physiology...
...On the other hand, a lot of us now assume that because we know a bit more than our ancestors did about a few things, they knew nothing...
...They bring their exceptional expertise and deep religious commitments together to discuss the moral issues most Americans consider when they talk about poverty...
...and to regard an "unplanned" or "unwanted" child as a mistake is a terrible thing...
...your eye shall have no pity...
...yet this was a common belief once...
...Does Leviticus 18:22—"You shall not lie with a male as with a woman...
...The most ardent defenders of John Paul II's conservative but appreciative approach to the body have moved far beyond the idea—once quite common, even among some authoritative church fathers that to take pleasure in sex is wrong, and that marriage is, to use Jacques Maritain's ironic phrase, a form of "holy imperfection...
...A selection from the Pew Forum Dialogues on Religion and Public Life E.J...
...To make no distinction between a committed homosexual couple and someone who is promiscuous is morally obtuse...
...John J. Dilulio Jr...
...On the conservative side it has blossomed at times into a kind of witch hunt, which could threaten even the celibate homosexuals who provide the church with so much dedicated service...
...Yet the attitude of many liberals toward conservative Christians who even try to raise such questions is often dismissive, and it should not be...
...For Catholics, and perhaps even more for Orthodox, tradition has an authority that it does not for most Protestants...
...Slavery was once considered not only a normal part of life...
...Dionne Jr., Jean Bethke Elshtain, Kayla M. Drogosz, series eds...
...Gore Vidal has said that there are no homosexuals, only homosexual acts,and it is a lovely irony that this committed loather of the Judaeo-Christian tradition finds himself in bed (as it were) with the most conservative ancient Catholic moral theologians...
...We do not now follow the advice on mildew or skin diseases that take up a great part of the Torah...
...So it really is important to see tradition in a more nuanced way...
...The Russian Orthodox Church had already ended the dialogue for the same reason...
...and Ming Hsu Chen, eds...
...There is, in fact, something dangerous in the attempt to control all aspects of our life...
...Before we can get a sense about the right claims being made by the traditionalist and modernist sides here, it is important to see what is wrong with both of them...
...E.J...
...To think that the common opinion of people whose perspective is blinkered by the zeitgeist of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is wiser than the agreed wisdom of the previous two thousand years is, maybe, a little arrogant...
...THE PEW ^ FORUM ^ ON RELIGION & PUBLIC LIFE www.pewforum.org/dialogues 3 Brookings Institution Press Phone 800-275-1447 or 202-797-6258 Fax: 202-797-2960 (Order Department) Available at your local bookstore or order online at www.brookings.edu Commonweal I 0 January 16, 2004...
...In most approaches to homosexual activity, the emphasis—as elsewhere in moral theology manuals—was on the act itself, and never on a larger moral or psychological con-text...
...Al-though I am not at all persuaded by the ban on contraception urged by Humanae vitae, it voiced some sound worries...
...COMING IN FEBRUARY Is the Market Moral...
...At the same time, tradition is an important voice -or better, a harmony of voices, a consensus—that should make us critical of merely contemporary understandings...
...As this issue continues to divide Christians, it will be essential for parties on both sides to listen deeply and respectfully to one another, understanding the limitations, as well as the strengths, of their own perspectives as they do so...
...The separation of sex from reproduction has not been an unmixed blessing for our culture, to say the very least...
...One of the very few blessings of this sad debate is that it forces a serious look at what we mean by tradition, and at how binding a force tradition is, or should be...
...In Lifting Up the Poor, two of America's leading experts on welfare reform join in an informative, pointed, civil, and searching dialogue on poverty and welfare...
...And then there is Deuteronomy 25: 11-12: "When men fight with one an-other, and the wife of one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of him who is beating him, and puts out her hand and seizes him by the private parts, then you shall cut off her hand...
...Still, for many contemporary Christians, when traditional under-standing meets the zeitgeist, the zeitgeist wins...
...but no homosexual per-son I know has experienced it that way...
...The issue of how we regard homosexuality and the ordination of actively homosexual clergy is going to remain a divisive and difficult one for years to come...
...slaves were called, in the Bible, their masters' income...
...The Torah also tells us to be good to the poor, the widow, and the orphan...
...The fact is that even the most traditionalist believers among us have changed our collective understanding, and interThe Jesuit College of the South Session II: June 6 -12 Southern Spirituality Joseph's Brothers Mary in Christian Tradition Solidarity, Justice & Sin Prayer and Discernment II Teresa of Avila Graduate • Undergraduate • Audit Directed Retreats May 2l - May 30 JOHN GARVEY T ,Session I: May 30 -June 5 o, Prayer and Discernment I Poetry for Healing and Hope Therese of Lisieux Holiness of Conscience Psalms Thomas Aquinas ummer Institute of Christian Spirituality SPRING HILL...
...On the liberal side, anyone who questions the wisdom of ordaining an openly gay bishop is regarded as a troglodyte...
...What's God Got to Do with the American Experiment...
...Dionne Jr., eds...
...A Dialogue on Religion, Economics, and Justice Rebecca M. Blank and William McGurn OTHER TITLES: Sacred Places, Civic Purposes Should Government Help Faith-Based Charity...
...Dionne Jr...
...These are especially difficult areas be-cause sex is always fraught, given its connection with reproduction and the family...
...Taking the same question into the New Testament, when in Romans 1 Paul speaks of homosexuality, his assumption is that it is a choice, a perverse abandonment of something natural in favor of some new sexual flavor of the month...
...While many of our ancestors had ideas about sexuality that we now appropriately reject, the common approach to sex in contemporary culture is unlikely to inspire the great reverence for the body, and the joy of deep and faithful commitment, that a truly healthy attitude to-ward sex would exhibit...
...and E.J...
...If it were that, I would agree that it is an evil, an objective disorder...
...I agree that this is a necessary sacramental symbol...
...it is an abomination"—fall into the category of the sort of thing we have come to ignore, or the sort of thing we cannot...
...To lean too much on a scriptural defense, however, or upon a continuous church tradition, could lead us to ignore or to downplay those situations in which we have in fact decided, not only as individuals but over time as a community, to ignore passages of Scripture or areas of tradition that we do not accept the way our ancestors did...
...Its strength is that it is, as Chesterton said, "the democracy of the dead...
...The con-tempt many liberals feel for those who oppose abortion is a case in point...
...zeitgeist he Vatican has suspended its dialogue with the Anglican Church, following the decision of its American branch to consecrate as a bishop a man who left his wife to enter a relationship with another man...
Vol. 131 • January 2004 • No. 1
