Michael Knowles: the Church and its Scriptures 6

The Church and its Scriptures Michael Knowles

A Catholic Response 1

For a theology to be Catholic it must be what is held ‘semper, ubique et ab omnibus” in the phrase of Vincent of Lerins as I think I recall it. In other words it’s the faith of the universal Church as handed down from the Apostles. It’s not individual but collective. Where it is required to determine what the faith is precisely, it is the judgement, not of any individual but of the successors of the Apostles either in council or, in very rare moments and in strictly defined and very limited circumstances, by the successor of Peter on which rock the Church is built as the Lord himself has stated. In turn the decisions of Councils and Popes will be what is held ‘semper, ubique and ab omnibus’ because the Spirit of Truth inhabits not just any one member or any one part but the whole of the Body of Christ, which is the Church. In other words in matters of definition of doctrine the Church exists in a constant state of tension, which is quite natural and is what we find in Acts 1-11, exemplified by the Council of Jerusalem, and of course in Paul’s letters. A summary of Church teaching on Sacred Scripture is to be found in Part One, Section One, Article 3 i-v of the Catechism of the Catholic Church which we must follow in order to be Catholic.

The issue is this, in a sort of syllogistic fashion: In the Bible God is described as advocating certain things which the Church, the Body of Christ, has declared to be evil. Since God cannot do evil, the Bible would seem to have got it wrong. But it is the faith of the Church that the Bible is the Word of God. Therefore the Word of God would seem to have got it wrong. Since, however, the Word of God cannot lie or err, the Bible can hardly be the Word of God. There has to be a mistake somewhere. Something’s wrong somewhere. Yet the Bible itself states:

‘Listen, for I will speak clearly.

You will have plain speech from me.

For I speak nothing but truth

and my lips detest wicked talk.

All I say is right,

Not a word is twisted and crooked.

All is straightforward to him who can understand

All is plain to the man who has knowledge” Prov.8.6-9.

Hence we can only say the prayer which must always be on the lips of anyone doing theology: “Keep me faithful to your teaching and never let me be separated from you”.

The problem can only be resolved within the context of the essential nature of Christian theology, that it is incarnational and every element is inter-connected. The nature of God’s revelation is incarnational, both in the Old Testament and in the New. The Catholic/Christian understanding of revelation is what God’s revelation is. In the Old Testament God’s Word revealed itself within the limitations imposed upon it by the human condition, as in an old wineskin. In the New Testament God’s Word became flesh. It was the fullness of time when the Advocate was sent by Jesus from the Father, the Spirit of Truth (to Peuma ths alhqeias) coming from the Father bearing witness (Jn.15.26). It is the moment when an even greater splendour enveloped mankind in the divine dispensation of the Spirit (2.Cor.3.8) Accordingly, the Letter to the Hebrew must be taken seriously. It cannot be dismissed, it cannot be ignored. The Incarnation made all things new. Christ said “But I say to you” (Egw de legw umin). With Christ there could be no reversion to the state of mankind in the Old Testament. That had passed away. The New Testament is “the fullness of time” (Gal.4.4), the Old Testament “the pangs of childbirth” (Rom.8.22).

There is an economy in salvation. Salvation has had to proceed at the pace mankind was capable of. God has had to make do with what he made. Either that or create robots. When God created beings with free will, he willed the consequences. There can’t be love, which is the total goal of religion in the Christian revelation (Jn.13.34. Mt. 22.34ff) without free will. There was no way God could bring about the establishment of a kingdom of Israel except the way the Jewish people –and indeed every people at that time, and, sadly, most times- thought they should go about it. The alternative was for God to interfere so aggressively in the minds and mentality of this tiny nation that he would detach them totally from their entire cultural, mental, environmental inheritance stretching back to the beginnings of the human race, and from all the human, cultural and ethical, milieu in which they lived and of which they were a part. Their whole milieu was that of empires –Egypt, Phoenicia, Syria, Assyria, Babylon, and indeed their own, where life was cheap and fighting a way of life and women existed for men and procreation. As Mohammed put it to the men of Mecca and Medina as late as the 7^th century: “Women are your fields. Go, then, into your fields when you please” (2.223). To expect anything better of the Israelites other than what they thought and what they did according to their lights would give us a God who steps in and waves some magic wand over them to change them into what they were not and just couldn’t be. Such aggression serves no divine, no religious, purpose.

When the writer of the Book of Joshua, which is the Word of God, the one and only and same God who inspired the books of the New Testament, wrote: “The Lord said to Joshua: Do not be fearful or dismayed; take the whole army and attack Ai. I deliver the king of Ai into your hands, him and his people, his city and his country. Deal with Ai and her king as you dealt with Jericho and her king” (8.1) the writer wasn’t recording the commands of God to Moses, though he undoubtedly believed he was. And of course the author of Deuteronomy believed it too in 31.1-8. God never said any such thing. What is written is simply not true. The God of Jesus Christ, the Word of God, the God of both Testaments, is a loving God. He is the God of the living, not of the dead. He wants mercy, not sacrifice. How can God be one if in the New Testament he tells us to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us and in the Old he commands the slaughter of enemies? God cannot contradict himself. And that’s that.

We must therefore conclude that wherever and whenever in the Bible God is said to have commanded something which is wrong in the Christian ethic, which is not acceptable to the Mystical Body of Christ, which is his Church, he did not command it. God gave no such instruction at all, ever, that was even in the slightest degree hurtful or cruel or unkind, let alone murderous and brutal. God gave no instruction at all that was sexist, that in any way subordinated women to men or held them inferior to men. God never preferred one people or nation to any other. “I need not tell you that a Jew is forbidden by his religion to visit or associate with a man of another race. Yet God has shown me clearly that I must not call any man profane or unclean....I now see how true it is that God has no favourites...everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins in his name. God has no favourites” said Peter (Acts. 10.28 & 34f & 43). In other words, Peter the rock on whom the Church is built, this man of visions, saw that the Jews had got God wrong. Likewise Paul: “There is no such thing as Jew or Greek, slave and freeman, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3.28). Anything else is “the old nature with its deeds” (Col. 3.10). We must “put on the new nature which is being constantly renewed in the image of its Creator and brought to know God. There is no question here of Greek or Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman; but Christ is all and is in all (alla panta kai en pasin Cristos Col.3.10f)

We must conclude that God never forced the pace. He allowed evil to happen because the alternative was never to achieve the good. He allowed the writers of his Scriptures to write untruths about him. God after all never wrote a single word of Scripture. Human beings of course, and only human beings, wrote the Scriptures. Every single word. When the OT writers said God commanded this act of slaughter and that, and this act of discrimination against women and that, it simply was untrue. He never did. Rather, he allowed such untruths about him to be written. God just worked with the grain. He led us by the cords of Adam. It was the necessary sin out of which we received such a wonderful saviour. It was the ‘felix culpa’. “Because they (Israel) offended, salvation has come to the Gentiles” (Rom. 11.11).

Slowly, patiently, like a woman passionately in love with a faithless man, like a man passionately in love with a wayward woman, over centuries, working his economy of salvation, he allowed lies to be told about him, evil to be done in his name. Time and again Israel was “a bird straying far from its nest” (Prov. 27.8). The Song of Songs records it all for us. Night after night on his bed he sought his true love who slept though her heart was awake; he sought her but he did not find her. He rose and went the rounds of the city. In the streets and the squares he sought her but he did not find her. He called her and she did not answer. The watchmen met him and struck him and wounded him and took away his cloak, and he was faint with love. His love was a strong as death (to which in the fullness of time it led him), his passion as cruel as the grave (in which in the fullness of time it laid him). No water could quench his love, no floods sweep it away; it was fiercer than any flame. And he did not rouse her or disturb her until she was ready. Then, and only then, when she was ready, did he come out into the open and show himself like a gazelle, a young wild goat on the spice-bearing mountain, the hill of Golgotha, the place of the Skull.. He did not rouse her or disturb his love until she was ready. For many centuries she was not ready. She was a little sister who had no breasts, so the bridegroom bided his time. He bided his time until that moment when she could cry out in pride and happiness: “I am a wall and my breasts are like towers, so in his eyes I am as one who brings contentment” . At last she was ready. At last she could say “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” (6.3), which surely must be the boldest and proudest and most incredible claim ever made. The creature claims the Creator as its possession. It was the fullness of time when God could consummate union with his people. “O the depths of the wealth and the wisdom and the knowledge in God” (Rom.11.33).

This was in a way the first self-emptying and incarnation of God --when God emptied himself, submitted himself to a portrayal of himself as human. He let himself be portrayed as the human lover accepting all the indignities a lover might endure in pursuit of the girl he loves. Israel used its God. Israel even abandoned its God, its tribal god, when another one, a golden calf for instance, looked more attractive, richer, more powerful, a bull-calf before which they prostrated themselves and to it made sacrifices (Ex. 32.8). She flaunted herself like a Jezabel. His anger at his rejection was so immense he was on the verge of rejecting her forever until the pleas of Moses, like the man from Relate, made him relent (ibid. v19-14).That’s how low God brought himself –to be described in such a way.. God the Creator, who brought things into existence, which is impossible to grasp, everything, and holds them in existence, which is impossible to grasp, submitted to being described throughout all Old Testament times as a human lover: passionate, angry, jealous, vengeful, in a way foolishly loyal to the nth degree. And patient. O, so very very patient. Long-suffering to a fault. This God, this Almighty Being, this Eternal Being, allows us to put words of extreme pathos into his mouth: “My people. What have you done to me? Answer me”. The lover shut out of the house, weeping at the door, rejected, totally forlorn, humiliated, with the street looking on.

What an incarnation this was! God was made flesh all right. Israel “sprawled in promiscuous vice on all the hill tops, under every spreading tree” (Jer. 2. 20) –it could hardly be put more graphically than that. “Look up at the high places and see: Where have you not been ravished? You sat by the wayside to catch lovers, like an Arab lurking in the desert and you defiled the land with your fornication and wickedness”.[1] And still this God pleaded with her: “Come back to me, apostate Israel” (3.12). “How long”, he asks, his voice breaking with the pain of rejection, “how long will you delay?” (13.27). How long does a man keep banging on the door before rejection and public humiliation make him turn away? In this case he did not turn away, not even when they led him to Golgotha, the place of the Skull, the spice-bearing mountain, and crucified him. Without their infidelity we would not have been healed. Theirs was a ‘felix culpa’ indeed. “Because they offended, salvation has come to the Gentiles” Rom. 11.11.

The Old Testament is the story of a love affair written, not by the lover but by the beloved. God never wrote a single word. Every letter, every line, every page, every book, was written by, and only by, the people he loved. It is their record.

But Jeremiah tells us he wrote what the Lord told him to write, or better, to say what the Lord told him to say. “Then the Lord stretched out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me: I put my words into your mouth. This day I give you authority over nations and over kingdoms, to pull down and to uproot, to destroy and to demolish, to build and to plant...This is the very word of the Lord” (1.9f&19). But how can that possibly be? Take this passage: “I will make Jerusalem a heap of ruins, a haunt of wolves, and the cities of Judah an unpeopled waste. What man is wise enough to understand this, to understand what the Lord has said and to proclaim it? Why has the land become a dead land, scorched like the desert and untrodden? The Lord said, it is because they forsook my law which I set before them; they neither obeyed me nor conformed to it.....I will feed this people with wormwood and give them bitter poison to drink. I will scatter them among the nations whom neither they nor their forefathers have known. I will harry them with the sword until I have made an end of them. These are the words of the Lord of Hosts” (Jer.11-17). Such violence and slaughter attributed to God are on every page of Jeremias. The nations of Egypt, Philistine, Moab, Edom, the Arabs and Babylon are threatened with violent punishment for actions which in reality were no worse than those of Israel against the original occupants of Canaan. Chapter 51.20-24 may be tremendous oratory but ethically its content is downright abysmal.

The opening claim of Jeremiah (1.19) is “This is the very word of God”. But in all honesty how can it be? If we read 9.24 as Christian in its theology we might detect a notion of God which we can endorse: “For I am the Lord. I show unfailing love. I do justice and right upon the earth”. We cannot however read it that way. Jeremiah was not a Christian preacher, prophet or theologian. His religion was Judaism. What else could it be? His theology was tribal. His god was Israel’s god. His God’s unfailing love was for Israel. The justice and right which his God does upon the earth is whatever favours Israel, to which his God subordinates every other people. So when in 51.56 Jeremiah calls God “The Lord, a god of retribution”, who “will repay in full” there is no contradiction with his claim that God’s love is unfailing. God’s love in Jeremiah’s tribal theology has a very narrow focus. It is focussed on Israel only. The immense tragedy of the history of the Jews is that they’ve never got past that tribal theology. They have not arrived at the insight of one of their own, the apostle Peter, that God has no favourites, an insight the tortuous journey of which the Acts record, an insight which in the light of Jewish history was an incredible achievement. Jeremiah claimed of what he preached “This is the very word of the Lord” (1.19). It just wasn’t in the way he meant it. It just couldn’t be.

God drew his people to himself, drawing them with the cords of Adam. He worked with his people as he found them. He did not force the pace. Jeremiah is a raging furnace of faith in his people’s God. Nothing less. The fire of his faith burns everything in sight. It is the scorching light he turns on every facet of the history of his people. God couldn’t turn Jeremiah into a theologian of the 21^st century denouncing the murderous barbarities of the Davids and Samsons and Joshuas of Israel as unethical –not without turning him into a robot, divorcing him totally from his natural self. Jeremiah’s God was the one true God. Jeremiah in many grave ways misunderstood and misrepresented the one true God. His prophecies are a mixture of truth and error –divine truth, human error.

What makes the Bible the Word of the one true God is not that it contains no error. It contains lots of errors. Some of them grave theological errors. Some of them grave ethical errors. What makes the Bible the Word of God is that it is the book of God’s Chosen People. It was with the people of Israel that he spoke in a special way which ultimately was Christ the Word made flesh. No other people was so favoured. “All nations shall pray to be blessed as your descendants are blessed because you have obeyed me” God said to their father Abraham (Gen.22.18). It is their record of their relationship with the one true God. It is their record of God interacting with them, guiding them, staying with them, keeping faith with them no matter what, never never letting go of them, loving them, sticking by them no matter what: from Ur of the Chaldees in poor bombed strife-torn Iraq, to Canaan, to Egypt, through the desert, to Canaan, to Assyria, to Babylon and back again to the Holy Land where “Mary bore Jesus” as the carol says “our Saviour for to be”. Israel was the first born of the whole family of nations. And will ever be. “God’s choice stands” says St. Paul (Rom.11.28). No matter how barbaric they behave now they are back in the Holy Land, no matter how brutally their treatment of the Palestinians, he will not let them go. “They are his friends forever for the sake of the patriarchs” (ibid). As Paul says in this same passage, it is an unfathomable and unsearchable mystery. Just as the love of God for all mankind (ibid.v.32) is totally unfathomable, immeasurable, and infinitely reliable. “God has no favourites” said Peter (Acts10.34). The parable of the Prodigal Son has like all parables levels of meaning and application.

Might I repeat what I have said, that what makes the Bible the Word of God is not that it contains no errors, ethical or theological, but the fact that is the book of God’s Chosen People, old and new. They wrote it. God did not write a single word. It is their book and they are God’s people. Because it is their book, it is God’s book. “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine”. The two have become one flesh, the Body of Christ.

In this way we might understand the scriptures. We the Church are the Body of Christ as from the Upper Room at Pentecost when we were filled by the Spirit of Truth. We are a faith community. Our faith is not in a book but in Christ. No books can encompass our faith. “There is much else that Jesus did. If it were all recorded in detail, I suppose the whole world could not hold the books that would be written” (Jn.21.25). We are not a ‘people of the book’ no more than the Jewish people were. It was not texts that made them God’s people but it was God who made them his people. They were what they were by God’s choice. Nothing else. “The Lord cared for your forefathers in his love for them and chose their descendants after them. Out of all the nations you were his chosen people as you are to this day” (Deut.10.15). “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you” (Jn. 15.15).

God chose us. God chose to redeem us. God chose to teach us his truth. Not in a book or through a book but through the Spirit of Truth that inhabits and informs the Body of Christ. It is not as individuals that we are taught but within the Body of Christ that is the Church. It was not to individuals that Christ spoke when he said “The word you hear is not mine; it is the word of the Father who sent me. I have told you all this while I am still here with you. But your Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in name, will teach you everything (‘panta’ –everything!) and will call to mind all that I have told you” (Jn.14.24-26). It was to his disciples as a body, an ‘ekklhsia’, a community, gathered around him. It was not a text or a book that Christ promised. It was his Spirit. That crucially is what revelation is. That Spirit was sent to men and women, not into a book. “But when your Advocate has come, whom I will send from the Father –the Spirit of truth that issues from the Father –he will bear witness to me” (Jn.15.26).

The Church was founded when the Spirit descended -“a strong driving wind, which filled the whole house where they were sitting…. tongues like flames of fire, dispersed among them and resting on each one” (Acts 2.1ff) on the Day of Pentecost, Whit Sunday. That was the decisive event for the Church collectively and individually–for “the whole house” (olon ton oikon) and for “each one” (ef ena ekaston autwn). The Church became the Church of the Spirit of Christ. That dictated the total outlook, the total understanding of itself. And for that reason the very first description of Jesus in the very first gospel, that of Mark, the very first statement of the faith of the Church, is of Jesus in relation to the Spirit. Our very, their very, first description of Jesus is a person who baptises with the Spirit (1.8) while John baptises only with water; on whom the Spirit descends as in the form of a dove, to shows that Jesus is ‘mightier’ than John and someone very special indeed, on whom God’s favour rests (1.10); and who is sent immediately by the Spirit into the wilderness (1.12). What Christ is his Body is, of the Spirit.

It was a wild and tempestuous day, that Whit Sunday, when the Spirit took hold of the first Christians and filled their minds and imagination with an intoxicating new wine and made them throw caution to the winds and do strange and daring things. The imprint on the mind of the Early Church was an all-influencing and indelible imprint. It was a theology of the Spirit. That experience, that theology, permeated and impacted on their whole outlook and understanding of what it was to be a Christian –“a child of God, not born of any human stock or by the fleshly desire of a human father, but the offspring of God himself” (Jn.1.13), baptised with the Holy Spirit (Mk.1.8). The body of Christ is a community or gathering or ‘whole house’ where, like Christ himself in the Church’s own very first account of him, literally on its very first page, the Spirit rests.

We are a community of faith. We make up the fellowship of the faithful, the believers. That faith is handed on to each new member of the community of the faithful. “And you also are my witnesses because you have been with me from the first” (Jn.15.27). As the Father sent Christ, Christ sent his disciples. We know our faith as Christ knew himself and his father. As his body we possess his Spirit, the Sprit that proceeds from the Father, the Spirit of Truth (Jn.14.17). What matters is the faith, the truth that Christ has taught about God -Father, Son and Spirit- in toto held and preserved by the Church the Body of Christ through the working of the Spirit of Truth. In part that faith is expressed by the Church in its writings. Pre-eminent and most venerated among the written expression of its faith are those writings the Church decided constitute the canon of the New Testament. In them, as in a mirror, the Church recognised itself. They did not compose themselves. They are not a sort of Koranic text composed in heaven by God himself as from eternity as Moslems believe, communicated into Mohammad’s consciousness by an angel without even the tiniest human participation (which is the Islamic understanding of the divine-human relationship and as a consequence the Islamic model of civic and social relationships). They are human documents. God did not write one single word or line or phrase. Members of the community of faith under the guidance of ‘the Spirit of Truth’ wrote them.

So how do we deal with them? We look to the Sermon on the Mount to see how the Apostolic Church dealt with the Word of God. It is as the Body of Christ inhabited by his Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, that we deal with them, to bind and to loose.