What to do when
February 14, 2008, 8:06 pm
Posted by Joseph A. Komonchak
When the Psalmist says, “When will you comfort me?” (Ps 118: 82), it’s as if he’s impatient with the delay. The same idea is expressed elsewhere: “And you, Lord, how long?” (Ps 6:4) Perhaps it’s so that delayed enjoyment may be sweeter; or it may be that this is what people with longings feel: what for one coming to help is a short while is a long while for one who loves. But the Lord, he who has ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight (Wis 11:21), knows what to do when. [Augustine, Enar. in Ps. 118/20, 2; PL 37:1558]
I wonder if the megachurch people who believe in the Prosperity Gospel would understand what Augustine is saying here?
And, of course, we all live in a culture of “instant gratification.”
Count me guilty!
The psalms date back to a time when the Jews did not believe in resurrection of the body or even in a soul that would go to eternal reward or punishment after death. So if there was to be reward for a pious life, or comfort in time of affliction, it would be quite natural to be impatient with a delay. Reward for the just, and punishment for the wicked (which for believers was supposed to happen), had to come in this life, or it didn’t come at all.
This is clear from the text of Psalm 6 itself as well as from a footnote in the online version of the NAB:
http://www.nccbuscc.org/nab/bible/psalms/psalm6.htm
The answer to the question in line 5 is “nobody.” Souls in Sheol were cut off from God. There was no “religion” in Sheol, and it was the fate of all individuals, good or evil, kings or paupers.
I am not sure Augustine is interpreting the Psalms in accord with what they meant when they were written, since waiting for reward or comfort in the times when the Psalms were written would have been an utterly different experience that it would be for a Christian, who believes that even if you wait your whole life and receive nothing (perhaps kind of like Mother Teresa), things will all be made right in heaven. Also, playing off bits and pieces of the Bible like this doesn’t seem to to me to be anything remotely resembling the interpretation of Scripture.
Augustine followed up on clues offered by the titles given to some of the Psalms, which, of course, he took at face value. So he did have some interest in presumed historical context. But he didn’t think the interpretation of Scripture had to be limited to their original meaning in their original context, and he read them in the light of Christ and the Church. I think this is a perfectly appropriate way to approach the Scriptures; it has its origins, of course, in the New Testament itself, and indeed in late OT books. (see midrash.) This is a way of interpreting the Scriptures, so how you can say it doesn’t even remotely resemble “the interpretation of Scripture” escapes me. Perhaps you meant to say you don’t think it a valid way of interpreting them. To exclude it is to invalidate the primary way in which the Bible has given life to individuals and to the Church for two thousand years.
If I go on retreat and bring my Bible with me, I’m not likely to bring my shelves of historical critical commentaries on its various books. If my spiritual director tells me to meditate on Jacob’s wrestling with the angel, I don’t rush off to the library to get out Gunkel’s three-volume commentary on Genesis in order to find out whether the passage comes from the Yahwist, the Elohist, the priestly or the Deuternomist author. If I read a Psalm and a verse reminds me of another verse, in another Psalm, or of a passage in another book of the Bible, must I get out my biblical chronology to find out whether these cumulating echoes may be permitted to sound in my mind or heart? If I can do this for myself, why may an Augustine not do the same for his people?
Coleridge said that in the Bible he found “words for my inmost thoughts, songs for my joy, utterances for my hidden griefs, and pleadings for my shame and my feebleness.” The possibility of the Bible’s providing something like this for us will be sharply limited if we have to restrict ourselves to what those words “meant when they were written.”
Fr. Komonchak,
I do have to sheepishly admit that my statement about interpreting scripture was a rather breathtaking dismissal of something that has gone on for 2000 years and been done by some of the greatest minds in Western civilization. Perhaps what I should have said is that it’s something I just don’t understand, particularly in the light of modern biblical criticism. I think it’s an issue (or maybe the issue) James Kugel deals with in How to Read the Bible, which I hope to read some day. I also find it troubling that the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible is God-given Scripture to both Jews and Christians, yet, if it is supposed to be interpreted in the light of the New Testament, Jews can’t interpret their own Scripture adequately (or so the logical conclusion seems to me).
It does seem to me that meditating on something is different from interpreting or explicating it, and I think one of the problems I have with the pope’s book Jesus of Nazareth is that it strikes me as meditation, when I was looking for something closer to history.
I find it difficult to understand why it would not be a prerequisite–if we fully want to understanding something ancient–to understand what the words meant when they were written. Of course in texts as rich and sometimes enigmatic as those in the Bible, even in the absence of that kind of understanding, they can certainly prompt us to ponder all sorts of questions.
As I think I may have mentioned before, I had a Catholic education up through high school (a Christian Brothers school, graduating in 1965), and at most what we got were Bible stories. When I first came in contact with modern biblical scholarship, which was by reading the Pelican New Testament Commentaries some years after graduating from college, and it was a jaw-dropping experience. Even now, reading the footnotes in something as “conservative” as the New American Bible can cause an occasional jolt, like finding out that the verses in Luke in which Jesus sweats blood were probably not part of the original version of the Gospel and were not written by Luke.
David:
I agree that we have to make every effort “to understand what the words meant when they were written,” and, as I indicated, Augustine’s sermons make it very clear that he tried to do so. Indeed, he wrote a treatise on biblical interpretation, the De doctrina christiana, which makes suggestions that traditional interpretations of the Bible are fundamentalistic simply absurd. (Is there anything further from fundamentalism than typology?)
But let me illustrate with the first reading for this Sunday’s Mass, Gen 12:1-4a. Not having my commentary on Genesis at home at the moment, I turn to The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. Here I find that the passage comes early in the section of Genesis that deals with the story of Abraham (Gen 11:27-25:18); that the stories told here “are a collection of stories and notices of diverse origins; that “about the origin, growth, and arrangement of the traditions scholarly opinion varies widely according to methodologies and assumptions about the history of Israel’s religion; that “most of the traditions are from the Yahwist (J) version of a presumed oral epic of the tribal period; that E (the Elohist) is present only in doublets; that P (the priestly author) makes “mostly brief and redactional” contributions; etc.
The passage used in the liturgy, we are told, comes from the Yahwist author. The most useful comment is perhaps the explanation of what it means that Abraham will be a blessing, that is, that “people will use him as a standard of blessing”–something, I guess, like “may you be as blessed as Abraham.” That’s it. There is nothing about the religious significance of this account; nothing about Abraham as a religious man; nothing about him as remembered later in the Jewish tradition, a fortiori there is nothing about what the NT makes of him as the representative man of faith (Heb 11:8); nothing about what Paul would make of his faith, etc. It’s all devoted to source-analysis. As far as I am concerned, it is without value for a priest preparing to preach about the text on Sunday, or, for that matter, for anyone who wants to meditate on it.
Now this is what is made of the text in an authoritative Catholic publication, in a chapter written by a very fine priest, whom I knew personally, Roland E. Murphy, O.Carm. I suspect that his response to me would be that he was offering only an historical-critical analysis, and that the religious and theological aspects of the text, or of Abraham himself, were for others to explore. (In fact, in the NJBC no one does explore them! And it’s interesting to discover that nowhere in this very large volume is there any effort to explain the hermeneutical principles that guided it.) But it strikes me as odd that the religious significance of the story and of the man is not thought worthy of comment.
Very briefly on your other point, that Christians persist in thinking that what they call the Old Testament “is supposed to be interpreted in the light of the New Testament,” this seeming to imply that “ Jews can’t interpret their own Scripture adequately”. A group of early first-century Jews became convinced that Jesus of Nazareth, that one who was crucified, was raised from the dead and made by Israel’s God both Lord and Messiah. Was it not natural of these first-century Jews that they looked to their authoritative sacred writings for the vindication of their faith, and that if they thought that Jesus was Messiah, that they interpreted those writings in the light of his person and his fate? I do not see how Christians can forego a Christian interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures. This would run the risk of removing Jesus from his Jewish background, always, I think, a dangerous effort.
David,
You seem to have a problem with the ambiguity of the Bible, and it *is* ambiguous. But why is such ambiguity necessarily a bad thing?
The most important message in the whole Bible is to love God, self and neighbor. What is more ambiguous than to tell a trillion people (or more) to “love” yourself, your neighbor” and God? The love that that individuals are called to differs wildly from life to life, though of course there are some similarities in all loves. It seems to me that “Love!” is both the emptiest term in itself, yet it is also the fullest when it is applied to many individual lives.
Ann,
If everyone agreed that the Bible was ambiguous, and further agreed that their interpretation was but one of a number of possible interpretations, I would have no problem at all. But of course many people who consider the Bible the word of God are quite certain that their interpretation is correct and everyone else’s is wrong. In fact, they do not even acknowledge they are interpreting. They’re just telling you “what the Bible says,” or “what God says in the Bible.”
Jews were persecuted for centuries, and wars raged in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeent centuries with horrendous casualties. In the lead-up to the American Civil War, clergy in the south were major supporters of slavery. In the Catholic Church itself, some find in the Bible support for the ordination of women, and some interpret the Bible to “say” just the opposite.
If the Bible is indeed the inspired word of God, one of the great mysteries is why God would speak in such a cryptic way as to allow people reading the same text to persecute and kill each other in His name.