Light On Dark Water

St. Edith Stein 5

“When a person lacking faith reads Holy
Scripture—for example for the purposes of philology or
religious studies—he does not come to know God. he
only learns how God is conceived in the Bible and by those who
accept the Bible in faith…”

Here is the story of what has gone wrong in the
study—and, far worse, in the teaching—of scripture in
our time. How many scholars does this describe, and how many of
them are teaching in the name of the Church?

There is a place for philology and for objective methods in
history, but they have become like so many other modern
enterprises, very effective as to means but futile or harmful as
to ends. One sees, over and over again, the turning of scripture
against faith, with scholarship used not to explain but to
explain away. Often a perverse sort of selective fundamentalism
appears, in which one scripture passage is taken as an absolute
and used to negate some teaching of the Church. How often is
Micah 6:8 used to assert that God intends that we should have no
specific and fixed doctrines? (“…what doth the LORD
require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk
humbly with thy God?”)

And how often is the later date assigned to John’s
Gospel put forward as proof that its teaching is not that of
Jesus but something invented after the fact by his followers, as
if an idea could not have existed unless it was written down? Or,
if necessary, the proof is turned around, so that the complexity
of thought is held to prove the lateness of composition. This
narrow-minded skepticism, which reaches the average Christian as
a scientifically-sanctioned radical disjuncture between faith and
fact, has had an incalculably corrosive effect on faith. More
than a few times I’ve heard a parish priest say, in
response to a question about the factuality of some incident in
Scripture, that “it doesn’t matter whether it
actually happened or not,” leaving open—in fact
inviting—the questioner to apply the same logic to
everything else in Scripture.

Worse, when the “person lacking faith” is not a
simple unbeliever exercising scientific detachment, but a former
or perhaps just unhappy believer, the power denied to God and to
the Church is assumed by the skeptic. Since he and his scholarly
peers alone can determine which texts are authentic, they are the
only authentic interpreters. Now what is learned is not even
“how God is conceived in the Bible” and in faith, but
what the scholar himself thinks; hence such aberrations as The
Jesus Seminar and the arrogance of the title of Garry
Wills’ new book, What Jesus Meant. And we are
supposed to receive this state of affairs as a liberation.

I grew up taking the Bible for granted as the only source of
religious authority, and as is often the case with things we take
for granted I didn’t really see it, certainly not as
a whole. I had to leave it aside for some years in order
“to return to the place and know it as if for the first
time,” to have the experience which Edith Stein describes
here:

“…a word of Scripture may so touch me in my
innermost being that in this word I feel God himself speaking to
me and sense his presence. The book and the sacred
writer…have vanished—God himself is speaking,
and he is speaking to me.”

If we follow the skeptical scholars, this experience is closed
to us, or at least is avoidable. Why would we want to avoid it?
To spare ourselves pain. As often as not when God speaks to us
through Scripture it is to offer us some challenge or correction.
And it stings; it touches us at a sensitive place. A dentist can
dig and probe my teeth with a wire hook and I will feel no great
discomfort until he hits a weakened or decayed spot, and then I
may try to jump out of the chair. When God probes those spots of
decay in our souls he seems our enemy. This is at least part of
the answer to the question posed by Walker Percy: “If the
Good News is true, why is one not pleased to hear it?”