“Biblical Criticism: the Right Perspective”

In recent years, there has been a lot of argument and discussion about modern biblical criticism. In 1988 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith attacked historical criticism on a fundamental level.[1] The Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1993 issued its document “The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church” and remained, despite the Cardinal’s criticisms of the historical-critical method, rather middle-of-the-road; the commission has been seen by some conservatives as too permissive and too ready to accept the deliverances of the form critics. The critics have defended themselves with vigor against anyone who dares to challenge their supremacy; Fr. William Most and Msgr. George Kelly are two examples. Whatever else may be said, no one is happy about the situation. There is a good deal of confusion and name-calling, and not a lot of solid work. Unfortunately, I cannot change all that with one opinion piece. Instead, what I propose to do here is to offer, briefly, a way out of the endless circle of debate. This way out is of no use to scholars or exegetes, and it is for them more of a cautioning than anything else. This essay is intended for ordinary priests and laymen who are tired of the endless fighting and are sick of taking sides: “Are you a conservative?” “Well, are you a liberal?” We are reminded of St. Paul’s words about the church at Corinth (1 Corinthians 1:12): “…Each of you is saying, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Kephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’” Things have not gone quite that far, but if they are not stopped, they may very well. To my mind, they need not go any further.

My way out is very simple; it is so simple, in fact, that I have a hard time saying more than two words about it. It is a matter of perspective. These men—be they liberals, conservatives, feminists, or schismatics—are just literary critics. The point is easily missed. Let me say it again: the modern biblical critics are just literary critics. They are not physicists, and they are not saints. Biblical criticism is a subdivision of that dubious discipline called “literary criticism”.

In order to illustrate this point, I ask you to consider the following: If you have just read Hamlet and you come across the critic Harold Bloom’s recent book on it, how much weight will you give to what Bloom has to say? Will you consider what he says to be indisputable truth? Probably not. You may or may not agree with his theories, but you will not regard them as anything more than literary criticisms of a great play. Harold Bloom may well be the man most qualified to give the right interpretation of the play; he certainly has the linguistic, historical, cultural, textual, and literary knowledge for it. Nevertheless, I myself—and probably most readers—would have no problem disagreeing with him, despite the fact that we are not the expert he is. Indeed, Harold Bloom and I seem to agree on very nearly nothing.

This is an interesting fact, and we must ask why it should be so. The answer is easy enough: having all of the knowledge in the world does not mean a man will judge rightly. A great myth of our times is that having expertise is like belonging to a secret society which has the answers to all the questions; this explains why people often ask doctors questions that have nothing to do with medicine; they are experts, after all, so they must know. The fact of the matter is that these experts very often say things more crazy than the lady in the pew ever dreamed, and they may rightly suffer her wrath when they tell her that her Lord did not rise from the dead. Again, the heart of the matter is judgment. And judgment is a gift of God. With Mark Twain, we may say that God must have loved ordinary people because He sure made a lot of them. While it is doubtful that God distributed good judgment more liberally among ordinary people than He did among critics, there is no reason whatever to believe that He distributed it more liberally among biblical literary critics than He did among the rest of the world. Given that we don’t generally put much stock in what the ordinary critics have to say, we are forced to wonder why we have put so much stock in what biblical literary critics have to say. It cannot be because of their extensive knowledge of the books and of the period. Harold Bloom has the same, or better, knowledge of his particular books and his particular period. And yet we don’t have much problem disagreeing with him. We could go back over the list above, but the point, I take it, is clear. The only thing that separates biblical literary critics from ordinary literary critics is just that they are biblical, that they are studying the Bible. Now, of course, the Bible is the inerrant, inspired word of Almighty God, and its study is far more important than the study of Much Ado about Nothing. But that fact alone shouldn’t give us more confidence in these biblical literary critics; if anything it should give us less. We should trust them less precisely because the subject is so much more important. If we are led astray by Harold Bloom about Hamlet, we have lost something. If we are led astray by John Dominic Crossan about Jesus, we may well lose everything.

And that is the right perspective.

There are at least three provisos that must be made. First, I am not condemning scholarship. Scholars are necessary, though they are the means to an end, not the end itself, as they so often think. It is important that scholarly work be done on these very topics, and it is important that some of those scholars have a degree of freedom to speak their mind without fear of the Church. (It is more important, however, that seminarians should be well trained, and if we have to choose, then we should prefer faithful priests to free professors.) The scholars themselves, however, should remember that they are parts of the Body of Christ; they are not its head; they cannot dictate theology; and they must recognize their subordinate position. No saint was ever a saint just because he was a great scholar; some saints have been great scholars, but the first comes before the second and is independent of it.

Second, a distinction must be made between literary criticism and textual criticism, papyrology, and philology. Physics is the king of the so-called “hard” sciences. After it in rigor, results, and detail, is chemistry. Biology follows them both. Astronomy is in there somewhere. Near the bottom of the list we find textual criticism, papyrology, and philology. These three make the list. What we do not, nor ever will, find on that list is literary criticism. Textual criticism is a science. So are papyrology and other similar disciplines. Literary criticism is not. It may seem difficult to distinguish among them. It only seems so. The difference almost invariably lies in this: papyrology does not tell you what a text means, it only tells you what the text is. Papyrology, textual criticism, and philology provide the basis for forming our beliefs about what the text means, for before we can know what something means we have to know what it is. These disciplines, and their sister disciplines, from paleography to the chemical analysis of inks and parchments, must be taken seriously and fostered. Here, the Church must intervene only for very real and very serious reasons. (For example, it would have been wrong if the Church had suppressed the discovery that The Donation of Constantine was a fraud.)

Third, the views and theories of biblical literary critics must be given their due weight. On most questions, that weight will not be very much, or, rather, it will be as much weight as we give to any other literary critic. Nevertheless, those competent authorities must see to it that the literary critical endeavor continues. The faithful do require exegesis, and difficult problems do arise that must be handled. Largely, the academic questions should remain in the academy, and local ordinaries should have the authority to see that they do so. It is not unwise to remember the way of the Church Fathers. If we read the Catena Aurea, we will see that a good many fathers disagreed with one another about a good many things. It is not that they did not take matters seriously; they had their share of arguments in their own day, say, for example, between the Antiochene and Alexandrian schools of exegesis. What they did not do was imagine that their own peculiar interpretation carried some special “scholarly” status, which is apparently akin to the revelation itself, if not outright superior to it. (I should almost pray that one of these modern scholars goes to sleep one night and is given the grace to dream Ezekiel’s dream for himself; then perhaps he would be more cautious in tearing it apart.) If we may further remark—the Church Fathers were more honest about each other and themselves than we are: if St. Jerome thought a man was a fool, he would simply say so and be done with it; we are too sophisticated to say what we believe and too fool to understand that we have “sophisticated” our way into grave sin; St. Jerome bewailed his own manifold sins and wickedness because he knew them well; we call ourselves sinners, not because we believe we are wicked, but because we would have men believe we are saints; in short, we are Pharisees, and the Church Fathers were saints. Honesty, not academic freedom, is paramount, for freedom is worthless without truth.

On a final note, there is a certain paradox regarding the scholarly study of scripture. The paradox is this: the scholars who study the scriptures can only use the tools that other scholars use to study other works of literature; but the scriptures are far more than any other work of literature ever could be. The scriptures, by their nature, do not only demand that they should be reverenced, they also demand that they be interpreted. We should trust biblical literary critics less than we trust ordinary literary critics because the subject matter is so much more important; but just because the scriptures are so much more important, they cry out for interpretation in a way that no other work does. And these two antipathies are what should run throughout any critical work on the scriptures. As Augustus Caesar once said, “Festina Lente.” Make haste slowly. So too here. If a biblical literary critic were to read this opinion, I should have only one thing to say directly to him: Interpret cautiously with great zeal. Or, as the Lord of Sabaoth said to His servant Moses, “Put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” Interpret cautiously with great zeal.

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[1] January 27, 1988, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, in the Erasmus lecture sponsored by the Rockford Institute Center on Religion & Society, “Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: On the Question of the Foundations and Approaches of Exegesis Today”