well the second volume of Pope
Benedict's study of the Lord Jesus just
appeared he wrote one about three years
ago and now this is volume 2 the first
one focused on the the teaching and life
of Jesus this one is more on the passion
death and resurrection of the Lord but
both books are prefaced by very
penetrating introductions they're talked
about the Pope's method of reading the
Bible and the Pope's impatience with a
one-sided use of the historical critical
method and the need to move beyond it
even while including it
okay what's the historical critical
method well the roots go way back into
the 17th and 18th century people like
Spinoza the philosopher by Mao rose and
Strauss two famous German scholars it
was picked up later in the 19th and
early 20th centuries by Julius
Wellhausen
and by Albert Schweitzer and by gerhard
von rönn many other Protestant German
scholars in 1943 Pope Pius the 12
published divino of flan de espíritu
which was a papal encyclical on the
reading of the Bible where he
recommended that Catholics could use in
a mitigative way the historical critical
method because of that a whole
generation of Catholic critics emerged
so people like Joseph Fitz Meyer and
Raymond E Brown and Roland Murphy and
many others who then used this method
within the Catholic framework okay what
is it what is the story with critical
method at the risk of producing a
complex and multivalent approach to much
I would say this these toriel critical
method is trying to uncover the
intention of the human authors the
biblical books within their historical
framework as they address their
particular audiences so looking at the
book of the prophet Isaiah the
historical critic wants to know what the
author of that book meant what was in
his mind as he addressed the audience at
his time and their concerns or let's say
you look at the
young Gospel of Matthew you want to know
what was in Matthews mind as he
addressed the particularly instead he
was addressing
that's why historical critics are very
interested in history the history of
that time and place they're very
interested in literary forms so what was
the literary method used by the author
to communicate they're very interested
in cultural anthropology and sociology
what was it like at that time what were
the concerns of people at a given period
so all of that contributes to the
historical critical method now Pope
Benedict has been very clear throughout
his career that there's something
permanently valuable about this method
that it has yielded very great fruits in
our understanding of the scripture I
would say maybe the primary value of it
is this Christianity is not a
mythological system there are mythic
elements within the Bible but primarily
the Bible is not mythic its historical
it claims that God has spoken and acted
in very definite historical situations
God has addressed particular people at
particular times and so the historical
critical method that roots us very much
in history is a permanently valuable
contribution it also enables I think to
scrape away certain maybe odd an
excessive forms of interpretation that
have crept in over the centuries it gets
us back to the bracing truth of what the
biblical text meant at their time okay
all that's good all that's permanently
valuable and the Catholic Church at
least from Divino of flaunt a spirit to
on has affirmed the value of it but you
also props here for the past
Oh 30 years or so has been drawing
attention to the danger of a one-sided
use of the historical critical method
here's I think his major problem by
focusing so much on the horizontal
dimension so I mean the dimension of
this world of history sociology culture
etc it misses the vertical dimension
what I mean is by focusing on the human
author
his intentions it can miss the divine
author and his intentions because the
claim of the great tradition is the
Bible is not just a collection of books
written by human authors at particular
times it is also in some mysterious
sense authored by God now we don't have
a naive sense of this as though God
simply is dictating words to robotic
human agents no no God works precisely
through history and precisely through
the psychologies and so on of the
authors okay that's true nevertheless
God is in some very real sense the
author of the scripture which is why we
can see our tradition holds great
patterns and trajectories within the
Bible
that represent a unity of purpose in
other words a danger of the storm a
critical method is it can leave us with
a Bible that's just a con juries or a
collection of disparate text written at
various times and various authors for
various purposes but that do not Co here
is one the claim of the tradition is
they do Co here as one book because
they're under the guidance of a divine
author here's a second and related
problem with these Oracle critical
method by focusing so much on history on
the time in which these books were
written it can lock them in time so we
found out a lot about the historical
Isaiah the author of the book of the
prophet Isaiah we know whom he addressed
and why what were his particular
concerns way back when the danger is
well how about when I read it today how
about we proclaim it in church why would
I bother with this ancient distant text
a one-sided use of this method can
preclude the possibility of reading the
Bible for our time but it has a
transcendent meaning ultimately grounded
in God's purposes so what's the answer
the answer the Pope says is a
theological hermeneutic that has to go
along with the historical critical
approach
we don't su the historical-critical we
don't leave it behind
but we put it in a broader framework of
a theological interpretation that's very
attentive to divine authorship and that
sees the theological and spiritual
tradition of the church not as a
obscuring overlay but as a clarifying
interpretive lens and so we read the
Bible the way the Church Fathers read it
they go back to Isaiah they go back to
Jeremiah go back to the Gospel of
Matthew but they would read it through
the lens of a richly theological and
spiritual imagination
I think Pope Benedict's two books and
there's a third one coming are very good
examples of exactly this very dense and
integrated way of reading the sacred
scriptures