The Bible Gap
by Benedict M. Ashley, O.P.
(Thus the abyss today opening between the Bible and theology, must
be overcome by a type of exegesis that does not stop with
historical and literary criticism but interprets the biblical text
precisely as the Word of God redeeming our theological systems,
not as re-written to conform to them. We must be instructed by God
not instruct him.")
Vatican II urged theologians to root their theological systems
more firmly in the Bible. This effort would favor ecumenical
dialogue with <sola Scriptura> Protestants and make for a sounder,
richer understanding of the Faith. "Sacred theology rests on the
written word of God, together with sacred tradition, as its
primary and perpetual foundation" (<Del Verbum>, afterwards DV, n.
24). This challenge was received enthusiastically by most
theologians. Today, thirty years after the Council, it has not yet
been met.
This failure is particularly obvious in my own field of moral
theology. The mainstream opinion seems to be that there is no such
thing as a specifically Christian ethics. The Bible, it is said,
can furnish moral theology with only the most general of moral
norms-the Love Commandment or the call to liberation from every
form of oppression. But what is "love"? What is "oppression"?
Somewhat less obviously, but even more dangerously, a similar gap
is opening between the Bible and systematic theology. The dominant
theological systems today rest on principles largely independent
of biblical revelation. Rahner makes his transcendental deductions
from <a priori> intuitions of the thinking, willing subject.
Lonergan proceeds from cognitive theory. Schillebeeckx from
religious experience. Gutierrez from the consciousness of the
oppressed poor and Rosemary Radford Ruether from that of oppressed
women. These theologians may select biblical themes that seem to
support these extra-biblical agenda, but they hardly do more than
"proof-text." Current human projects, not God's Word, furnish the
principles of such theologies. Theology can, of course profit much
from sound philosophy, but the truth of philosophy must be tested
by theological truth before it can become theology's profitable
servant.
Recently the Pontifical Biblical Commission has instructed us on
the strengths and weaknesses of various methods of modern biblical
exegesis. Yet when it was consulted by the Holy See on what the
Bible might have to say about the ordination of women to the
Christian priesthood its own performance was ambiguous. It lamely
concluded:
It does not seem that the New Testament by itself alone will
permit us to settle in a clear way and once and for all the
problem of the possible accession of women to the presbyterate.
However, some think that in the scripture there are sufficient
indications to exclude this possibility, considering that the
sacraments of eucharist and reconciliation have a special link
with the person of Christ and therefore with the male hierarchy,
as borne out by the New Testament. Others, on the contrary, wonder
if the church hierarchy, entrusted with the sacramental economy,
would be able to entrust the ministries of eucharist and
reconciliation to women in light of circumstances, without going
against Christ's original intentions.
That the Bible actually contributes more to solving this question
than the Biblical Commission was able to uncover is well argued
recently by Francis Martin, <The Feminist Question> (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 1994). Other biblical data is cited in my own
article, "Gender and the Priesthood of Christ" (<The Thomist>, 57,
343-379). Thus John Paul II, with so little help from his Biblical
Commission, was forced to appeal to Tradition rather than to
Scripture when he firmly declared "the church has no authority
whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this
judgment is to be definitively held by all the faithful"
("Apostolic Letter on Ordination and Women," 1994).
Vatican II emphasized the intimate relation of Scripture and
Tradition as "one sacred deposit of the Word of God" (DV, nos. 9-
10). Has this unify been severed, so that the Magisterium, is
forced to base its decisions on Tradition alone? Does this justify
theologians in seeking some more credible basis than Scripture or
Tradition on which to construct their systems? From the view point
of faith, the Bible is an absolutely unique book because it is the
Word of God.
Therefore, since everything asserted by the inspired authors or
sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it
follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as
teaching, firmly, faithfully, and without error that truth <which
God wanted to put into the sacred writings for the sake of our
salvation> (DV no. 11).
The phrase I have italicized saves us from any temptation to slip
back into fundamentalism, but it does not nullify what precedes.
Thus the Bible has many fallible human authors, but only one
inerrant principal author, the Holy Spirit. Hence, by the witness
to Sacred Tradition given by the Church under the Holy Spirit's
guidance, the Bible forms a canonical unity. Its <definitive>
interpretation, therefore, rests primarily on two grounds: (1) its
canonical consistency ("Scripture is its own interpreter" as
Protestants say); (2) its interpretation by the Church through its
Magisterium, i.e. by living Sacred Tradition.
Thus for faith, both the work of biblical and of systematic
theological scholarship are secondary and subject to ultimate
judgment by the Magisterium as to the truth of their results. What
then does this secondary role of biblical scholarship as practiced
today amount to? It certainly is of great service to the Church,
but this service is chiefly <apologetic>, and <negatively> so. The
present historical-critical method was developed by Protestant and
Catholic scholars to answer nineteenth-century skeptics who denied
the credibility of the Bible. For example, by this method
believing scholars can reply to skeptics that the Genesis creation
narratives read in historical context do not contradict Darwin,
nor did St. Paul create Christianity. It is too much to expect of
the historical-critical method to do much more.
More recently, there has been a shift of interest in exegesis from
the historical-critical method, which for lack of new data seems
largely to have done its work, to a literary-critical method. This
approach abstracts from the diachronic methods of historical
criticism and takes the canonical text synchronically as it is.
Yet this newer method (at least as usually practiced) is also
hardly more than a negative apologetic. It abstracts from whether
what the text asserts is true or false, and asks only whether it
has a coherent meaning. Thus it is able to answer those non-
believers who say the Bible is a mass of contradictions or
meaningless God-talk or that today it is irrelevant. Literary
criticism is able to show that the Bible is as meaningful in our
times as are other great literary classics, but it cannot read the
Bible as in fact the Word of God. Hence, we ought not look to
either the historical-critical or the literary-critical method to
contribute directly to faith or to expect them to secure a
foundation for theology.
This does not mean, of course, that a negative apologetics for the
Bible is without real value. Apologetics is one of the difficult
but necessary secondary tasks of Catholic theology. But since
apologetics is addressed to those without faith, it cannot be the
basis of theology's essential work, which is "Faith seeking
understanding." Yet apologetics does also have a certain positive
role in arguing for the credibility of biblical inspiration. While
it cannot demonstrate the Bible to be the Word of God, since that
fact is accessible only to faith, it can and should point out the
extrinsic <signs> that reasonably oblige us to believe the Bible
to be divinely inspired.
Catholics do not accept the notion of the Protestant Reformers
that the Bible is <self-evidently> God's Word.
Surely modern biblical scholarship has shown how incredible that
notion is! Hence the mainline Protestant churches no longer
unequivocally accept biblical inspiration, while Evangelical and
Fundamentalist Protestants do so because of a Reformation
tradition that ultimately has no other grounds than the Sacred
Tradition of the Catholic Church!
That Sacred Tradition is guaranteed by the witness of the living
Church, which as Vatican I solemnly defined, remains a sign, a
"moral miracle" accessible to all to whom that Catholic Church is
able to preach. Thus it is the Church as a living miraculous sign
that obliges us to believe the Word of God on God's own word, just
as the earthly Jesus, still present in his Church, once obliged
his hearers to believe him on his own word made credible by his
miraculous life and deeds.
While theology must be based on faith, modern biblical
scholarship, for all its apologetic success, can only be based on
reason in the form of historical arguments or literary
hermeneutics. Even some of our best exegetes find themselves
writing books in which their methodology forces them to frankly
admit that certain Church doctrines cannot be established from the
Bible as they read it. For example John Meier finds the "brothers"
of Jesus more probably to be blood brothers inspite of the Sacred
Tradition of the perpetual virginity of Mary. Raymond Brown finds
it not possible to support the Sacred Tradition of the apostolic
succession by evidence of the universality of episcopal polity in
the New Testament church. And, as we have seen, the Biblical
Commission finds no clear warrant for the Tradition's restriction
of priestly ordination to men. As faithful Catholics these
exegetes can only add footnotes to say that of course they do not
mean to contradict the Church's teaching.
In my opinion, as one who is not a biblical scholar but is
fascinated by their work, the results they have come up with are
often, even on their own terms, both tenuous and tendentious. For
that reason alone they can hardly serve as a secure basis of
theology-but that is not here my point. What is really wrong in
our present situation is that exegetes have confined themselves to
secondary, although important, apologetics tasks. Instead one
would think they should be busy with their main job of reading the
Bible as the Fathers of the Church read it, on the basis of faith
in its inspiration. Hence biblical research has ceased to be
theology proper and become simply historical and literary
scholarship.
On the other hand, theologians err if they conclude that since
biblical exegetes contribute little to establishing a unified and
consistent basis for theology, this frees theologians to construct
their own systems on some other basis than what God says in the
Bible. They have moved very far from the patristic and medieval
theologians who like St. Thomas Aquinas, called theology <Sacra
Doctrina> and chiefly meant by this <doctrina> simply the Bible.
Let me give two examples of what I am talking about. <She Who Is>
(1993 ), the well-reviewed work of the feminist theologian,
Elizabeth Johnson, reworks the major dogmas of Catholicism with
many references to current biblical scholarship. Johnson then
concludes that to avoid the sin of sexism it is necessary to
revise the Church's teaching that the order of procession of the
Divine Persons in the Holy Trinity is first, second and third.
Such an ordering at least suggests subordination, and
subordination is necessarily oppressive and evil.
How did Johnson arrive at this odd view, contradictory to the
solemn definitions of the Magisterium and the practice of the
liturgy, and certainly alien to the New Testament? Following the
feminist exegete Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Johnson begins with
the assumption that the political agenda of radical feminism is
unquestionably correct. Hence if she is to remain a Catholic
(which, thank God, she wants to do!) she must, with the aid of a
"hermeneutic of suspicion," recast the Scriptures to support
women's liberation as radical feminism defines it.
Johnson's program, which she grounds only by occasional appeals to
"women's experience," turns out on closer examination to be a kind
of Christian anarchism. Johnson seems to believe that the
essential Gospel message is the abolition of all "hierarchy" so
that someday we can live in an egalitarian community where all
decisions are made by consensus only. In such a community no one
need obey anybody else, since obedience implies subordination and
subordination is always oppressive. She makes no attempt to prove
that God created a non-hierarchical cosmos or promised us the
oxymoron of an Anarchic Kingdom of God. Yet her unargued
assumption that such an egalitarian community is the Gospel
message is the basic hermeneutic principle on which her whole
reconstruction of Catholic theology depends.
What enables Elizabeth Johnson to proceed in this arbitrary
fashion is that she has first proposed an apophatic view of God as
the "Incomprehensible Mystery" on which as on a blank screen it
becomes possible for her to project her own program. The Bible's
claim that God, Mystery that He is, has definitively revealed that
Mystery to us in Jesus Christ, the Bible, and the Church is set
aside. For "God" with its patriarchal symbolism, she substitutes
the feminine sounding "Sophie," ignoring the fact that in the
Bible "Sophie" is chiefly used not to name the Creator but the Law
by which the Creator has established an hierarchical order in
creation and human society. "She is the book of the precepts of
God, the law that endures forever; all who cling to her will live,
but those will die who forsake her" (Bar 4:1). Thus the
androcentric Bible names not God but itself, God's self-
revelation, "Sophie."
A second example of the Bible gap is the conception of moral
theology which our most renowned American moral theologian,
Richard A. McCormick, proposes. It has even led him to dissent on
certain issues from the teaching of the Magisterium and to
denounce John Paul II's <Veritatis splendor> for misrepresenting
the current mainstream of moral theology. In the voluminous and
highly influential writings of McCormick, along with his sometime
collaborator Charles E. Curran, we find a specious argument to the
effect that moral theology needs to free itself from a too close
reliance on specific moral norms found in the Bible. According to
this view, modern biblical scholarship has demonstrated that these
concrete biblical norms are so historically conditioned that they
are of little help in solving modern moral problems. Moreover, in
so far as some still relevant content can be salvaged from these
obsolescent biblical norms it turns out to add little to what is
common to most ethical systems independent of Christian faith.
Hence there really is no such thing as a specifically Christian
ethics. At most the Bible supplies us with the motivation of
Christian love and with homiletic exhortations to do good and
avoid evil. The definition of what is good and what is evil in
today's world, therefore, is not to be sought in proof-texting or
fundamentalist biblical literalism, but in arguments based on
philosophy and modern science.
Many other examples could be cited both in the fields of dogma and
of moral theology to show this widening gap between theology and
the Bible. This is not the place to try to show in detail how this
gap might be narrowed so as once more to ground theology in the
Word of God, making use of the more secure results of current
biblical scholarship but not asking of it what it cannot supply.
In a very modest, text-book way I have attempted to do this for
moral theology in a work <Living the Truth in Love> to be
published soon by Alba House. Here, I want only to raise the
problem and to point out the direction in which I believe we must
search for answers.
We must begin not with history, nor literary criticism, nor human
reason, nor religious experience, nor philosophy (Kantian or
Aristotelian), nor a political program however admirable. As
Vatican II urged, we must begin from divine faith that the Bible
as understood in the Sacred Tradition of the Church is God's Word
guiding us to union with him. This does not mean, of course,
reading the Bible as fundamentalists do in an anachronistic and
literalistic way, but as God intended his message to be conveyed
through human authors writing in human ways in particular
historical contexts. Nor does it mean that the Scriptures
substitute for the rational pursuit of scientific truth or give us
all the data and analysis that we need to live in our contemporary
world. What it does mean is that God in his wisdom and mercy has,
with a certainty far surpassing any human research, given us in
the Bible read in its proper context of Sacred Tradition, the
fundamental truths of faith and morals that alone can securely
direct our lives.
Hence we must take with utmost seriousness, as did the Fathers of
the Church, every thing relevant to our salvation asserted in the
Scriptures. Thus, for example, we must avoid the current
superficial "explaining away" of such biblical assertions as St.
Paul's condemnation of sexual relations between same-sex partners
(Rom 1:26-27). To say, as some do, that Paul was only talking
about child abuse, or that the reasons he gives do not apply to
constitutional homosexuals is to stop our ears and close our minds
to God speaking through Paul. It also ignores Paul when he says
that the Scriptures "were written for our instruction that by
endurance and by the encouragement of the Scripture we might have
hope" (Rom 15:4).
What every verse of the Bible means for our salvation may not be
clear, but it is clear that it means something, and it is the task
of the exegete to try to find that meaning. It is also the
responsibility of theologians to base their reasoning upon the
rock of biblical teaching not on some foundation of sand. We must
take the canon as it is and not reduce it to a "canon within the
canon" by a "hermeneutic of suspicion" that exorcises whatever in
the text might expose the falsity of our own opinions.
Second, the fundamental hermeneutic clue for all exegesis is, as
DV said, what <God wanted to put into the sacred writings for the
sake of our salvation>. What we need for our salvation is to know
God as He reveals himself to be and how we are to respond to him
in our own lives, not merely as individuals but as a Church which
he has chosen in Christ and called to be his witness to the world.
The Bible cannot be read, therefore, simply as a collection of
documents with a variety of sources written on the different
occasions and expressing the authors' contrasting insights. It
must be read as ultimately a unified revelation of who God is and
a consistent and sufficient guide for Christian living. This is
not to deny the polyphony of biblical voices, but to show that
they form a harmonious composition not a cacophony.
Third, since the Word of God is voiced by the Holy Spirit not only
in the Bible, but also through Sacred Tradition, and since, as DV
says, these are not two disconnected sources of revelation, but
unified in their witness, they are joined in a hermeneutical
circle. Sacred Tradition is expressed in a privileged way in the
Bible, but the Bible cannot be understood except in the context of
the living faith of the Christian community as it exists through
time down to the present moment. Yet at the same time the good
wheat of Sacred Tradition must be winnowed from the chaff of human
traditions by its consistency with the Bible. The teaching
authority of the Church has the final judgment on what is
authentic tradition and what is not. Yet it too, as our Protestant
brethren remind us, "stands under the Bible's judgment." The
Catholic exegete's task, therefore, is not completed until this
hermeneutic circle is closed and Scripture and Tradition confirm
each other.
Fourth, this means that the development of doctrine in the Church,
though it is the work of the Holy Spirit, must constantly submit
itself to judgment by the Bible. We cannot begin with some
intellectual, moral, or political program, no matter how true or
just it may seem to us, and use it as the criterion of what we
accept or do not accept in the Scriptures. We come to the
Scriptures to be judged, corrected, enlightened, and to repent,
not to rewrite the Bible, nor to cleanse it of its supposed
defects. One can admit that the Bible is androcentric in that it
was written principally by men not women, but that does not and
cannot mean that it fails to tell us what God meant the relation
of men and women to be when he created them "in his own image,
male and female: (Gn 1:27). If God does not instruct us on this
fundamental problem of human life, we men and women, mutual
enemies that we often are, are never going to find reconciliation
and peace.
Fifth, the inevitable historical conditioning of every part of the
Bible cannot be understood to render any part of it obsolete.
Whatever the value of the current fashion for "narrative
theology," the history of God's work for our salvation from
creation to the eschaton is certainly the chief mode in which he
has chosen to reveal himself, and is the Way which we are called
to journey. Historico-critical scholarship contributes much to
understanding this history, but its results are in large part
controversial and constantly shifting. It has not, for example,
been able to establish as historic fact so fundamental a part of
the Biblical narrative as the Exodus, on which, by the way,
liberation theology is based. Literary criticism abstracts from
this historicity, but theology cannot be content simply to accept
it as a meaningful myth. Of course, we theologians should be
grateful when such fundamental data receives apologetic support
from archaeology and biblical criticism. Moreover we should never
on supposed biblical grounds claim as historic fact what has been
certainly proved by rational methods to be false. Nevertheless,
neither ought we be ashamed to claim as historical fact what seems
to be well attested in biblical revelation even when it has not
been proved to be such by purely historical methods.
Sixth, the Word of God is found principally neither in Scripture
or Sacred Tradition but in Jesus Christ, who is that Word (Jn 1:1-
14). He is both the revelation of the Father, "Whoever has seen me
has seen the Father" fen 14:10) and, in the power of the Holy
Spirit, the way to the Father. "I am the way, the truth, and the
life" (Jn 14:6). But Jesus remains palpably present and visible to
us only in his yet imperfect Church, "Teach them to observe all
that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until
the end of the ages" (Mt 28:20). This is why the theologian and
exegete must submit their conclusions to the judgment of the those
in the Church commissioned by Christ to speak in his name, as he
said to the seventy-two disciples when he sent them out as his
authorized representatives, "Whoever listens to you listens to me.
Whoever rejects you rejects me. And whoever rejects me rejects the
one who sent me" (Lk 10:16).
To return to the two examples of the Bible gap I gave earlier: if
we do not project feminist anarchism on to the cipher of The
Mystery, but listen to that Mystery:' reveal itself in the Bible,
what do we hear? Jesus calls the Mystery, "Abba, Father" (Mk 14:6;
cf. Gal 4:6; Rm 8:15), himself "The Son" (Mt 11 :27; Lk 10:21-22).
and declares, "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father" (Jn 14:9).
When Jesus named the Mystery "Father" not "Mother," he was not
teaching male dominance, but was selecting the analogy from common
human experience which best reveals the true relation of the
Mystery to us all. This relation differs from the one we as
children have to our mothers which tends to simple identification
with her from whom our bodies are drawn and nursed. That analogy
would favor-as feminists themselves admit-a pantheistic or
panentheistic understanding of God, as have the mother goddesses
of many religions, like those that tempted Israel to idolatry.
Instead, the one God is revealed through his Son Jesus as the
wholly Other transcendently free Creator, infinite in power yet
infinitely tender in his love for all his creatures. This Father
puts aside his otherness so as to share without Oedipal rivalry
all that he has with his Son. "All things have been handed over to
me by my rather" (Lk 10:22). The paradox of God's transcendent
immanence can be communicated to us by no truer name than "Abba."
Does this biblical symbol marginalize woman? At a marriage banquet
do all eyes turn toward the bridegroom or to the bride? She is the
center of attention, as her groom, like Adam when he first saw Eve
(Gn 2:23), exclaims, "Ah, you are beautiful, my beloved, ah, you
are beautiful! Your eyes are doves behind your veil" (Sg 4:1). The
Old Testament uses the symbol of Wisdom (<Sophia>) not for the
Holy Spirit himself (who as the mutual paternal-filial love
between Father and Son is masculine), but for the Bride of God,
the Creation, the Law, and the Chosen People, united to Him in the
covenant partnership of mutual love (Hos 1-3, etc.) The New
Testament speaks even more clearly of the Church as the bride of
Jesus (RV 21:2). He is her head, but she is his body (Eph 5:23),
"bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh" (Gn 2:23), on which St. Paul
comments, "For just as woman came from man, so man is born of
woman; but all things are from God" (I Cor 11:12).
To read these texts as if they aim to exalt God as superior to his
creation, the male as superior to the female, is to miss their
point. What they aim to express is that our relation to God ought
and can be that of true lovers whose difference is complementary
and whose union is not for domination but for true self-donation.
Johnson, somewhat reluctantly, admits as much when she grants that
a male Incarnation at least is the <kenosis> or emptying of male
pride, since Jesus by his pacificism and virginity rebukes male
violence and sexual exploitation. The maleness of Jesus, she says,
"proceeds under the negating sign of analogy, more dissimilar than
similar to any maleness known in history" (p. 163). If men were to
follow the Pauline exhortation to sacrifice themselves for their
wives as Jesus did for his people (Eph 5:25) what would remain of
male tyranny?
The second of my examples was taken from McCormick's notion that
the moral teachings of the Scripture should be read today as
motivational rather than as strictly obligatory. I believe that
this opinion originated in the laudable effort after Vatican II to
correct the legalism of post-Tridentine moral manuals by centering
moral theology in the Great Commandment of Love (Mt 22:40). It is
true that the New Testament, rather than supply a detailed code of
morals, motivates and transforms moral life through the work of
the Holy Spirit and his gift of the Christian virtues. But it also
shows us Jesus not as one who abrogates the Law but as one who
interprets and completes it in the true sense intended from the
beginning of creation by the Father. "Do not think I have come to
abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not abolish but to
fulfill" (Mt 5:17).
Thus when we read the Bible as a canonical whole it will be found
to instruct Christians in concrete detail how to live in the world
but not of it (Jn 17:15-16; Jas 1:27). Yet, as the prophets of the
Old Testament had already shown, the purpose of the Law is not
that hypocrisy of mere external conformity which Jesus rebuked in
some of the Pharisees. It is our transformation into the image of
Jesus who is the image of the Father (Col 1:15). By the
transforming power of God's grace in the baptized this divine
image is to be found first of all in the theological virtues of
faith, hope, and charity (I Cor 13:13) and their actions by which
the Trinity dwells in us and works through us.
In scholastic theology these theological virtues were thought to
be supported by the four cardinal or moral virtues: prudence,
justice, fortitude and temperance. Yet these were borrowed from
Greek philosophy and are listed only once in the Bible and then
only in the Old Testament (Wis 8:27). Yet these four virtues are
by no means absent from the New Testament, since "prudence" is
another name for the practical aspect of faith which is that same
"wisdom" that is so prominent throughout the whole Bible.
"Justice" is the "righteousness" of meeting our obligations to God
and neighbor without which the Commandment of Love cannot be
genuinely fulfilled. "Fortitude" is the courage and patience of
the Cross and of martyrdom, while "temperance" is that control of
bodily desires by which the chaste Christian becomes a "temple of
the Holy Spirit" (I Cor 6:19). Together fortitude and temperance
constitute Christian asceticism motivated by the theological
virtue of hope, since hope for eternal life leads us to "live
temperately, justly, and devoutly in this age" (Tit 2:12; cf. Rom
8:1-13 ).
These Christian virtues are not mere formal "values" to be
approximated in action in ways of our own choosing, as some
moralists think, but are defined by concrete norms of action, such
as the Ten Commandments. Such concrete norms, as John Paul II
teaches in <Veritatis Splendor> set absolute limits to what we may
and may not do, whatever the circumstances of our lives, if we are
to keep our feet on what Jesus called "the narrow road that leads
to life" (Mt 7:14). How then does moral truth set us free (Jn
8:32)? St. Paul answers, "You were called for freedom, brothers.
But do not use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh;
rather serve one another through love" (Gal 5:13). We are freed by
the Holy Spirit not to wander into sin, but to walk straight in
Jesus' footsteps as he calls, "Come, follow me!" (Mk 10:21).
Thus the Bible shows us how we are to be transformed into the
likeness of Jesus and through him of the Father by faith joined to
prudence, love to justice, and hope to fortitude and temperance.
The measure of each of these virtues is not conformity to the
world but to Christ, because, as St. Paul asks, "Where is the
scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has God not made the
wisdom of the world foolish?" (1 Cor 1:20). It should be evident,
therefore, that a Christian ethics differs in many specific ways
from those not guided simply by human reason.
Thus the abyss today opening between the Bible and theology, must
be overcome by a type of exegesis that does not stop with
historical and literary criticism but interprets the biblical text
precisely as the Word of God redeeming our theological systems,
not as rewritten to conform to them. We must be instructed by God,
not instruct him. "For who has known the mind of the Lord or who
has been his counselor? (Rm 11:34 quoting Jb 15:8).
Dominican Father Benedict Ashley teaches at the Aquinas Institute
of Theology in St. Louis, MO.
This article was taken from the Mar-Apr. 1996 issue of "Catholic
Dossier". Catholic Dossier is published bi-monthly for $24.95 a
year by Ignatius Press. For subscriptions: P.O. Box 1639,
Snohomish, WA 98291-1639, 1-800-651-1531.
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