What do atheist skeptics and liberal Scripture scholars have in common? They both love to find alleged “contradictions” in Scripture. Though there are many of these alleged “contradictions,” one of the favorites of both of these camps is one that you can expect to find being re-hashed again and again on the Internet:—especially now that we are approaching Christmas—the “contradictions” found in what are commonly referred to as “the infancy narratives” of St. Matthew and St. Luke.

The late Fr. Raymond Brown, S.S., for example, who definitely made positive contributions to biblical study in the Church, also made some not-so-good contributions. In his book, The Birth of the Messiah, p. 46, for example, he flatly declares the two infancy narratives “are contrary to each other.”

Oy vey!

So What Gives?

The two “infancy narratives” are found in Luke 2:1-39 and Matthew 1:18-2:23. We’ll use St. Luke’s account as our beginning point of reference and from there we’ll move forward inserting the alleged “contradictions” as we go.

I’ll give you a very important pointer here at the outset for clarity’s sake: keep your eyes on the words I put in bold print as I lay out the narrative for St. Matthew and St. Luke's Gospels. These are the problem areas. And also keep in mind that these problems are not created by the texts of Scripture. They are created in the imaginations of those creating the so-called “contradictions.” Here we go:

According to St. Luke’s account, Mary and Joseph traveled from Nazareth to Bethlehem because of the census called for by Caesar Augustus. It would be there that Mary “gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger…” (2:1-7) Are we good, so far?

Well, maybe not!

According to St. Matthew’s Gospel, there is no account of a journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. And this is true. But skeptics claim St. Matthew portrays the Holy Family to have been living in Bethlehem, not Nazareth. There would have been no way for there to have even been a journey to Bethlehem if Matthew’s scenario were true. The Holy Family was already there!

Moreover, Jesus is not found in St. Luke’s “manger,” but Matthew 2:11 says the Wise Men found him in a “house” in Bethlehem where the Holy Family was not staying in the Inn—or more precisely, the manger attached to an Inn—that we find in Luke’s Gospel. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is depicted as being born in the family home of Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem where they had lived all along, contradicting St. Luke’s account. Herein we find the first of these narratives’ supposed irreconcilable contradictions.

A Biblical Response:

There are two crucial assumptions made here that have nothing to do with the actual text of Scripture.

1. Because there is “no account of a journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem” in St. Matthew’s Gospel, this does not mean St. Matthew’s Gospel excludes it as a possibility. It doesn’t. It just means St. Matthew chose not to mention it.

2. And this is the most crucial error that, when understood properly, will end up dispelling most of the misconstrued contradictions we find out and about in cyberspace. The assumption is made that St. Matthew’s recording of the Wise Men following the star leads them to the Holy Family at the time of Jesus’ actual birth, and in Bethlehem. But the text does not actually say this.

Let me explain.

First, let’s look at Matthew 2:1:

"Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, Wise Men from the East came to Jerusalem…"

Critics nearly unanimously interpret this to mean that St. Matthew is claiming the Wise Men arrived in Bethlehem at the time Christ was born. The truth is: it doesn’t say that. It simply says Christ was born during the days of King Herod and that the Wise Men came in those days to see—as they themselves asked upon their arrival in Jerusalem—where they could find “he who has been born king of the Jews” (Matt. 2:2).Matthew 2:1-2 does not specify how much time had transpired since the actual birth of Jesus.

However, having said that, though Matthew 2:1-2 doesn’t specify the time of Christ’s birth, we do have clues elsewhere that indicate the Wise Men did not arrive at the time Christ was actually born; rather, one to as much as two years later.

Little Drummer Boy History

I know what you’re thinking. Or, at least, what you should be thinking. I love “The Little Drummer Boy,” too! (Yes, that was said “tongue and cheek,” folks!) My family and I watch it every year at Christmas! And multiple times (we have the DVD).

(It's great having young children in the house. It gives me an excuse to watch all those kid-oriented Christmas specials!)

But unfortunately, “The Little Drummer Boy,” as well as a whole slew of atheists and liberal theologians, has his (and their) time-line all wrong here. Perhaps there is a lesson here about getting one’s theology, or history, through children’s Claymation television shows?

At any rate, the Nativity is commonly portrayed with Magi, Shepherds, and yes, maybe even the little drummer boy, all together at the manger with the Holy Family and the new-born baby Jesus. But that is not the way the Bible portrays it.

First of all, when the Magi “saw his star” in the East that indicated the birth of the “king of the Jews,” it was only then that they began their journey to Israel, according to Matthew 2:2. And remember, this was before you could jump on a commuter jet. Coming from Persia, most likely, they would have had to travel around 970 miles to get to Jerusalem. At least, that’s the distance from modern Tehran, anyway. Even if you move eastward as far as modern Bagdad as their starting point, they would have still had to travel at least 500 miles.

Why is this significant?

Matthew 2:3-7 tells us that after the Wise Men arrived in Jerusalem and began asking about the location of  “he who has been born king of the Jews” (notice, they did not say “new-born king” as many assume, they said, “he who has been born king of the Jews…”), Herod was troubled, for obvious reasons. He was corrupt and didn’t want another “king” to threaten his position of power. So, after “assembling all of the chief priests, and scribes” (v. 4), and asking them where the Messiah was to be born, they informed him of Micah’s prophecy (Micah 5:2) that foretold Bethlehem as the birthplace of the coming king. Herod then decided to pretend he was interested in welcoming, and worshipping, this new “king of Israel” just as the Magi were. He really wanted to find out precisely where this king was located, so he could eliminate the threat… permanently.

But notice what Matthew 2:7 says:

"Then Herod summoned the Wise Men secretly and ascertained from them what time the star appeared, and he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him bring me word, that I too may come and worship him.”"

Herod wanted to know “when the star appeared” so he could know the approximate age of the child. This indicates that the star appeared to the Magi when Jesus was born, before their journey to Israel. This eliminates the possibility of the Magi meeting the shepherds and the Holy Family at the manger.

Moreover, after God warned the Magi “not to return to Herod” in Matthew 2:12, and Herod later realizes they were not coming back to give him his desired information about the location of Jesus, in 2:16, “in a rage” he determined to “kill all of the children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the Wise Men" (emphasis added).

Thus, if we allow for Herod hedging his bet to make sure he kills the right child, the information he garnered from the Magi would probably have placed the birth of Christ at about a year or so before the Magi’s arrival. Herod would probably want a cushion on each side of the approximate time of Christ’s birth.

Most importantly, this would indicate Christ would have been 1 to at most 2 years-old (though I would again say it would be unlikely Christ would have been a full two years-old) at the time the Wise Men arrived in Jerusalem to find the Christ-child. This would have been 1 to 2 years after the nativity of St. Luke’s Gospel.

Many will say at this point that a journey of 500 to 1,000 miles would not take that long. If you say the caravan of the Wise Men could travel about 5 to 10 miles per day, it would have taken anywhere from two to seven months of travel. This is true, but this does not take into account many variables. You didn’t just jump into a car or airplane and go. It would have taken time to plan the trip, gather supplies, security, etc. These and more contingencies are simply not revealed to us in the text. But we do get hints here about what Herod concluded from his personal interview of the Magi themselves. The text of Scripture indicates it was the Magi that revealed the time of Christ's birth to have been long before the Magi's arrival in Nazareth.

Check Your Assumptions at the Door

Once we get the above timeline right, the “contradictions” between “infancy narratives” are not so contradictory any longer. We are not going to get to all of the “contradictions” claimed, but as one other example, the claim is also made that when the Wise Men were sent to Bethlehem by Herod, then that would naturally have been where they ended up finding the Holy Family when they arrive at the place “where the child was” in Matthew 2:9. This is the foundation for the “contradiction” between St. Luke’s “manger” and St. Matthew’s “house,” and more. The problem is: the text doesn’t say the Wise Men actually found the Christ-child in Bethlehem. This is another non-biblical assumption.

In fact, Matthew 2:9 tells us that after Herod ordered the Magi to go to Bethlehem, it would be the miraculous star that would actually guide them to Christ. The text doesn’t explicitly say this, but we can reasonably assume the star would not lead them to the wrong location! If the Wise Men would have then headed to Bethlehem, the Holy Family would have been long gone. The star would have led them to Nazareth, where, St. Luke tells us, in 2:39, “[the Holy Family] returned,” but only after “they had performed everything according to the law of the Lord.”

Back to St. Luke’s Gospel

It is crucial to understand that other than the mention of Christ’s actual birth in Matthew 2:1, there is no overlap with Luke’s infancy narrative and Matthew’s. Here’s a time-line:

Matthew 2:1 mentions Christ’s actual birth in Bethlehem. This sole overlap parallels Luke 2:6-7.

But because we know St. Matthew’s Gospel then leaps forward to the story of the Magi, one to at most two years after Christ’s birth, the story of the shepherd and the angels finding Christ in Bethlehem in Luke 2:8-20, the circumcision of Christ while the Holy Family was still in Bethlehem in Luke 2:21, the “Presentation of the Lord” in the temple of Luke 2:22-36 (a six-mile trip that would take the better part of a day to walk), and the “return to Nazareth” of Luke 2:39, all happen within about 40 or so days after Christ’s birth, and long before the Magi arrive at Nazareth in search of the “king of Israel.”

With this in mind, we can now eliminate the above-mentioned “contradictions” quite easily:

1. The “home” in Matthew 2:11 does not conflict with the “manger” in Luke 2:7. The “home” was in Nazareth where the Holy Family had traveled well over a year before the coming of the Magi.

2. Matthew’s Gospel never actually says the “home” mentioned in 2:11 was in Bethlehem.

3. The Wise Men were “sent” to Bethlehem by Herod, but the text never says that is where they ended up. We know, in fact, they would have ended up in Nazareth where Christ actually was, not Bethlehem.

Another Assumption Exploded

As I said above, in this brief post, we are not going to eliminate all of the errors that are out there claiming contradictions between the infancy narratives. In fact, there are some who argue for contradictions even within the narratives themselves. But if you keep in mind the historical timeline laid out here, you can deal with most of the claimed anomalies.

Here is one final example:

Matthew 2:23 tells us the Holy Family never went to live in Nazareth until after the coming of the Magi and the flight into Egypt. It was only then, the text says, “[Joseph and the Holy Family] went and dwelt in a city called Nazareth.” Yet, St. Luke says, it was after the 40 days of purification after the birth of Christ that “[the Holy Family] returned into Galilee, to… Nazareth.”

Actually, Matthew 2:23 does not say the Holy Family “first” went to Nazareth after the flight into Egypt. That is another unbiblical assumption. After being warned by God to flee Herod’s wrath and travel to Egypt in Matthew 2:13-14, and then after being told by an angel of the Lord to return to Israel, in Matthew 2:20, it appears St. Joseph’s desire was to go back to his family’s native Bethlehem in Judea, but because Herod’s son, Archela’us, was reigning there, “he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream” he went to Nazareth instead (Matthew 2:22-23).

We have to remember that the inspired authors place emphases on particular aspects of the life of Christ and the Holy Family for particular theological reasons. St. Matthew is writing to a Jewish Christian community; thus, he emphasizes both Christ’s birth in Bethlehem to fulfill the Old Testament prophecy of Micah 5:2 (Matthew 2:5-6), and the fulfillment of the Oral Tradition, or word “spoken by the prophets,” that Christ would be “called a Nazarene” (Matthew 2:23). St. Luke, the only inspired Evangelist who was also a Gentile, did not seem as interested in pointing those things out.

For St. Matthew’s purpose, it would not suffice for him to simply mention Jesus' brief sojourn in Bethlehem as an infant and toddler; he had to be raised in Nazareth in order to be “called a Nazarene.” Thus, the emphasis of St. Matthew is on Christ and the Holy Family coming to Nazareth where Christ would be raised in order to fulfill the prophecy “spoken by the prophets” (Matthew 2:23). But he never says this was the “first” time they had been there.

Final Thought

There is much more to be done here—multiple alleged “contradictions” to clear up. But to do that, we must establish a true context for Scripture free from assumptions that don’t jive with the entirety of the text.
 
 
Originally appeared at Catholic Answers. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Wikimedia)

American Atheists responded to the Pennsylvania state legislature’s designation of 2012 as “Year of the Bible” with mocking billboards, and a press release insisting that “the House of Representatives should not be celebrating a barbaric and Bronze Age book.” It’s a common argument against the Bible, that it can’t be trusted because it’s a book from the Bronze Age. Over on Twitter, Richard Dawkins extended this argument to attack both the Bible and the Qu’ran.

Bible and Quran were the best that Bronze Age desert tribes could do. But we’ve moved on. And even at the time, others were doing it better.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) May 17, 2015

Factually, the argument is wide of the mark. Despite its name, the Bible isn’t a book, but a collection of books, the majority of which were written several centuries after the Bronze Age. (The New Testament is closer in age to the foundation of the University of Paris in the High Middle Ages than it is to the close of the Bronze Age in c. 1200 B.C.). Historical inaccuracies aside, Dawkins' argument relies upon a sort of genetic fallacy, the assumption that certain beliefs can be proven false simply because they’re old. But this assumption doesn’t withstand scrutiny. We don’t reason, for example, that murder must be okay simply because people have always thought it was wrong.

Furthermore, this Bronze Age argument is circular. It assumes that the Bible is wrong because it was written by ignorant people. But this assumes, in turn, that the human authors of Scripture were limited to the knowledge otherwise attainable at that time and place, the very question in dispute in debating the authenticity of the Bible. In other words, the strength of this argument relies upon a prior assumption that the Bible is wrong – for example, in its claim to divine inspiration – and concluding from this that the Bible is wrong.

Curiously, in characterizing the Scriptural authors as ignorant and uneducated, American Atheists finds an unlikely ally: Saint Luke, the author of the Book of Acts. In Acts 4:13, he says that when the Jewish Temple authorities “saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they wondered; and they recognized that they had been with Jesus.” Luke doesn’t sugarcoat the truth. Peter and John, who together authored seven of the 27 books of the New Testament, were uneducated commoners. But rather than a cause for arrogant dismissal, this should lead us, as it did the Temple authorities, to a state of wonder. If the human authors of Scripture were “Bronze Aged” ignoramuses, how do we account for the credibility of the Apostles’ testimony?

Recall that the Bible isn’t, as American Atheists suggests, a single book. Instead, it’s a collection of centuries worth of religious texts, including centuries worth of Messianic prophecies. This means that, unlike the Qu’ran or the Book of Mormon, the prophecies and the accounts of the fulfillment of these prophecies aren’t coming from the same sources. This makes it all the more remarkable that the life of Jesus Christ so neatly fits the time and place foretold by the Jewish prophets.

For example, the Book of Daniel foretold that “the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed” during the fourth kingdom after the then-reigning Babylonians, a timeline corresponding with the Roman Empire. The Book of Micah specifies that the Messiah will come from Bethlehem, and be of the tribe of Judah. The Books of Malachi and Haggai prophesied that the Second Temple of Jerusalem (destroyed in 70 A.D.) would be greater than the First Temple because the Lord Himself would enter it. And Psalm 22 depicted the Messiah as being executed by having his hands and feet pierced, a description eerily reminiscent of Crucifixion, despite having been written several centuries prior to its invention.

Christ meets all of these criteria: no small feat, given that none of these factors involved events within the Apostles’ control. He rose to prominence from a very particular part of the world, within a very particular time frame. A generation after His death, the Second Temple, so central to the Malachi and Haggai prophecies, was permanently destroyed. Nevertheless, these prophecies might serve as a baseline, of sorts. Anyone claiming to be the Messiah would need, at the very least, to meet these criteria. But the Apostolic message is profound, in that it goes beyond claiming that Christ fulfilled these explicit prophecies.

Instead, they view Him as so much more, as the key to revealing the deepest meanings of Scripture as a whole: “beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). Countless passages which, on face, don’t even appear prophetic are revealed to have a Christological dimension. To take a single example, consider John 19:32-34, “So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first, and of the other who had been crucified with him; but when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water.”

In verse 36, John explains that this “fulfilled” the Scripture saying that not one of his bones would be broken. But that doesn’t come from an obvious Messianic prophecy; it comes from the instructions for preparing the Passover Lamb. And the water that streams out alongside the blood isn’t just a sign that Christ’s body has ceased metabolism. It’s a fulfillment of the Temple prophecies in Ezekiel. The last several chapters of the Book of Ezekiel describe a miraculous Temple from the side of which will flow life-giving waters. In John 2:21, John explains that this Temple is Jesus’ Body, and Christ applies the life-giving waters prophecy specifically in John 7:38.

This, in turn, points to the Sacramental theology latent in this passage: the life-giving waters flowing from the side of Christ signify Baptism, just as the blood signifies the Eucharist. These two Mysteries together form the Church, revealing yet another sets of Scriptures which are fulfilled: “As Eve was formed from the sleeping Adam’s side, so the Church was born from the pierced heart of Christ hanging dead on the cross” (CCC 766). In a single event, we see the meanings of several parts of Scripture, from the story of Adam and Eve to the Passover ordinances to the Temple prophecies, revealed in a radical new light as prophetic of the Messiah. Unlike the explicit Messianic prophecies, these weren’t predictions that the Apostles “had” to show as fulfilled in order to present Jesus as the Christ. And yet the Gospels are filled with events like this one, each one chock full of meaning and Scriptural significance.

Now perhaps this could be the work of a literary genius, who found a way to take the whole Jewish religious tradition, set it in the context of a single (real or fictional) human life, and combine the various prophecies and literary elements like so many instruments in an orchestra. But of course, the New Testament is no more the work of a single author than is the Old Testament, and we know from Roman sources like Pliny and Tatian that there were already Christians followers in the 50s and 60s A.D., before most of the New Testament (including the Gospels) was written. So the skeptic is left positing, not a single genius, but a cabal of geniuses, conspiring to craft a false Messianic narrative for reasons not immediately apparent. (This is precisely the direction skeptical Biblical scholarship has gone, creating ever-more complex theories about the textual origins of the Bible,)

But even if you’re willing to accept that sort of theory, it’s squarely contradicted by the charge of Bronze Age barbarism. You can’t simultaneously write off the Scriptural authors as halfwits and as too clever by half. The Bible can be primitive nonsense, or it could be an elaborate fraud, but it can’t very well be both. If Richard Dawkins, the American Atheists, and St. Luke are right that many of the writers of the New Testament were simple, uneducated folk, then it’s hard to explain away the literary genius of the New Testament as anything less than Divine inspiration.
 
 
(Image credit: The Guardian)

My previous post at Strange Notions underscored the often-unacknowledged philosophical premises at work when believers and non-believers sit down to debate about things biblical. In the course of my argument, I pointed to a possible area of common ground for Catholics and agnostics/atheists. A survey of statements by thinkers as different as Benedict XVI and Bart Ehrman reveals an important agreement upon the reality that everyone carries their own philosophical presuppositions and that a purely objective consideration of Jesus’ miracles is therefore impossible. Today I would like to carry forward this discussion. By way of doing this, I will first briefly summarize Bart Ehrman’s position on Jesus’ divinity and resurrection. Then I will critique what I consider to be an insufficient (but very common) Christian response to the skeptic’s position. Finally, I will dwell upon a couple keys given by C.S. Lewis and Pope Benedict XVI which point out from a Christian perspective the direction a philosophical dialogue about miracles needs to head.

Ehrman on Jesus’ Divinity and the Failure of the “Trilemma” Argument

Ehrman’s position concerning the divinity of Christ can be quickly grasped from his evaluation of C.S. Lewis’ famous “trilemma” argument. According to Lewis, Jesus’ lordship can be shown by reducing to the absurd the possibility that he was either a liar or a lunatic. But in Jesus Interrupted, Ehrman reveals a problem with Lewis’ logic:

"I had come to see that the very premise of Lewis’s argument was flawed. The argument based on Jesus as liar, lunatic, or Lord was predicated on the assumption that Jesus had called himself God…I had come to realize that none of our earliest traditions indicates that Jesus said any such thing about himself…not three options but four: liar, lunatic, Lord, or legend."

At the risk of oversimplifying Ehrman’s more lengthy narrative, his position is that Jesus’ disciples began to profess his divinity only after they experienced him as risen from the dead. According to Ehrman’s analysis of the data in How Jesus Became God, the earliest Christian sources (Paul and Mark) do not portray Jesus as divine but rather as an exalted human or an angel. While Jesus certainly existed as a historical person, for Ehrman he is nevertheless a “legend” in that he was not divine as Christians subsequently came to believe.

Ehrman on Jesus’ Resurrection

One of the interesting features of Ehrman’s work is that he affirms at least some direct followers of Jesus sincerely believed their master had been raised from the dead. He suggests that “three or four people—though possibly more—had visions of Jesus sometime after he died.” Ehrman states that the question of whether these putative experiences were veridical (i.e. whether Jesus was really there or whether they were hallucinatory bereavement visions) is beside his point. Rather, the claim he puts forth is the following:

"[A]nyone who was an apocalyptic Jew like Jesus’s closest follower Peter, or Jesus’s own brother James, or his later apostle Paul, who thought that Jesus had come back to life, would naturally interpret it in light of his particular apocalyptic worldview— a worldview that informed everything that he thought about God, humans, the world, the future, and the afterlife. In that view, a person who was alive after having died would have been bodily raised from the dead, by God himself, so as to enter into the coming kingdom."

In Ehrman’s view, then, it was the disciples’ own apocalyptic worldview (informed by Jesus’ teachings while he was alive) that led them to think of their visions of the crucified Jesus in terms of resurrection.

An Insufficient Christian Response

While the constraints of this post do not permit me to elaborate further on Ehrman’s arguments, it should be noted that they are formidable and cannot simply be written off without a robust response. For instance, I do not find satisfactory the response to this “quadrilemma” (Jesus is either a liar, lunatic, lord, or legend) in Kreeft and Tacelli’s Handbook of Christian Apologetics. With due respect to these thinkers whom I deeply admire (and who have likely provided more solid arguments in other texts outside of the present one), I think their response to the “legend” issue unfortunately evinces a rather common but simplistic understanding of the biblical evidence. The authors state that our extant biblical manuscripts contain “very few discrepancies and no really important ones,” but I think Ehrman’s books Misquoting Jesus, How Jesus Became God, and Jesus, Interrupted sufficiently disabuse one of the notion that the Gospels only differ in accidentals such as order and number. And Ehrman is by no means the only author who writes about this sort of thing; he is popularizing information that biblical scholars already know.

Moreover,Kreeft and Tacelli argue, “If a mythic ‘layer’ had been added later to an originally merely human Jesus, we should find some evidence, at least indirectly and secondhand, of this earlier layer.” Here I think the authors have an unduly narrow view of “myth,” and moreover I think they fail to anticipate the obvious response of a bible scholar like Ehrman. What might he say? The evidence for this earlier, non-mythical layer is right there in front of us: it is the Gospel of Mark, whom scholars by and large recognize to be the first gospel composed.

Finally, the authors of the Handbook ask who possibly could have invented such a myth about Jesus. I think they are on to something in remarking, “No one invents an elaborate practical joke in order to be crucified, stoned, or beheaded.” Ehrman agrees to some extent with this insofar as he does not seem to think that the disciples maliciously invented the myth of a divine Jesus. (Remember, in Ehrman’s view at least some of the disciples really thought they saw Jesus alive after his death, and it is this that eventually led them to conclude he was divine). The authors fail to envision this sort of counter-argument when they claim, “Whether it was his first disciples or some later generation, no possible motive can account for this invention.” It is indeed difficult for a Christian to imagine someone inventing the notion that Jesus was divine, but is it fair to say that “no possible motive” could account for this? Couldn’t the disciples themselves have been delusional, as Ehrman seems to suggest? Or couldn’t they have been using the “risen” Jesus as a power play for their own (ultimately unsuccessful) personal ambitions? Now as a believer I am certainly not saying that this is what actually happened, but one cannot properly call it an impossible scenario.

Where the Discussion Ought to Head: C.S. Lewis on Miracles

While C.S. Lewis may not have hit a home run with his “trilemma” argument in defense of Christ’s divinity, I think that his book Miracles is invaluable for those who wish to profess the divinity of Jesus in the face of modern biblical criticism. Lewis begins by arguing along the same lines of Benedict XVI and Ehrman as discussed in my previous post. He correctly observes that the real issue at hand is a philosophical one: “The difficulties of the unbeliever do not begin with questions about this or that particular miracle; they begin much further back.” For Lewis the miracles question boils down to whether or not the natural world we know is the only reality that exists. Looked at from another angle, this is the same as asking whether or not the supernatural or divine exists. A negative answer to the question of the divine’s existence necessarily entails the conclusion that purported miracles such as Christ’s resurrection cannot be true.

A positive answer, on the other hand, means the following for Lewis: “If we decide that Nature is not the only thing that is, then we cannot say in advance whether she is safe from miracles or not.” In other words, if there exists a Being which/who is not limited by the confines of the natural world but is rather the very ground of this world, then we can never conclusively deny that this Being sometimes acts in a way other than that which we tend to expect based on our observations of nature. Lewis thus proposes that within the universe “there are rules behind the rules, and a unity which is deeper than uniformity.” While Christians often speak of miracles as divine “interventions,” this unfortunately appears to presuppose that God is somehow “absent” from his creation and then “intrudes” upon it to perform a miracle. But in truth, if God exists he is always present to his creation. For Lewis, then, the miracles we take to be “interruptions” of nature’s history are in reality “expressions of the truest and deepest unity in [God’s] total work.”

Even if we personally are not conscious of having experienced the miraculous, Lewis reminds us not to discount the fact that our world is full of stories of people who claim to have experienced miracles. Moreover, even if we were to live an entire millennium our experience would not necessarily inform us whether a given miracle happened. Indeed, Lewis and Ehrman both acknowledge that miracles are by definition improbable. It is always more likely that the witnesses to the alleged miracle are lying or deluded than that the miracle actually occurred. And yet, even as we know fraudulent cases exist, these by no means discredit all such claims regarding the miraculous. On this score I myself tend to be very skeptical when people talk of miraculous healings on the one hand or demonic possessions on the other. But then every once in a while I hear an account of some such phenomenon directly experienced by someone I trust and know not to be psychologically imbalanced. These are the moments that make me reconsider the possibility that maybe such things happen after all even if I (thankfully, in the case of possessions) have never directly experienced them.

At the end of the day, Lewis is right: I would be arguing in a circle if I were to conclude that miracles have not occurred merely because I have not experienced them. The bottom line for Lewis is that our experience cannot prove nature is closed, i.e. that it never admits of what from our point of view might look like “interruptions.” To be sure, living sanely in the world requires that we assume the laws of nature continue operating as we have always experienced them (We should not jump out of a boat expecting the gravity to be suspended before we sink into the sea). In fact, Lewis argues that the existence of miracles presupposes that nature is governed by laws. But this does not mean that walking on water is per se impossible. The impossibility of miracles is not something that can be proved, only assumed.

Benedict XVI and the Question of an “Open Philosophy”

I would like to conclude this post by returning to my point of departure in the previous one. In his 1988 Erasmus Lecture, the future Pope Benedict XVI poignantly wrote that “the debate about modern exegesis is not a dispute among historians: it is rather a philosophical debate.” In the course of his lecture, Benedict called for a “criticism of the criticism,” a self-critique of the modern, historical-critical method of biblical interpretation. In the course of these two posts I have attempted to carry forward this critique in one small way, identifying the presence of philosophical presuppositions we bring to our reading of the biblical text and underscoring that believing miracles to be impossible is something people can only assume, not prove.

As one who daily engages in the craft of historical-critical exegesis, I find Benedict’s comments on this subject refreshing and liberating. In contrast with a naturalist, “ready-made philosophy” that precludes the possibility of miracles, the Christian approaches the Bible with an “open philosophy” that refuses to exclude the possibility that God himself “could enter into and work in human history, however improbable such a thing might at first appear.” This posture, deeply rooted in the Catholic tradition with its conviction that the boundary of time and eternity is permeable, allows for the Bible to be what the Church has always claimed it to be: the word of God in human words.

And yet when all is said and done, Christians should beware of thinking we have definitively proven that which we hold by faith. On the basis of reason alone we cannot conclude whether the Bible is the word of God, whether a given miracle has occurred, or whether Jesus rose from the dead. The real question undergirding all these has been given to us by Lewis. It is the question of whether or not God exists, whether we have independent reasons to believe that there exists a supernatural Being beyond the natural order, a Being to whom nature owes its existence and who may act within that order in ways we do not typically expect.

Read Lewis’ Miracles attentively, and there you will find well-argued reasons to believe that the answer to the above questions is “yes.” Moreover, even if you do not agree with him, I think you will find that he provides serious arguments which call into question whether a non-theistic worldview offers an intelligible account of the world in which we live. But this post’s aim remains much more modest in focusing on just one key thought from Lewis’ book: If we admit that nature is not the only thing that is—if we come to the conclusion that theism is true—then we are not “safe” from miracles. This by no means disproves atheism or agnosticism, but at least it points out one direction our dialogue needs to go.
 
 
(Image credit: Real Clear Religion)

According to James 1:13, “Let no one say when he is tempted, 'I am tempted by God'; for God cannot be tempted with evil and he himself tempts no one.” Skeptics, aiming to disprove the Bible, may reply that God certainly does tempt people to do evil, and his actions during the Israelite's exodus from Egypt is proof of that.

Let My People Go!

 
In Exodus 3-4 God calls Moses from his life as a fugitive in Midian and tells him to return to Egypt in order to lead the Israelites to freedom. God assures Moses that he will give him help, including the support of his brother Aaron and a wooden staff capable of performing miraculous feats. This will show the Egyptians that the God of Israel means business. God then says in Exodus 4:21, “When you go back to Egypt, see that you do before Pharaoh all the miracles which I have put in your power; but I will harden his heart, so that he will not let the people go.”

Wait a minute! God says he wants to free the people of Israel and now he is saying he will cause Pharaoh to not release them. What’s going on here? First, God does not merely want to relocate the Israelites. He wants to demonstrate to the Egyptians the power and reality of the God of Israel by delivering them with “his mighty hand.”

This will compel the Egyptians to let the Israelites go of their own will and maybe even cause them to repent in the process. In fact, in Exodus 12:38 we read of a “mixed multitude” who left with the Israelites during the Exodus. This group could have included Egyptians who were convinced that the God of Israel was the real God. But why did God cause Pharaoh to “harden his heart” and not let the people go?

Who Hardened Pharaoh’s Heart?

 
Exodus 4:21 is the first time we read of how God will harden Pharaoh’s heart. In the next chapter Moses and Aaron make their demand to Pharaoh that he let the Israelites go worship in the desert. The Pharaoh not only curtly dismisses them, he demands the Israelites make bricks without straw as a punishment for their insolent request. All of this takes place without any hint of God prompting Pharaoh’s overreaction.

God then reminds Moses again in Exodus 7:3 that he will harden Pharaoh’s heart. In Exodus 7:14 and 7:22 we read that Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, although the text does not say by whom. Then, in Exodus 8:15, 8:32, and 9:34 it is revealed that Pharaoh hardened his own heart by “sinning yet again” and refusing to release the Israelites. Only as the plagues grew worse and Pharaoh became more stubborn does the text begin to say God hardened Pharaoh’s heart.

When we read that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, it is an easy mistake to assume that God did something to Pharaoh in order to cause Pharaoh’s heart to become stubborn and “hard.” But you can cause something to become hard just by leaving it alone, such as when bread is left out on the counter. It seems that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart by removing what little presence of his grace that was in Pharaoh’s heart in the first place. Pharaoh had his chance to peacefully release the Israelites, but he ignored God’s warnings and hardened his heart. This description of events, as some commenters have noted, preserves God's sovereignty. God is not thwarted by Pharaoh's obstinacy but has providentially foreseen it and uses it for the good of his people.

Stubborn Hearts

 
As a consequence of Pharaoh’s own actions, God allowed Pharaoh’s heart to reach its maximum level of stubbornness, and Israel’s freedom was purchased at a heavy price for the Egyptians. This mirrors other times when God punishes sinners not through external punishment but by letting the awful consequences of their own bad lifestyles show them the error of their ways. God even did this with Israel after the Exodus. In Psalm 81:11-14 the author describes God saying, “How my people did not listen to my voice; Israel would have none of me. So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts, to follow their own counsels. O that my people would listen to me, that Israel would walk in my ways! I would soon subdue their enemies, and turn my hand against their foes.”

In conclusion, skeptics should know that God will punish us by letting us engage in our foolish sins, but as soon as we desire to repent he will deliver us from our sins. God did the same thing for Pharaoh and allowed him to wallow in his foolish disobedience. God was not the primary cause of that disobedience and would have allowed Pharaoh to repent if Pharaoh had chosen to do that. Pharaoh’s failure to do that and not release the Israelite’s says more about his character than God’s.
 
 
Originally published at Catholic Answers. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Athena Academy)

NOTE: Over the past several months, we've had lots of combox discussion about how Catholics read and interpret the Bible. To help us all make sense of this question, we began a multi-part series on the topic. Once a week, for the next several weeks, Mark Shea will unpack how Catholics authentically read the Bible. He began with a general introduction, then he outlined three specific guidelines. Last week he launched into the three main spiritual senses (or lenses) through which Catholics interpret the Bible by focusing on the allegorical sense. Today, he'll cover the moral and next week conclude with the anagogical.

Discussing the moral sense of Scripture should seem easy. After all, we’re talking "The Good Book" here. Even when many Americans abandoned Christianity as supernatural revelation from God, they for the past couple generations still tended to treat the Bible as a solid moral code with some lingering respectability. Martin Luther King, Jr. could still appeal to it and not get hooted off the stage as recently as 40 years ago.

But the cultural consensus about the goodness of the Good Book is rapidly decaying and, for many people, it is no longer taken for granted that “the moral sense of scripture” is even a good thing. But whether they approach the Bible as the Good Book or the Bad Book, there’s one thing most of our fellow post-moderns can agree on it: it is primarily a Rule Book.

That’s just one of the many ways in which contemporary culture demonstrates its misunderstanding of Scripture. For it is not too far off the mark to say that Christ came into the world specially to destroy the notion that salvation is predicated on following the Rules and Morality.

So if the Bible is not all about law and morality, why the Ten Commandments and all the rules and regs? The basic answer of the Tradition is that laws and morality are sort of like x-rays. They are part of the healing process, but they do not heal anything. The laws and morality side of the Bible are the x-ray equipment of the Divine Physician. The law says stuff like “Don’t covet. Be generous.” and then, when you act like the squeezing, wrenching, grasping, covetous old sinner you are, you find you are breaking the law. But that’s all the law can do: tell you what’s wrong with you. It’s can’t get you an inch nearer to healing the problem with your soul once you’ve looked at the x-rays. Only Christ can do that—which is why the Bible is actually all about him, not about rules and regulations.

This does not, of course, mean Catholics say “Whee! New Testament, New Covenant! No rules! Go nuts!” It means that for us Christ is the reality while the laws, rules, and regulations of the Old Testament were, so to speak, just the shadow pointing to him. The lesson of the Old Testament, in a hundred ways, is that purity matters. And the Old Testament gets this across by making no specially strong distinctions between the “ick” created by our revulsion to sin and the “ick” created by our revulsion at eating foods that gross us out. The moral is not “God hates bacon”. The moral is “God hates sin the way you, O Israel, hate the thought of eating pork.” Eventually, once the central lesson has been learned about the sin business, Christ will make clear that we are not defiled by anything that enters the belly, but only by the evil that comes out of the heart. His solution is not “Down with rules!” but rather to give us the power to obey God and keep the law. So faith in Christ does not “free” us from obeying God, just as love does not “free” us from binding ourselves to our spouse. Rather, faith “establishes” the law of God by making us both desire to do it and able to do it.

That’s why the New Testament still commands us to do various things (starting with keeping the Ten Commandments). The point is not that the Ten Commandments will save you, but rather that saved people live as God wants them to live so that they can experience the fulness of the life of the Trinity. Living out the commands to love God and love neighbor, they will find themselves keeping the whole of the law and the prophets.

Because of this, the Church has always looked to Scripture to convey a “moral sense”: that is to communicate ways in which an authentic follower of Jesus Christ should live. This includes not merely the standard didactic moral teaching of the Judeo-Christian tradition (“Love your enemies, pay your taxes, don’t gossip, avoid impurity” etc.), but also various ways in which Christ is again “hidden” in the Old Testament.

What this presumes is that Christ teaches by means of icon as well as word. The reason the Church believes this is because Christ does, in fact, give us an example of iconographic teaching when he strips, ties a towel around his waist, and proceeds to wash the feet of the disciples on Maundy Thursday. He offers us a picture rather than a preachment and tells us to do likewise. The Church, following this clue, does what we all do when reading a familiar tale and starts seeing moral lessons elsewhere. For instance, she (like every first grader on planet earth) sees a moral lesson about courage in the face of overwhelming odds in the tale of David and Goliath. Reading the story of Daniel in the Lion’s Den, we see a moral image of the faith required by a disciple of Christ when we too are surrounded by lions of fear, despair, doubt, and discouragement. When we look at the Temple, Paul tells us that we are looking at an image of our own body and that we must not defile it. He gets that connection from his Master, who likewise said of his body, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.”

Scripture is more or less a bonanza of this sort of imagery and, again, we can ransack it at will just so long as the moral teachings we see illustrated there do not contradict what the Church teaches about, you know, morals.

Which, of course, raises a question since morals in both Scripture and in the history of the Church develop. Psalm 137 pronounces a blessing on anybody who would smash a Babylonian babies brains out on a rock. Christ? Not so much. Slavery used to be sort of reluctantly okay for Christians (cf. Philemon). Now? No.

Of course, a postmodern who is simply mining Scripture for “contradictions” will often dismiss the whole thing as rubbish. However, those in our culture who still retain something like an historical imagination will consider the possibility that precisely the problem facing the Christian description of revelation is that it involved eternity breaking into time and the Perfect revealing himself to the radically imperfect. Among other things, this means that our grasp of what God is saying to us could well take all of human history and beyond to fully see what is going on. So it would seem to me quite on the cards that when God reveals himself to a bunch of Bronze Age savages, he will likely be understood in Bronze Age savage terms involving such matters as herem—the ancient Semitic practice of slaying everybody and everything in a village as, ironically, a pious act (“See Lord! I’m keeping nothing for myself!”). One need not, I think, believe that God desires such things to see that he could use such cultural flotsam in a long-term effort (a successful one, by the way) to move Israel away from such barbarism and ultimately to the revelation of Christ, who offers Himself as a sort of burnt offering to save us from our sinful barbarism.

Because of all this, I don’t think we can embrace any of three simple solutions to the moral complexity of Scripture. That is, we cannot simply: 1) deny the inspired character of those texts of Scripture we happen to find distasteful or troubling; 2) explain away the literal sense of Scripture by allowing some symbolic reading of it to predominate; or 3) simply affirm wholesale all Old Testament morality from hamstringing horses to stoning rebellious adolescents to butchering Canaanite babies as “the will of God.” Rather, we must be very cautious in searching through Scripture for its moral sense because the morality taught by Scripture is not a static thing.

Consider a human embryo. At one point it has a tail. But the adult human doesn’t. Is it really accurate to say humans are creatures with tails? No, even though at one stage in the womb we were. The same principle applies here. Revelation progressed like a developing embryo from the Old Testament to the New. God permitted divorce under the Mosaic Covenant, for instance. Yet Jesus would later make clear that this was a permission, not “God’s will” (Mark 10:5). Similarly, God condescended to the practice of the culture to which He first revealed Himself when He “stooped down” and submitted Himself to the practice of “cutting a covenant” with Abraham by passing between the severed halves of the animal carcasses (Genesis 15). But though God blessed forms of sacrifice and covenant which were perfectly acceptable in Abraham’s day, His ultimate goal was always to lead us to the final and full sacrifice and covenant offered by Christ. In the same way, there were moral, ethical, and philosophical insights in Abraham’s day which were good as far as they went, but they have since been fulfilled and completed by the final and full revelation offered by Christ

Consider also the Jewish understanding of the afterlife. Ecclesiastes tells us that “life is vanity” and speaks in a despairing tone about the futility of earthly existence. That is because Ecclesiastes is unaware of the resurrection of the Body which was not fully revealed until later. The author is right as far as he goes. Earthly life is futile. He simply doesn’t (and can’t) go far enough without further revelation.

Bottom line: Much Old Testament morality and theology regarding war, marriage, the afterlife, justice, and so forth is true as far as it goes, but often the author has not yet gone far enough because the Holy Spirit has not yet revealed it. In the Old Testament, the Chosen People were not yet the recipients of full revelation. That full revelation was Jesus Christ, who definitively clarified all that went before and fulfilled what was not complete. This is the idea of the development of doctrine. We understand this idea completely when we contemplate our own children. There are things we permit of (and punishments we inflict on) three year olds that are appropriate for their stage of development which would be absurd to permit of (or inflict on) a 20-year-old.

In short, in revealing himself “in time and on earth” God is obliged to work through and with a people with faults, idiosyncrasies, blind spots, and errors resulting from their being as fallen as the rest of the human race. Yet he is obliged to do so, not in order to ratify the Fall, but in order to mend it. This meant, as all teachers know, making allowances for the weaknesses of the student till the student matured further. It meant facing the fact that the world into which Israel marched out of Egypt was a real world, not an ideal one, and that facing that world (a world where idolatry, wars of extermination, child sacrifice, polygamy, and other such complicating features were the norm for all participants) would mean a long, hard road to building a civilization and an even longer road to the day when the human race was ready to hear the (at the time) unimaginable truth of Christ.

Thus, to complain that God did not immediately introduce the full moral and ethical teaching of Christ into the diet of Israel is like complaining that a parent does not immediately force feed a baby sirloin steak and a bottle of wine. It is like finding fault with a kindergarten teacher for neglecting to introduce the kidlets to the inner mysteries of integral calculus, algebra, and quantum physics. As Christ taught of divorce, so it may be said of many of the moral imperfections permitted in the Old Testament: “For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment” (Mark 10:5). It was not that God changed from the Old Testament to the New. It was that we had to grow up enough to bear the full truth about him and his demands on us. Our eyes have to get used to the Light.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Exchange. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: St. George's)

NOTE: Over the past several months, we've had lots of combox discussion about how Catholics read and interpret the Bible. To help us all make sense of this question, we began a multi-part series on the topic. Once a week, for the next several weeks, Mark Shea will unpack how Catholics authentically read the Bible. He began with a general introduction, then he outlined three specific guidelines. Today he'll begin covering the three main spiritual senses (or lenses) through which Catholics interpret the Bible—allegorical, moral, and anagogical.

We noted last week that one of the principal problems of trying to treat Scripture as a purely human book is that, though God can supernaturalize nature, we cannot naturalize the supernatural. God can assume a human nature and join it to His divinity. But we cannot take a supernatural thing and reduce it to mere nature without doing it violence. We cannot reduce Jesus to a mere man, nor man to a mere animal, nor the Bible to a mere book without making incongruous claims.

Proof of this abounds. If we will not receive Scripture on its terms as the word of God, we wind up with a book that is not even human, but merely a patchwork of “sources” stitched together into something unreadable and inhuman. Similarly, natural explanations for the various miracles in Scripture must suppose that all early Christians were preternatural fools. For example, somebody theorizes that Jesus walked on ice sheets, not water, yet he doesn't wonder how professional fishermen who knew the lake like the back of their hand could not figure out that it was that cold (nor why Peter, who also walked on water, didn’t figure it out). Someone else claims that the Resurrection myth is due to ignorant women going to the wrong tomb, but nobody bothers to ask why the people who buried Jesus (or the authorities who persecuted the Church) didn’t just go to the right tomb and produce the corpse. Finally, somebody else argues that Jesus never existed, yet nobody asks why these hundreds of people ran around the first-century world dying for the testimony that they knew Him personally and why thousands and thousands more, including a lot of martyrs, never thought to question that?

I propose, therefore, taking Scripture on its terms: as the word of God. If we do this, Scripture not only makes sense as a divine book, but as a human one. Jesus no longer has to be accounted for by some Latest Real Jesus explanation. He can be the same old Jesus: the Son of God that the actual data always pointed to.

Now one of these early Christians—a gentleman named Augustine of Hippo—tells us something curious about the Bible. He says that the New Testament is hidden in the Old and the Old Testament is only fully revealed in the New. This strikes most moderns as a comment about the bizarre working of Augustine’s psychology, not as a comment about the Bible. That’s because when most of us read the Old Testament with all its battles, strange tales, thundering threats, lyrical poetry, and weird instructions for separating the fat from the kidneys of a goat, we don’t immediately see Jesus of Nazareth as particularly being on the minds of the authors. We tend to assume that Augustine is one of those Dark Ages monks who had too much time on his hands and so began to treat the Old Testament as a sort of Rorschach blot in which he imagined he saw Jesus lurking in the Old Testament the way Percival Lowell thought he saw canals on Mars.

“Now,” we moderns say confidently, “we know better.”

But, of course, by “now” we mean “in an age more biblically and historically illiterate than almost any other."

That should be our first clue that Augustine might be seeing something we are missing. The second clue comes when we look at the biblical text and find Jesus saying:

"'These are my words which I spoke to you, while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.' Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and said to them, 'Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.'" (Luke 24:44-47)

In short, Augustine and those Dark Age monks got the notion that the Old Testament was about Jesus—from Jesus. He’s the one who put it into the heads of his followers that everything written in the Old Testament was about Him.

Not that they immediately believed that. It turns out they were human beings and not cartoons of preternatural gullibility. So they initially found the suggestion that everything in their most sacred books was about Him to be as plausible as you would think it if I told you that I am the True Meaning of the Torah. In fact, so slow were they to believe this that even when they stood in the very mouth of the empty tomb, gawking at Jesus’ grave clothes, they still “did not know the scripture, that he must rise from the dead” (John 20:9). So, far from being credulous fools who believed anything, they were rather slow on the uptake—so slow, that Bible studies personally led by the Risen Christ were kind of a bust due to the thickness of the disciples’ skulls (cf. Luke 24:13-32).

So what did the trick? Well in the Catholic view, the Resurrection helped, but Scripture itself points to something else as the decisive factor: the Holy Spirit. Without the Holy Spirit, the disciples tended to regard every obvious clue God threw their way via the Scripture in much the same way that your dog sniffs your finger when you are trying to point to something. That’s because the true meaning of the Old Testament is, says St. Paul, “veiled” and the cleverest scholar is powerless to understand what it’s all really about without divine help. As Paul puts it:

"Since we have such a hope, we are very bold, not like Moses, who put a veil over his face so that the Israelites might not see the end of the fading splendor. But their minds were hardened; for to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away. Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their minds; but when a man turns to the Lord the veil is removed." (2 Cor 3:12-16)

Note how Paul practices what he preaches here. His point—just like Jesus’—is that there is a literal sense to the Old Testament, but also a more-than-literal sense that points us to Christ. This is what the Church calls the “allegorical sense” of Scripture.

The literal sense of the story of Moses’ veiled face is recounted in Exodus 34:29-35, which tells how Moses wore a veil over his radiant face after speaking with God at Sinai. Paul takes the literal sense of this story for granted—and then insists, just as Jesus does, that there is more to this story than meets the eye: that it, in fact, points to the spiritual blindness caused by a hardened heart apart from the Spirit.

This way of reading Scripture for second meanings is all over the place in the New Testament for a very good reason: it is all over the place in the teaching of Christ. Jesus habitually takes images from the Old Testament and applies them to Himself. According to Jesus, the real meaning of the Bronze Serpent, Jacob’s Ladder, the Manna in the Wilderness, the Passover, Hanukkah, the Feast of Booths, and a host of other Old Testament images, stories, and allusions is none other than—Him! It’s like He thinks He’s God or something!

Now the Catholic explanation for this is fairly straightforward: He is God. So it follows that the Word of God is His word and those images, stories and allusions aren’t there by accident, but because the divine Author is at least as competent a craftsman as Hemingway, Tolkien, or Shakespeare. He makes use of foreshadowing so that the richness of what He has to say will be available to us in its fulness. The Lamb that Moses is commanded to sacrifice by God at the first Passover is intended by God to foreshadow the Lamb of God Who will be sacrificed on Calvary at the Last Passover. The Tree of Life lost by the First Adam is not merely a coincidental reminder of the Tree of Life upon which the Last Adam hung. It’s not just a lucky break that Isaiah wrote about the Messiah as a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, or that the manna in the wilderness is reminiscent of the Eucharist. The New Testament really is hidden in the Old and the Old Testament is really looking forward to the New, because that’s what the Author of Scripture intended.

Now some may object that if you open this Pandora’s Box of the allegorical sense of Scripture, there is no way to shut it. People will turn it into a giant Rorshach Blot.

Recall the instructions we discussed last week at Strange Notions:

1. Be especially attentive “to the content and unity of the whole Scripture”;
 
2. Read the Scripture within “the living tradition of the whole Church”; and,
 
3. Be attentive to the analogy of faith.

These instructions continue to hold for Catholics. If an allegorical reading is used in Scripture, (as, for instance, when the sacred author allegorizes the meaning of the Old Testament Tabernacle in Hebrews 9) you can rely on it since the Author knows what He’s doing.

Likewise, if the Church connects the allegorical dots in the liturgy, or if a bunch of the early Church Fathers are all seeing the same connections (“Hey! The Ark of the Covenant is a foreshadow of Mary!”), then you are on safe ground.

But you can even find fruitful connections that aren’t in the Fathers or the liturgy too. The only thing the Church asks is “Don’t make allegorical connections that contradict the Church’s teaching on faith and morals.” So, for instance, pulling a Charles Manson and interpreting the Bible to mean you should murder a bunch of people in Southern California and start a race war is right out.

The point is this: reading for both the literal and the spiritual sense of Scripture is still the normative way the Church reads her Bible.

With that in mind, let’s talk next week about the moral sense of Scripture.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Exchange. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Jim Somerville)

NOTE: Over the past several months, we've had lots of combox discussion about how Catholics read and interpret the Bible. To help us all make sense of this question, we began a multi-part series on the topic. Once a week, for the next several weeks, Mark Shea will unpack how Catholics authentically read the Bible. Last week he offered a general introduction, today he outlines three specific guidelines, and next week he'll begin covering the three main spiritual senses (or lenses) through which Catholic interpret the Bible—allegorical, moral, and analogical.

For some folks, including not a few Catholics, it takes a lot to dispel the myth of the hyper-controlling Church that only permits Bible study after the insertion of the Vatican Orbital Mind Control Laser Platform chip in the frontal lobe of the brain. Indeed, it may come as a shock to such folks to discover that the Church offers Catholics only three guidelines when pointing toward reading Scripture for its literal sense. Dei Verbum tells us:
 

1. Be especially attentive “to the content and unity of the whole Scripture”;
 
2. Read the Scripture within “the living tradition of the whole Church”; and,
 
3. Be attentive to the analogy of faith.

 
That’s it. That’s all the Church offers. What do these guidelines mean? In part, as we saw last week, they mean that when you read the Bible, you need to pay attention to what sort of literature you are reading. But other things come in as well.

The Bible is a sort of organism, like a goldfish. Many moderns don’t think of it that way, insisting instead that it's just a collection of human writings from widely divergent sources that got stitched together pretty roughly and is therefore “full of contradictions”. Many Bible students, both Catholic and atheist, concern themselves almost entirely with looking for the “contradictions” and shabby seamwork. This can sometimes get pretty silly, as when A.N. Wilson discerns a fraudulent claim that Jesus was a “carpenter” since “no carpenter in real life came anywhere near to having a plank sticking out of his eye".

From the perspective of sane biblical study, this entire approach (technically known by Catholic theologians as the “hermeneutic of suspicion”) is sort of like looking at a goldfish and seeing only a circulatory system, an excretory system, a pair of gills, a pair of eyes, some randomly distributed fins, a bunch of scales, a nervous system, and various connective tissues, all of which just happen to be crammed into a goldfish-shaped space—and then spending all your time looking for “junk DNA” in the goldfish cells while steadfastly ignoring the swimming, living fish.

In fact, the remarkable thing about Scripture is the organic unity of growth one sees in it. Seen from the Catholic perspective, it looks pretty much like what it is: the written record of a Tradition that is growing just like the mustard seed and revealing the gradual revelation of God to man, culminating with the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. Yes, you can see the stitching at times, as when Genesis combines two accounts of creation. (But so what? That’s only a problem if you believe the Bible is a purely divine book, not a book written and edited by humans.) So, to be sure, the human authors of Scripture display change over time. But it is the sort of change one expects in a growing thing, not a mutating thing. Ideas found in seed form early on (such as “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”) break out in huge leafy branches later on (such as the conviction found in the prophets and the books of the Maccabees that God will defeat death and even raise the dead at the end of time).

We discover, as we read, that the Bible is an immense conversation across the ages. For Catholics, the Old Testament longs for and looks forward to the New and the New is only comprehensible in light of the Old. In short, there really is a unity to the whole of Scripture. So all of us, regardless of our religious worldview, do well to read it with that in mind. Each verse is related to the verses before it, each paragraph is related to the paragraphs before and after, and each book, especially in the New Testament, is not really comprehensible if you don’t know the other texts to which the author is alluding. So a return to the understanding of Scripture as a single organism, and not merely as a collection of loosely connected cells or systems, is the first order of business for effectively reading the Bible.

The next order of business is realizing that a living goldfish won’t live long outside the water. If you want to get to know the goldfish of Scripture better, the paradox is that you cannot do so by removing it from the Sacred Tradition of the Church, which is the water in which Scripture swims. The absolute worst way to read the Bible is to just go off with it by yourself and ask, “What does this text mean to me?” Catholics approach the text by finding out, as best we can, how the author and his readers would have understood it.

We know to do this with other books, but something goes awry when it comes to the Bible. Many people believe that the Tradition—that is, the fruit of millions of lives of prayer and sanctity, not to mention scholarship of a very high order and even, in some cases, personal familiarity with the apostles themselves—is absolutely worthless if it contradicts one's strongly felt intuition about what the Bible really means.

This faulty approach is primarily a fault of the will, not the intellect. It affects Catholics and atheists alike, and the solution requires humility and a basic reorientation away from self and toward God's revelation through his Church (not just a vague admission that, now and then, the Church gets it right by agreeing with my view of the Bible.) Such a reorientation is vital because without it, the biblical reader inevitably winds up depriving the Scriptural goldfish of the water of Tradition which it requires in order to live.

But let's move on. To keep the water of Tradition from being spilled, the Church tells us to “be attentive to the analogy of faith”. This cryptic remark means, basically, “hold on to the defined teaching of the Church”. The “analogy of faith” is the goldfish bowl that holds the water of Tradition. Without it you’ve got water all over the floor and, soon, a dead goldfish.

So what’s the “analogy of faith”? Well, an analogy is a thing that’s like something else. So a photo of my wife is an analog of my wife. It looks just like her, but it’s not her. The Church proposes various analogies of the Faith to us, such as the Creeds or the dogmas of the Church, to give us a sense of what is and is not part of apostolic Tradition.

A dogma is not the forbiddance of thought (as is commonly supposed) but the conclusion of thought: it’s what you get when you are done thinking something through. Periodically, questions arise in theology as they do in every field. When they do, the Church thinks the problem through and, when the occasion requires it and the Spirit wills it, the Church defines its teaching. The first time this happens is recorded in the book of Acts. The Church is confronted with the question, “Do Gentiles need to keep the ceremonial laws of Moses?”. The Church arrives at the momentous conclusion that Christians are saved by faith in Jesus Christ, not by circumcision, keeping kosher, and so forth. They promulgate this decision in the shocking words, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us...” meaning that the dogma promulgated by the apostles and the elders is the authentic guideline for understanding the meaning of the Tradition with respect to this question.

Where do they get off talking this way? Well, to be fair, they formed the impression because of what they heard from Jesus Christ, who told them “He who listens to you listens to me” (Luke 10:16). So it’s pretty much in the DNA of the Church. It appears Jesus had enough foresight to know that the Church would need a permanent teaching office to navigate the waters of history, just as the American forefathers knew the country would require Congress, judges, and a President to interpret the Constitution through time.

So that's a brief introduction to the three guidelines Catholics use when properly interpreting Scripture. Next week we'll begin exploring the three spiritual senses, or lenses, through which Catholics read the Bible.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Exchange. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Go2Grace)

I’m continually amazed how often the “problem” of Genesis comes up in my interactions with people online. What I mean is the way people struggle with the seemingly bad science that is on display in the opening chapters of the first book of the Bible. How can anyone believe that God made the visible universe in six days, that all the species were created at the same time, that light existed before the sun and moon, etc., etc? How can Christians possibly square the naïve cosmology of Genesis with the textured and sophisticated theories of Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and Stephen Hawking?

One of the most important principles of Catholic Biblical interpretation is that the reader of the Scriptural texts must be sensitive to the genre or literary type of the text with which he is dealing. Just as it would be counter-indicated to read Moby Dick as history or “The Waste Land” as social science, so it is silly to interpret, say, “The Song of Songs” as journalism or the Gospel of Matthew as a spy novel.

By the same token, it is deeply problematic to read the opening chapters of Genesis as a scientific treatise. If I can borrow an insight from Fr. George Coyne, a Jesuit priest and astrophysicist, no Biblical text can possibly be “scientific” in nature, since “science,” as we understand it, first emerged some fourteen centuries after the composition of the last Biblical book. The author of Genesis simply wasn’t doing what Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and Hawking were doing; he wasn’t attempting to explain the origins of things in the characteristically modern manner, which is to say, on the basis of empirical observation, testing of hypotheses, marshaling of evidence, and experimentation. Therefore, to maintain that the opening chapters of Genesis are “bad science” is a bit like saying “The Iliad” is bad history or “The Chicago Tribune” is not very compelling poetry.

So what precisely was that ancient author trying to communicate? Once we get past the “bad science” confusion, the opening of the Bible gives itself to us in all of its theological and spiritual power.

Let me explore just a few dimensions of this lyrical and evocative text. We hear that Yahweh brought forth the whole of created reality through great acts of speech: “Let there be light,’ and there was light; ‘Let the dry land appear’ and so it was.” In almost every mythological cosmology in the ancient world, God or the gods establish order through some act of violence. They conquer rival powers or they impose their will on some recalcitrant matter. (How fascinating, by the way, that we still largely subscribe to this manner of explanation, convinced that order can be maintained only through violence or the threat of violence).

But there is none of this in the Biblical account. God doesn’t subdue some rival or express his will through violence. Rather, through a sheerly generous and peaceful act of speech, he gives rise to the whole of the universe. This means that the most fundamental truth of things—the metaphysics that governs reality at the deepest level—is peace and non-violence. Can you see how congruent this is with Jesus’ great teachings on non-violence and enemy love in the Sermon on the Mount? The Lord is instructing his followers how to live in accord with the elemental grain of the universe.

Secondly, we are meant to notice the elements of creation that are explicitly mentioned in this account: the heavens, the stars, the sun, the moon, the earth itself, the sea, the wide variety of animals that roam the earth. Each one of these was proposed by various cultures in the ancient world as objects of worship. Many of the peoples that surrounded Israel held sky, stars, sun, moon, the earth, and various animals to be gods. By insisting that these were, in fact, created by the true God, the author of Genesis was, not so subtly, de-throning false claimants to divinity and disallowing all forms of idolatry. Mind you, the author of Genesis never tires of reminding us that everything that God made is good (thus holding off all forms of dualism, Manichaeism, and Gnosticism), but none of these good things is the ultimate good.

A third feature that we should notice is the position and role of Adam, the primal human, in the context of God’s creation. He is given the responsibility of naming the animals , “all the birds of heaven and all the wild beasts” (Gen. 2:20). The Church fathers read this as follows: naming God’s creatures in accord with the intelligibility placed in them by the Creator, Adam is the first scientist and philosopher, for he is, quite literally, “cataloguing” the world he sees around him. (Kata Logon means “according to the word”).

From the beginning, the author is telling us, God accords to his rational creatures the privilege of participating, through their own acts of intelligence, in God’s intelligent ordering of the world. This is why, too, Adam is told, not to dominate the world, but precisely to “cultivate and care for it” (Gen. 2: 16), perpetuating thereby the non-violence of the creative act.

These are, obviously, just a handful of insights among the dozens that can be culled from this great text. My hope is that those who are tripped up by the beginning of the book of Genesis can make a small but essential interpretive adjustment and see these writings as they were meant to be seen: not as primitive science, but as exquisite theology.
 
 
Originally posted at Word on Fire. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Bible-Truth)

A few years ago I began posting brief reflections on movies, music and culture on YouTube, probably the most watched Web site in the world. In my mind, this exercise resembles St. Paul's venture onto the Areopagus in Athens, preaching the Gospel amid a jumble of competing ideas. YouTube is a virtual Areopagus, where every viewpoint—from the sublime to the deeply disturbing—is on display. Never as a Catholic teacher or preacher have I addressed less of the "choir.” The most numerous responses have come to my pieces on atheism and belief. I have made a video called Why Do We Believe in God?, several answering Christopher Hitchens, and, the most popular, a response to Bill Maher's film Religulous.

YouTube viewers can post comments the hundreds I've received have been overwhelmingly negative. Some are emotionally driven and rude, but others are thoughtful and have given rise to serious exchanges. As I debate with these mostly young opponents of religion, and Catholicism in particular, I have discerned four basic patterns of opposition that block the reception of the faith. In the second century, St. Irenaeus wrote his classic Adversus Haereses (Against the Heresies). If a contemporary thinker would like to know the heresies of our time, she might consult these YouTube objections. I have identified four: scientism, ecclesial angelism, biblical fundamentalism and Marcionism.

First, Scientism. In the videos, I have appealed to classical and contemporary arguments for the existence of God, demonstrating that there must be a stable ground for the contingency of the world and an intelligent source for the intelligibility of the world. I am met with some version of the following assertion: Matter, or the universe as a totality, or the big bang, or "energy” is an adequate explanation of all that is. When I counter that the big bang is itself the clearest indication that the entire universe—including matter and energy—is radically contingent and in need of a cause extrinsic to itself, they say that I am speaking nonsense, that science gives no evidence of God's existence. I agree, insisting that the sciences deal with realities and relationships within the world but that the Creator is, by definition, not an ingredient in the world he made.

What I am up against here is not science, but the philosophical position that reality is restricted to what the empirical sciences can measure. When one of my opponents asserted that science alone deals with reality, I informed him that he was involved in an operational self-contradiction, for he was making an unscientific remark in support of his claim. Though many of my YouTube interlocutors can speak rather ably of physics or chemistry or astronomy, they are at a loss when the mode of analysis turns philosophical or metaphysical.

The second heresy I call ecclesial angelism. Repeatedly my conversation partners say: "Who are you, a Catholic priest, to be making truth claims, when your church has been guilty of so many moral outrages against the human race: the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, support of slavery and the clerical sex abuse scandal?” My arguments in favor of religious belief are not so much refuted as ignored, with a "consider the source” wave of the hand.

I respond by insisting that the existence of bad Catholics does not in itself demonstrate that Catholicism is a bad thing. A rare ally on a YouTube forum observed that the use of Einsteinian physics in the production of the nuclear weapons that killed hundreds of thousands of innocents does not amount to an argument against Einstein. As the old dictum has it, bad practice does not preclude good practice.

I do not deny the major premise of their argument. I've told them I stand with John Paul II, who spent years apologizing for the misbehavior of Catholics over the centuries. But Christians have known always that the church, as Paul put it, "holds a treasure in earthen vessels.” In its sacraments, especially the Eucharist, in its essential teachings, in its liturgy and in the lives of its saints, the church participates in the very holiness of God. But in its human dimension, it is fragile. Ecclesial angelism blurs this distinction and allows any fault of church people to undermine the church's claim to speak the truth.

A third heresy is biblical fundamentalism. I hear from my YouTube opponents that the Bible is a mishmash of "bronze-age myths” (Christopher Hitchens) and childish nonsense about talking snakes, a 5,000-year-old universe, and a man living three days inside of a fish. I observe in reply that the Bible is not so much a book as a library, made up of texts from a wide variety of genres and written at different times for varying audiences. Just as one would not take "the library” literally, one should not interpret the whole Bible with one set of lenses.

My YouTube conversation partners typically fire back that I am proposing a novelty in order to respond to the attacks of modern critics. I try to steer them to Irenaeus (second c.), Origen (third c.) and Augustine (fourth c.), all of whom dealt with the complexity of the Bible through the exercise of a deft hermeneutic. Some of those who appreciate the library analogy wonder how one would decide which kind of text one is dealing with and hence which set of interpretive lenses to wear. I respond that their good question proves the legitimacy of the Catholic Church's assumption that the church—that variegated community of interpretation stretching over 20 centuries—required for effective biblical reading today. I ask, How do you know the difference between Winnie the Pooh, The Brothers Kara-mazov, the Divine Comedy, Carl Sandburg's Lincoln, and Gore Vidal's Lincoln? Then I answer my own question: You have been taught by a long and disciplined tradition of interpretation. Something similar is at play in authentic biblical reading.

The fourth YouTube heresy is Marcionism, which brings us back to one of Irenaeus's principal opponents, Marcion. He held that the New Testament represented the revelation of the true God, but that the Old Testament was the revelation of a pathetic demigod marked by pettiness, jealousy and violence. This ancient heresy reappears practically intact on the YouTube forums. My interlocutors complain about the morally offensive, vain, psychotic and violent God of the Old Testament, who commands that a ban be put on cities, who orders genocide so that his people can take possession of the Promised Land, who commands that children's heads be dashed against stones. In the wake of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, this complaint becomes more pointed. If I gesture toward the wisdom of the biblical tradition, I am immediately met with this objection.

In reply, I urge my respondents to read the entire Bible in the light of Christ crucified and risen from the dead. I tell them of an image in the Book of Revelation of a lamb standing as though slain. When no one else in the heavenly court is able to open the scroll that symbolizes all of salvation history, the lamb alone succeeds. This indicates that the nonviolent Christ, who took upon himself the sin of the world and returned in forgiving love, is the interpretive key to the Bible. It was in this light that Origen, for example, read the texts concerning the Old Testament ban as an allegory about the struggle against sin. The bottom line is this: One should never drive a wedge between the two testaments. Instead, one should allow Christ to be the structuring logic of the entire Scripture.

What are the biggest misunderstanding regarding Christianity today? Many things. But I would suggest these four stand above the rest.
 
 
Originally posted at Word on Fire. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Mashable)

Every year on March 14 fans of math gather to enjoy a slice of pie along with discussions about pi, or the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Since the value of pi is approximately 3.14, pi day is held on March 14 (or 3/14) each year.

One objection to the Bible that pops up all over the Internet is the claim that the Bible teaches that Pi is actually three and not 3.14. In the first Book of Kings, Solomon selects Hiram to create a large, bronze basin of water for the new temple. 1 Kings 7:23 describes how Hiram “made the molten sea; it was round, ten cubits from brim to brim, and five cubits high, and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference” (a cubit is about 18 inches in length).

The skeptic says this is mistaken, because if the diameter of the basin was ten cubits, then the circumference should be about 31.4 cubits, not thirty cubits. Steve Wells, the author of the Annotated Skeptics Bible, writes, "This verse implies that the value of pi is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159)."

Of course, the Book of Kings is neither a mathematical textbook nor is it an architectural manual. The ancient writers would have had no qualms about referring to the circumference of Solomon’s basin as being 30 cubits in length even if it was actually 31 cubits in length. This is like how we might say a Boeing 747 jet airliner can hold 63,000 gallons of fuel even though technically it can hold 63,705 gallons of fuel.

Furthermore, we have to remember that the Bible is not trying to teach the value of pi; it’s just recording how a real object was created. Calculating the circumference of a circle in a math problem is easy, because the circle is composed of a line that technically has no width. In contrast, Solomon’s basin would have had thick sides in order to maintain its structural integrity. 1 Kings 7:26 says, “Its thickness was a handbreadth; and its brim was made like the brim of a cup, like the flower of a lily; it held two thousand baths.”

This means that the basin had a rim that was greater in circumference than the circumference of the basin’s main body (due to its ornate lilylike shape). According to 1 Kings 7:23, the basin was 10 cubits from “rim to rim,” which probably included the thick edge fashioned like a lily that was a “handbreadth” in width. This means that the diameter of the basin may have been closer to 9.6 cubits in order to allow for a rim that is about 3 inches wide (or a "handbreadth" in width). If it were, then the circumference of the basin below the ornate lily rim would have been 30 cubits in length, just like the Bible describes it.

Skeptics will always find what they consider to be errors in the Bible if they assume the Bible is some kind of divine encyclopedia written by God himself. But the books of the Bible have both a human and a divine author, which frees them from error but also imposes limits on what is taught (just as Christ was fully God but was still limited in his human nature). One such limitation includes rounding for simplicity.

In conclusion, a closer look at the passage shows that the skeptic's argument that the Bible teaches that pi equals three just doesn't add up.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Answers. Used with permission.
(Image credit: The Meta Picture)