Inculturation

Two items came to my attention shortly after writing John Duns Scotus and the Crisis of the West, Part 2, and they fall right in line with several of the themes I've been stressing lately. The first is an article by David Gibson that appeared on April 23, 2012. The Real Clear Religion link was titled rather more provocatively than the original: Benedict XVI, Papal Enforcer versus Is Pope Ratzinger Suffering From the Seven-Year Itch?

The article begins by addressing the recent announcement that “Benedict had signed off on a crackdown on the organization representing most of the 57,000 nuns in the United States, saying that the group was not speaking out strongly enough against gay marriage, abortion and women’s ordination.” Of more interest to us, however, is that the article went on to mention recent sanctions against an American and a Spanish theologian. In each case the actions were taken by the respective Bishops conferences:

John Duns Scotus and the Crisis of the West, Part 2

MacIntyre's Critique of Scotus

As we have seen, numerous thinkers, included Benedict XVI, have seen in John Duns Scotus' thought a turning point for Western Christianity. While we lament the failure of most modern thinkers (Josef Pieper is a remarkable exception) to connect all the dots that lead from archaic ontology through Plato to the present, the recognition of Scotus' significance for Western thought is a welcome development. We, of course, believe it is essential to see Scotus and other similar figures as parts of a continuum—in line with Whitehead's insight that Western thought is largely a series of footnotes to Plato. In this second look at Scotus' thought and its influence on subsequent Western thought we will begin by considering Alasdair MacIntyre's fine critique of Scotus in his important work, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition. MacIntyre's discussion of Scotus can be found on pages 152-156. Importantly for our purposes, MacIntyre (like Pieper before him) discusses the importance of Scotus' influence with regard to the relationship of “philosophy” and “theology” or “religion.”

Anselm's Platonism and the Development of Doctrine

In Questions of Authority I posed the following question:

This leads us to the question: is it possible that the Church can mistakenly put forward as doctrine theologizing that is based on misunderstandings of Scripture?

The example I provided was one that Avery Dulles cited re Original Sin:

In recounting the challenges faced by the authors of the Catechism, Dulles points out one doctrinal matter in particular:

The doctrine of original sin caused particular difficulty, and was studied at length by a special commission. In the past fifty years numerous theologians have proposed ways of updating the traditional teaching, which relied heavily on contestable interpretations of the creation narratives in Genesis and of Paul's letter to the Romans.

Josef Pieper, writing in 1960 in his well known survey Scholasticism, touched on these issues from an historical standpoint in his treatment of Anselm of Canterbury—most famous for his so-called ontological “proof” for the existence of God. Pieper begins the extended passage ( pp. 60-65) by noting that, of the two ways in which human reason may be “overvalued,” the “overvaluation of logical deduction from general principles,” is

especially linked to the Platonic-Augustinian view of the world; it is a latent peril of that view. And it is this peril of “deductive rationalism” which Anselm of Canterbury conjured up, and which thereafter lingered in Western Christianity.

Reason and Revelation: The Islamic Case and Western Parallels

Both Etienne Gilson, in his classic study The Unity of Philosophical Experience (UPE, 1937), and Benedict XVI in his 2006 address at the University of Regensburg (Three Stages in the Program of De-Hellenization)--previously discussed in Benedict at Regensburg--have found it useful in discussing the crisis of the West to compare the Western crisis to the earlier crisis of Islamic thought.  As we continue our consideration of the development of Western thought, we will do likewise.


Gnosticism and Ideology

In what follows I’ll be using words like gnosticism and ideology in quite specific senses.  Gnosticism and ideology represent human responses to reality in which a programmatic vision of reality is developed in a highly conceptualized structure. Unlike the experiences of faith and reasoned inquiry--which seek insight into the nature and meaning of existence--gnosticism and ideology, while highly conceptualized and thus highly rationalistic in a certain sense, have as their motivating core, desire: desire for deliverance, for certitude, for power. Thus, while gnosticism and ideology often draw freely on the symbols and terminology of faith and reasoned inquiry, their motivation sets them apart and marks them as deformations of those experiences. Gnosticism and ideology present reality in terms of a conceptual construct that, while purporting to offer a comprehensive understanding of reality, is in fact oriented toward the fulfillment of human desires rather than the understanding of reality as it really is. As I use these terms, broadly speaking, “gnostic” refers generally to movements that seek deliverance or salvation, while “ideology” is seen to have a strongly practical, this worldly orientation toward attaining power.

This usage derives, of course, from the work of Eric Voegelin. One of Voegelin’s most compelling explications of the nature of gnosticism and ideology can be found in his seminal essay, “On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery,” in which Voegelin quite deliberately characterized Hegel’s gnostic/ideological speculation as “sorcery.” (The essay is unfortunately unavailable on the internet. Cf., Eric Voegelin, “On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery,” Collected Works Vol. 12, or Eric Voegelin, “On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery,” Studium Generale 24 (1971), pp. 335-68. Cf. also Voegelin’s shorter book length expositions, The New Science of Politics and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism.) The following short summary of the basic ideas Voegelin was working with, taken from the essay on Hegel, is helpful:

Sorcery, or magic, is a conceptual system that asserts the human ability to control the natural world (including events, objects, people, and physical phenomena) through mystical, paranormal, or supernatural means — through, for example, magic words, or an ability to present compelling appearances of fictitious reality.

A Second Reality is such an ersatz reality. The term was coined by Robert Musil to denote a fictitious world imagined to be true by the person creating it, who will then use his construction to mask and thereby “eclipse” genuine, or First Reality.

(From Hegel as Sorcerer: The “Science” of Second Realities and the “Death” of God, by Jean F. Drew)

As is apparent from Drew’s definitions, Voegelin’s focus was on the gnostic nature of Hegel’s speculation, but Voegelin deliberately used the provocative term “sorcery" to draw attention to the ways in which Hegel’s speculation differs from true “philosophy," despite Hegel’s use of language and presentation that are usually associated with philosophy. This ambiguity of Hegel’s presentation was noted by David Walsh who pointed out (Reflections on the Nature of Modernity) that Hegel deliberately maintained this ambiguity in his thought--the ambiguity as to whether it was “religious” or secular in nature. This ambiguity as well as the interplay between gnosticism and ideology, their conceptual fluidity and ability to masquerade as faith or reasoned inquiry, has its practical uses: successors of Hegel such as Marx had no difficulty transforming gnostic speculation into ideologies focused on raw power under the guise of intellectual respectability.

Jesus and the Israelite Scriptures

Over two years ago we concluded Messy Revelation by stating:

The old models of exegesis--coded messages that are uncovered and interpreted by exegetes using grammar, allegory, typology, etc.,--are attempts to house train God, to make his self revelation in Jesus conform to a pattern that is comfortable for men. But is it reasonable that we should expect this of God? Enns' answer, if I may extend his logic somewhat, is or should be, No. We should expect, rather, that revelation should be "somewhat messy." For the reason that reality, and above all human life, is "somewhat messy." Enns, of course, is following his Protestant (Judaizing--h/t Spengler) model of revelation, by which God "speaks to man through Scripture," but he realizes that that is not the whole story. Not by half. For, "in much the same way: he enters into our world and uses our own cultural patterns to reveal himself." Here, unfortunately, Enns is still trapped within the notion of God's self revelation in Jesus having been accomplished through a collection of books that we call the New Testament, rather than in the very personal reality of Jesus of Nazareth. For the Christian, Jesus IS revelation, and all else, including Scripture, can only be "revelation" in a secondary sense. This must be the beginning of exegesis. And as a start we must seek to determine Jesus' own understanding of how to deal with "scripture."

We are now in a position to follow up on the project we defined as central to development of a theory of revelation: What was Jesus' own understanding of “scripture?” To answer that question we will look at how Jesus made use of the Israelite scriptures. That is, we will examine how the Gospels portray Jesus' use of those scriptures when speaking in his own voice, as opposed to how the evangelists use the Israelite scriptures when reflecting on the meaning of Jesus' life, death and resurrection.

It has become something of a truism to state that the early Christian writings we now know as the New Testament reflect the “theologies” of their authors. Some would, in fact, argue that that is all we have--that it is impossible to separate out a “theology of Jesus” as distinct from that of the early Christian authors or to distinguish the original words that Jesus spoke from the theologizing of the evangelists. While we do not minimize the difficulties involved and do not claim that a completely definitive account can be given, our reading of the Gospels convinces us that the distinction between the “theologies” of Jesus and of the evangelists is both valid and significant. Moreover, we are convinced that differing approaches to the use of the Israelite scriptures lies at the heart of that distinction. Thus, this undertaking will shed light on the "original voice" of Jesus.

Israel and Revelation

What follows is the text of an email I sent some years ago.  Since it constitutes in many respects the outline of a theory of revelation it seemed appropriate to post a lightly edited version of it.

Sometimes I recommend books more for the ideas and issues that they raise than for the actual solutions that they offer. With regard to Mircea Eliade's work, I see his importance as due to his formulation of what he calls the "ontology" of archaic man (the man of "traditional" cultures), the ontology of archetypes and repetition. Of particular importance, in my view, is that he recognizes that the strand of Western thought known by the Greek term "philosophy" is, in fact, derived from this archaic ontology--as of course is the advanced thought of other cultures as well. This, I believe, provides the indispensable framework for any theoretical understanding of man in history.

Paul and the Yetzer Ha-Ra

W. D. Davies devotes Chapter 2 (“The Old Enemy: The Flesh And Sin,” 17-35) of his classic Paul and Rabbinic Judaism to an examination of the role in Pauline thought of the rabbinic doctrine of good and bad “tendencies” (Heb. yetzer) in human nature. (We should note that Davies uses the term “rabbinic” in a somewhat anachronistic sense since, at the time of Paul, Judaism was still in the Second Temple period and had not yet entered the Rabbinic period. Properly speaking, Rabbinic Judaism become dominant over the period from the 2nd to the 6th centuries AD. Nevertheless, it is widely accepted that the roots of Rabbinic Judaism are to be found in the earlier Second Temple period.)

Davies begins his inquiry from the assertion of some earlier scholars that the Pauline opposition of “flesh” and “spirit” (sarx/pneuma) reflects a Hellenistic, dualist influence that is foreign to Israelite thought. Davies dismisses this argument, noting that in Hellenist thought the body/soul dichotomy is never expressed in terms of “flesh/spirit,” whereas Paul's use of such key concepts as psyche, kardia and pneuma (soul, heart, spirit) closely tracks the usage of the Israelite scriptures: nephesh, leb, ruach. In contrast, in later Israelite writings the Hebrew word for sarx/flesh, basar, is used to express:

Trinity and Revelation

Chapter Nine, “The Church and the Kingdom of God,” in Charles Norris Cochrane's classic study, Christianity and Classical Culture, contains a discussion of issues that hold great interest for us and that we have already touched upon..

Cochrane begins by observing that, for the fourth century Church, the vision of the Kingdom was of “a society regenerated by the acceptance of Christian truth.” (359) As we have seen—and this is a point that we will return to in greater detail--the articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity was seen to solve many of the theoretical problems inherent not only in the more traditional expressions of the archaic ontology but also those problems that were raised by the Platonic elaboration of that ontology: “philosophy,” especially in its Neoplatonic form. (As we have already seen, the Arian heresy can be viewed as a Neoplatonizing version of Christianity, and so involves the same issues.) That being the case, the Christians considered that their faith held the key to all truth, and that those aspects of truth which they found in pagan thought could be “baptized,” subsumed under the superior theoretical insight of Trinitarian thought. It was thus true to say, from this standpoint, that “all truth is Christian truth” and that Christian truth is human truth--the truth of and for all men. As Cochrane states, the function of this Christian universalism was “to heal the wounds inflicted by man on himself in classical times and, by transcending while still doing justice to the elements of truth contained in philosophical paganism, to revive and give direction to the expiring spiritual ideals of classical antiquity.” (360)

Mark Smith: From Scriptures to Bible

We are now reaching the end of Mark S. Smith's The Memoirs of God, but Smith adds a “postscript” - Biblical Memory between Religion, Theology and History - in which he attempts to address some of the issues that he has inevitably raised in the course of the book but has not yet discussed. Smith's concerns center around the nature of revelation.

Biblical Narrative and Systematic Theology

Smith begins by noting that, in the Bible, Israel generated a “master narrative” of God's relations with man, running from Genesis through the books of Kings. As this narrative came to be recognized as “scripture,” i.e., became “the Bible,” it was also transformed from Israel's traditions into what Smith has termed the “memoirs of God.” But this new development could not hide the past, nor the highly complex way in which the individual narratives came into being and were later incorporated into a master narrative:

This master narrative was modified as it went on, with older modifications overwritten by later ones. The modified biblical narrative often left vestiges of older versions of the past, issuing in a text with a dialectic between the master narrative and other earlier, or even contemporary, conflicting versions. Israel's representation of its past in the Bible also incorporates competition and compromise over the meaning of that past. What becomes recognized as revelation is more than a single revelation about the past. (161)

Obviously, to enshrine such narratives as the “word of God” presents theoretical problems, not the least of which is: what could God have intended by this procedure, and how are humans to decide among the conflicting versions and representations of God's relationship with man?

Mark Smith: Memory and Amnesia in the Israelite Scriptures

Chapter Four of Mark Smith's The Memoirs of God, “The Formation of Israel's Concepts of God: Collective Memory and Amnesia in the Bible,” is dense and difficult. Smith is attempting to deal with the issue of historicity in the Israelite scriptures:

What are we biblical scholars dealing with in the Bible, what or who are we as we deal with it, and what means can we deploy to plumb the difficulties in these questions and to assess these issues? In this chapter, I focus on the last of these questions. In particular, I wish to advance the claim that the academic study of collective memory offers important intellectual help for understanding the biblical representations of Israel's past. (125)

This is a complicated topic and at times Smith stumbles in selecting his terminology, but I believe he is very much on the right track.

1. Collective Memory and Amnesia

Smith begins by setting out two fundamental points about the Bible's treatment of the past.

First, the Bible is not a record of “events” ... “What we have are various witnesses to an event.” (quoting Brevard Childs) ... Second, the Bible is teaching (Torah in Hebrew), much of it religious in character. Ancient Israelites ... as well as modern Biblical scholars, largely recognize the Bible's pedagogical purpose, and this teaching function extends to the Bible's narratives of the past. (126)

Smith refers to “the Bible's treatment of the past” and “the Bible's narratives of the past.” There are several problems with this choice of words, most of which problems Smith later recognizes to varying degrees. While the “Bible” is for us a book, its constituent parts were mostly not written to be part of a book—they were themselves books that were self contained units. The authors and redactors of some, but not all, of the various books that constitute what we call the Bible do in some cases treat of past events--or sometimes of events better described as set in the past. Whether the narratives do in fact describe actual events is quite another matter, as is the question of the original authors' intent. Other books, particularly some of the prophetic books, treat of what, for the prophet, were current or contemporaneous events, although at times also referring to the past. Therefore, while the redactors who formed the collection of writings that we now know as the “Bible” may well have had a view regarding the historicity of the narratives in the Biblical books that treat of events set in the past, that viewpoint must be carefully distinguished from the intentions of the actual authors of those books.

Mark Smith: Monotheism and the Structures of Divinity

In Chapter Three of The Memoirs of God, "Biblical Monotheism and the Structures of Divinity," Mark Smith attempts to explain the development of monotheism in Israel, a process which we have touched upon repeatedly in this examination of Israelite religion. As Smith observes in his introductory remarks, a major difficulty in dealing with this aspect of Israelite religion is that "monotheism was a development in Israelite religion that was read back into its earlier religious tradition." Briefly, monotheism developed within an elite segment of the Israelite population during the late monarchy. However, from the perspective of these relatively late thinkers, monotheism was read back into earlier times, although the writings of the Israelite scriptures clearly preserve important information that shows that earlier Israelite religion was not monotheistic. As a result, the Israelite scriptures must be approached with caution in order to separate out genuine early traditions from later interpretative developments based on Judaic monotheism. Later Christians unfortunately adopted late Jewish interpretations of the early traditions uncritically, as well as reading Christian meanings back into the Israelite scriptures. Smith's approach to this issue views the development of monotheism as part of a "survival strategy" for Israel, one intended as a response to historical challenges to Israel's continued survival--in particular, the fall of the dual kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

Mark Smith: Challenges To Israel During The Biblical

Challenges To Israel During The Biblical Period

Pre-Monarchic Challenges

We have seen that the early origins of Israel were the result of a basically peaceful development, involving a migration of farming populations from relatively nearby regions to the lightly populated highlands of Canaan. The infusion of tribal elements from the south (Midian) with their strong influence on religion and certain social structures was complementary to the "anti-feudal" attitudes of the indigenous population, and gave rise to a distinct Israelite identity. This distinct Israelite social, as opposed to political, identity was recognized as early as the victory Stela of Pharaoh Merneptah in 1208 B.C. The Egyptian inscription makes a careful distinction between the states or political entities that the Pharaoh defeated and Israel, which is categorized as a "people": a social reality but not one that was organized as a state or political entity.

As time went on and the population increased, two areas of conflict emerged for Israelite society, both of which are described in Judges: on the one hand intertribal tensions and feuds between Israelite and allied groupings, and conflicts with both more advanced coastal societies (primarily Philistines) as well as tribal groupings from the desert fringes (Midianites, Arab tribes, Amalekites, etc.) who combined trading and caravaneering with raiding. The informal tribal levy, the traditional response to such problems, is portrayed as effective in the case of intra-Israelite disputes, but we may well believe that as Israel became a more cohesive social reality the need was felt for a formalized authority to control the more destructive aspects of intertribal disputes. The informal response of the tribal levy proved clearly ineffective against external threats of a more organized character, particularly that of the Philistines. The Philistine threat was probably the most significant factor that led to the limited kingship of Saul--limited in that it was largely confined to the more advanced Josephite tribal groupings of the central highlands and Transjordan. Judah and the Galilean regions do not appear to have been part of Saul's kingdom. However, with Saul's death in battle against the Philistines the weaknesses of Saul's kingship were clear: it was still based in tribal loyalties and lacked the cohesive organization of a true state that was needed to withstand external threats of the type that Israel faced. (MG 46-50)


The Challenges of the United Monarchy

The Israelite response to this challenge came in two stages. First, a charismatic warlord, David, arose in the sparsely populated and rugged hill country of Judah, centered around Hebron. David gained valuable experience both in Saul's army as well as in the service of the Philistine city state of Gath, and he parleyed this experience into an independent military power base.

Mark Smith: History and the Israelite Scriptures

We are now at a point from which we can attempt a synthesis of these disparate reflections on the Religion of Israel. I will do so by working through Mark S. Smith's The Memoirs of God (MG) over as many as four separate posts. I have argued that the essence of what Christianity has termed 'revelation' in the pre-Christian past is the development of Israelite religion toward a true monotheism centered on God whose identity--in so far as it is knowable to human reason--is that of creator. From that standpoint Peter Machinist's comments regarding Smith's book are suggestive:

[Smith's book] is not simply a study of the history and religion of ancient Israel nor of [its literature], but of the complicated interface between [Israel's history and religion]--of how the Bible chose to remember the history and religion of the Israel that gave it birth. As Smith compellingly argues, the formation of memory is indeed the central characteristic of the Biblical text, and in a wide-ranging provocative discussion, he allows us to see the multiple ways in which the Biblical authors struggled to make sense of their past and to define its ongoing significance for them.

Obviously, Machinist's language is somewhat anachronistic, in that the vehicle of revelation--seen as the development of Israelite religion to the point that God's own self revelation in Jesus becomes a meaningful event--is a people, not simply a book. Nevertheless, from the Christian standpoint this development (of Israelite religion) is of interest not merely in itself, as a record of historical memory, but for what this development led to. It is this development and its culmination in Jesus that gives it "ongoing significance," enduring and universal significance.

According to the Scriptures - N. T. Wright

N. T. Wright has a somewhat popularized book, The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture, which is directly relevant to some of the posts here--especially the post devoted to C. H. Dodd's classic work: According to the Scriptures. (Frustratingly, Wright's book has no index and does not cite Dodd's work, but I find it impossible to believe that Wright has not read and thought deeply on Dodd's ideas.) I am in general agreement with Wright's approach, but would wish to amend it in some respects. Here are the key passages, spread across two chapters, with my comments:

3. Scripture and Jesus (pp. 42-46)

... I have argued...that Jesus believed himself called to undertake the task ... through which God's long range purposes would at last be brought to fruition. ... What this means in practice is that in and through Jesus evil is confronted and judged, and forgiveness and renewal are brought to birth. The covenant is renewed; new creation is inaugurated. The work which God had done through scripture in the Old Testament is done by Jesus in his public career, his death and resurrection, and his sending of the Spirit.

Comment: I believe this is generally the correct approach. However, there are complexities that need to be addressed. First, Wright refers to "[T]he work which God had done through scripture in the Old Testament," yet at the time of Jesus the Old Testament did not yet exist: there were significant differences among versions of the writings that we now call the Old Testament, and there was not yet general agreement as to which books could be regarded as scripture. In addition, Wright describes God as working through a book--a view which is at some variance with the picture we get from scripture itself, which describes God as working through a people in history. This is not nitpicking. Rather, it gets to the heart of a central question: how did Jesus himself regard the Israelite scriptures?

Benedict XVI and the State of Israel

David P. Goldman, a self described "writer in New York" who also writes as Spengler, writes today at the neoconservative journal First Things, Benedict XVI and the State of Israel. (Relevant excerpts are appended to this post.)

As usual, Goldman attempts to convince Catholics that Church acceptance of the State of Israel is a matter of fundamental theology, but he can only do so by fudging distinctions and avoiding basic issues:

According to the Scriptures

I recently reread C. H. Dodd's According to the Scriptures: The Substructure of New Testament Theology. The book, a 1952 version of lectures that Dodd delivered at the Princeton Theological Seminary, is Dodd's classic examination of the idea of "fulfillment" in early Christian thought. Specifically, Dodd sought to understand the use that Christians made of the Old Testament scriptures in asserting that--as the Lucan/Pauline writings state--a) the Messiah had to suffer, b) would rise on the third day, and c) that in His name repentance leading to forgiveness of sins would be preached to all nations (Luke 24: 46-47).

Without attempting to summarize the entire range of Dodd's insights, I will simply state that Dodd's analysis leads him to conclude that the early kerygma (preaching) of the Church can be traced back to its earliest days. In point of fact, there is no good reason to doubt that it is rooted in the teaching of Jesus to his disciples. Dodd offers four main conclusions to his study, which delimit the substructure of New Testament theology:

Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: The 1988 Erasmus Lecture

In 1988 Cardinal Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, came to New York to deliver the Erasmus Lecture. The title of his lecture was Biblical Interpretation in Crisis, which reflected his long running concern with the state of modern Biblical exegesis. In the lecture he set forth his critique of the current troubled state of affairs--which he attributed to the influence of the “historical-critical method”--and offered his “hopes” for the future. This appears to be as good a starting point as any for a consideration of the issues confronting the Church in developing a coherent theory of revelation, and especially because Ratzinger's views, as expressed in 1988, remain unchanged in their essentials to this day.  We will proceed with a running commentary on Ratzinger's somewhat rambling lecture.

Ratzinger quickly sets the tone for his lecture, opening his remarks with an anecdote from Soloviev that portrays modern exegetes as the Antichrist! He then suggests that “[t]o speak of 'the crisis of the historical-critical method' today is practically a truism.” He professes to find this state of affairs, which is to say, the state of affairs as he has painted it, somehow ironic, since the historical-critical method had “gotten off to so optimistic a start” 100 years ago. True, he adds, the historical-critical method as originally conceived during the Enlightenment contained an “impertinent presupposition” which regarded “dogma or church doctrine ... as one of the real impediments to a correct understanding of the Bible itself,” yet Catholic proponents of the historical-critical method assured the Church that the method, once freed of such anti-Christian presuppositions, would provide “strict objectivity” and would bring us closer to “the clear and unmistakable voice of the original message of Jesus.” And, in fact, says Ratzinger, that did initially appear to be the case.

This manner of framing the subject is certainly noteworthy, implying as it does that the historical-critical method is part of an illusory quest for “strict objectivity.” From a philosophical standpoint this formulation clearly implies that Ratzinger falls well within the common Platonic tradition when it comes to the the problem of knowledge. For Platonists (of whatever stripe) knowledge is an all or nothing proposition. Either we attain to a complete grasp of the Ideas (the heavenly archetypes of Mircea Eliade's “archaic ontology”) or ... we have no real knowledge at all! Godlike omniscience or total skepticism, the Scylla and Charybdis that has bedeviled man for millennia. Ratzinger is situating the entire project of historical-critical exegesis within the context of this wrongheaded epistemology.

So, then, what followed from the historical-critical method's optimistic beginnings? Ratzinger first complains that the historical-critical method led to a “confused” picture--use of the method gave rise to a number of apparently conflicting theories. The existence of contradictory theories, says Ratzinger, meant that “access to the Bible” was blocked for all those who were not “initiated” into the complexities of the method (note once again the use of a loaded, pejorative term: “initiated,” with its hint of a gnostic fraternity of illuminati). Furthermore, says Ratzinger, those who were “initiated,” the scholars and exegetes, “were no longer reading the Bible anyway, but were dissecting it into the various parts from which it had to have been composed.” (My emphasis.) In other words, Ratzinger suggests that these exegetes were impious men who ignored what “the Bible” was actually saying, in favor of arcane academic game playing that blocked the simple faithful from access to the clear meaning of the text.

It's clear that Ratzinger disapproves of this situation, but he is less than totally forthcoming about his exact reasoning. For example, he appears to be saying that the “uninitiated,” the simple faithful, should have full “access” to “the Bible.” How reasonable is this contention? There are at least two presuppositions behind this complaint, and probably more.

Benedict at Regensburg

"Jihad injures reason, for it honors a god who suffers no constraints on his caprice, unlike the Judeo-Christian god, who is limited by love. That is the nub of Pope Benedict XVI's September 12 [2006] address in Regensburg, Germany." So wrote internet gadfly Spengler, only a week after Benedict's address, in Jihad, the Lord's Supper, and Eternal Life. Robert Reilly, writing at about the same time in Crisis magazine (The Pope and the Prophet), had a similar reaction: "Finally, a leader has spoken about the real, essential differences in the struggle between the West and Islam ..."

Benedict's now famous address at Regensburg bore the title "Three Stages in the Program of De-Hellenization." While Spengler, Reilly and most other commentators focused on what they saw as Benedict's critique of Islam's vision of God--which Benedict presented through a quotation from "the dialog carried on ... by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both"--there was, in fact, far more in Benedict's address than met most eyes at the time.

Benedict, as is now well known, has made the theme of the recovery of reason a key project for his papacy, for he sees the recovery of reason as essential for the spiritual recovery of the West. Benedict shares the quite conventional interpretation of the West as "a rapprochement between biblical faith and Greek inquiry." The very identity of the West resides in this "rapprochement," and the spiritual crisis of the West lies precisely in this, that these two indispensable elements of the Western spirit have been sundered by what Benedict calls the "Program of De-Hellenization."

No doubt Benedict may have been happy to clarify those "essential differences" between Christianity and Islam that Reilly refers to, but his address was far more than facile Muslim bashing. But if contrasting Christianity and Islam was not Benedict's primary purpose, then why did he plunge into the question of Islam at the very outset of his address?

A New Counter-Reformation?

The 11/14/08 issue of the Wall Street Journal featured an article of more than passing interest by David Gibson: A New Counter-Reformation Starts at the Vatican. Gibson has been observing the Synod of Bishops at the Vatican and sees hopeful signs of an initiative that could become a New Counter-Reformation:

For most of October, more than 200 Catholic bishops, along with sundry theologians and experts, met at the Vatican to figure out how to get Catholics to read the Bible -- a project easily dismissed by Protestants and some Catholics as too ambitious and about 500 years too late. After all, wasn't it Rome's fears about letting mere lay people consult Holy Writ that stoked the Reformation? And Catholics don't want to read the Bible anyway, right? They're all about the Mass and the sacraments.

Gibson begs to differ with the notion that Catholics and Scripture don't mix too well. Or rather, as Gibson backhandedly concedes, at least a rarefied clerical and academic elite within the Catholic Church has opened itself to Scripture. Just how far this openness extends we will consider, but Gibson claims, after a brief review of 20th century Church history, that the Church has gradually developed an impressive and balanced cultural blend of Scripture and traditional Catholic piety:

Scripture as Tradition

In Messy Revelation I opened a discussion on the need for a renewed and deepened understanding of "revelation." Here I will provide documentation that illustrates that the perceived need for such a deepened understanding is recognized on many levels within the Church.