IN HIS PREFACE to his book The Real Jesus, Luke Timothy Johnson says:
When I was a PhD student in New Testament studies at Yale University in 1972, I wrote a paper for Professor Wayne Meeks on The Quest For The Historical Jesus. Meeks thought it mediocre and commented on the cover sheet that I seemed strangely detached from the issue, as though it were not my problem. As a Roman Catholic and (at that time) as a monk of the Benedictine tradition, I agreed. I did not think the historical Jesus was a problem for me or for my tradition. I thought then that this was a peculiarly Protestant problem. Well, Professor Meeks, here is the second draft.
When I read that, I understood just what he meant and it has everything to do with the place that Scripture holds in the Roman Catholic tradition and, I would assert, to an extent, the Orthodox tradition.
While Scripture is held to be authoritative as a record of revelation, it isn't possibly understood in a literal or fundamentalist manner, it is respected, it is used to challenge, to upset, to shatter, to inspire and a means of salvation but it isn't the whole record of revealed truth and it isn't perfect. And revelation didn't stop when the last word of the last Book in the canon was put on paper. Creation continues, change continues. The experience of those who wrote the Mosaic Holiness Code (for the priestly class) or the Pauline letters of the world is not our experience today. While Paul certainly believed the end of time was coming on fast and he was eager for as many People as possible to be OK for the Kingdom, which is why I'm convinced some of his most troublesome passages were written, he didn't think fixing those ephemeral and tangential problems were what his commission was about, we know that Creation went on two thousand years past then. What he said is something I value but not more than the experience of good and evil in the world I see now.
That's something that you have to be honest about, every single person who reads Scripture now, does so out of the unofficial hermenutic of their own experience and their chosen loyalties, it's the same way that Paul read the Jewish Scriptures which he cited and used and modified according to his own experience of grace and about which he said some pretty shocking things, especially for a Pharisee such as he confessed himself to still be. His view of The Law was certainly not the mainstream view of it among those who took it seriously. His experience of the Risen Christ and what he learned from the Apostles who knew Jesus and witnessed his ministry, perhaps even from his family members, certainly led him to come to some rather unorthodox terms with the tradition he still professed to be a part of even as he held himself to be outside of it. And if you can make those two parts of Paul's textual legacy cohere, be my guest.
There are many parts of Scripture (and, as a Catholic, tradition and the Magisterium) which are problematic, many parts which are contradictory, many parts that no one could possibly make logically cohere with other parts of it and it is in no way a part of the further revelation of truth as Creation continues and human experience of that changes.
While I think the Protestant reliance on "Scripture alone" is a very sometimes thing (as the Catholic Church fails to live up to its confessed faith, too) the general trend in its relation to Scripture would make such historical-critical practices of modernism far more shattering for Protestantism than for Catholicism. Maybe that's why Biblical Fundamentalism is a peculiarly Protestant and not a Catholic thing, indeed, traditional Fundamentalism was as motivated by its hostility to Catholics as it was the modern world.
One example of that Protestant ability to ignore Scripture when they want to is that there is not all that much taking seriously the words of Jesus on the prohibition on remarriage after divorce in most Protestant denominations and there could be nothing plainer in scripture. And compared to that the order to sell everything we've got and give the money away to the poor and pick up our cross is taken even less seriously.
That said, there is nothing that has influenced me more than the writings on Scripture by some great Protestant scholars and theologians. I don't think there is a Catholic or Orthodox writer who has had the impact on me that Walter Brueggemann has, or several others who could be named. Before the Second Vatican Council most Catholics would have felt themselves to be morally or, more through a sense of fidelity to "our side" to not even read them. Though that's not really as true as I'd have believed it at the time. When I read that Pope Pius XII praised the theology of Karl Barth as being on the same level as Aquinas's I was shocked.
This is a long introduction to a passage from an essay that Luke Timothy Johnson wrote about why he believed that LGBT relationships are compatible, not with the literal word of the Scriptures but in the extension of those and the foundational morality behind the moral codes through our human experience as Creation continues. I think it's pretty close to what I think about that issue.
I think it important to state clearly that we do, in fact, reject the straightforward commands of Scripture, and appeal instead to another authority when we declare that same-sex unions can be holy and good. And what exactly is that authority? We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience and the experience thousands of others have witnessed to, which tells us that to claim our own sexual orientation is in fact to accept the way in which God has created us. By so doing, we explicitly reject as well the premises of the scriptural statements condemning homosexuality-namely, that it is a vice freely chosen, a symptom of human corruption, and disobedience to God’s created order.
Implicit in an appeal to experience is also an appeal to the living God whose creative work never ceases, who continues to shape humans in his image every day, in ways that can surprise and even shock us. Equally important, such an appeal goes to the deepest truth revealed by Scripture itself-namely, that God does create the world anew at every moment, does call into being that which is not, and does raise the dead to new and greater forms of life.
Our situation vis-à-vis the authority of Scripture is not unlike that of abolitionists in nineteenth-century America. During the 1850s, arguments raged over the morality of slave-holding, and the exegesis of Scripture played a key role in those debates. The exegetical battles were one-sided: all abolitionists could point to was Galatians 3:28 and the Letter of Philemon, while slave owners had the rest of the Old and New Testaments, which gave every indication that slaveholding was a legitimate, indeed God-ordained social arrangement, one to which neither Moses nor Jesus nor Paul raised a fundamental objection. So how is it that now, in the early twenty-first century, the authority of the scriptural texts on slavery and the arguments made on their basis appear to all of us, without exception, as completely beside the point and deeply wrong?
The answer is that over time the human experience of slavery and its horror came home to the popular conscience-through personal testimony and direct personal contact, through fiction like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and, of course, through a great Civil War in which ghastly numbers of people gave their lives so that slaves could be seen not as property but as persons. As persons, they could be treated by the same law of love that governed relations among all Christians, and could therefore eventually also realize full civil rights within society. And once that experience of their full humanity and the evil of their bondage reached a stage of critical consciousness, this nation could neither turn back to the practice of slavery nor ever read the Bible in the same way again.
Many of us who stand for the full recognition of gay and lesbian persons within the Christian communion find ourselves in a position similar to that of the early abolitionists-and of the early advocates for women’s full and equal roles in church and society. We are fully aware of the weight of scriptural evidence pointing away from our position, yet place our trust in the power of the living God to reveal as powerfully through personal experience and testimony as through written texts. To justify this trust, we invoke the basic Pauline principle that the Spirit gives life but the letter kills (2 Corinthians 3:6). And if the letter of Scripture cannot find room for the activity of the living God in the transformation of human lives, then trust and obedience must be paid to the living God rather than to the words of Scripture.
For me this is no theoretical or academic position, but rather a passionate conviction. It is one many of us have come to through personal struggle, and for some, real suffering. In my case, I trusted that God was at work in the life of one of my four daughters, who struggled against bigotry to claim her sexual identity as a lesbian. I trusted God was at work in the life she shares with her partner-a long-lasting and fruitful marriage dedicated to the care of others, and one that has borne fruit in a wonderful little girl who is among my and my wife’s dear grandchildren. I also trusted the many stories of students and friends whose life witnessed to a deep faith in God but whose bodies moved sexually in ways different from the way my own did. And finally I began to appreciate the ways in which my own former attitudes and language had helped to create a world where family, friends, and students were treated cruelly.
I'm thinking that sometime I might go through some of Luke Timothy Johnson's book mentioned above because I think he's quite a fair though thorough critic of someone who has been very influential on me, John Dominic Crossan and his colleagues in the Jesus Seminar. I've said that Crossan's book The Historical Jesus and what he wrote about Paul was very important with my adult conversion from lazy, superficial agnosticism to chosen Christianity. I agree with Johnson that Crossan, among those who are associated with him, is a couple of cuts above most of them and I still find some of what he said inspiring though I reluctantly have come to agree with Johnson's critique of some of his more basic stands on things like the dating of books in and outside of the Scriptural Canon. His presentation of the general milieu of first century life as it was known to those who wrote the Scriptures informs my imagination of that background. I will credit Johnson for pointing out something I admit I missed while reading Crossan, JDC was honest and explicit about having a theological agenda in his reconstruction of an "historical Jesus" and his handling of the texts. The temptation of his critics is to point that out while not admitting that unless you are constantly on guard you cannot avoid doing exactly the same thing, whether it's out of belief or a choice of sides or of a rejection of it. Mocking atheists do the same thing and they never, in my experience, admit that they do what they do, too.
BY THE WAY:
I should have pointed out this excellent post by RMJ on Creation, I was thinking of posting a link to it yesterday entitled
I Need A Little Easter Right This Very Minute
But I took an allergy pill and it made me too goofy to post anything.
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