God, The Author of Scripture | Preface to "God and
His Image: An Outline of Biblical Theology" | Fr. Dominique Barthélemy, O.P. | IgnatiusInsight.com
God, The Author of Scripture | Preface to God and
His Image: An Outline of Biblical Theology | Fr. Dominique Barthélemy, O.P.
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2007/barthelemy_prefacegahi_sept07.asp
This book is the work of an amateur. An "amateur", from
the Latin amare, is one who hastens toward the things he
loves, without constantly checking that the ground he treads
on is solid, recovering by his next step the balance he lost
in the last, uncertain one. Yet in spite of this too simple
apology; the pages that I now offer for publication cause
me a little misgiving. I am afraid that in writing them I
have succeeded only too well in forgetting what I know
about textual or literary criticism. When I set forth certain
precepts of the law, the Elohistic and Deuteronomic codes
intermingle without the least constraint. Traits in the character of
Moses are gathered from Yahwistic, Elohistic and sometimes priestly
traditions as though it were quite in order
to unite their witness without learned preliminary discussions. The
Books of Exodus, Ezekiel and Revelation converse together like old
friends, without any introduction. I
am therefore afraid that those who peruse these pages may
be shocked to find me regarding the Bible as the work of a
single author. I am aware that a work cannot be called
serious--in the critical sense--if it springs from such an
old-fashioned idea. So it must be clearly understood that in
this sense the present work is not serious.
However, I bring myself to publish it because I have come
to the conclusion that reams written in an overcritical spirit
run the risk of concealing the fundamental nature of Holy
Scripture: a word of God spoken to his people today, spoken to you and
me. Just before writing the ten chapters of this book, I spent ten whole
years studying the Palestinian
recensions of the Greek Bible made during the first century of the
Christian era. This work is now in the hands of
printers in Holland. [1] I do not belittle it, but I confess it
brought me no new light whatsoever on the impact that
the Word of God must have on my life. One could take a
painting and write the story of the successive varnishings
and cleanings it has undergone and discuss the changes of
emphasis these have led to. One might write the history of
the progress of the cracks in the Mona Lisa and seek to
discover when it was that the crack joining the inner corner of the
right eye to the right nostril first appeared, or
the slightly winding one a little to the right of it. This has
importance, for these two cracks make it difficult to perceive the
transition from the nose to the cheek, both of
which are equally clear, and yet are placed on two different
planes. Since the Bible is the word of God, it is only right
that much time and trouble should be given to the study of
the various transformations undergone by its text. But the
enlarged photographic effect thus produced has little connection with
the viewpoint of lectio divina.
To take another example, the meaning of that strange
figure nowadays called the Winged Victory of Samothrace
is not revealed by the story of its mutilations or the remaking of its
right wing and the left side of its torso. In its
mutilated and half-restored form, the Winged Victory "exists"
for us much more--though in quite a different way--than
it did for those who contemplated it new in the temple of
the Cabiri during the second century B.C. The rediscovery in 1950 of the
palm of its right hand and the comparison of this with the fragments of
fingers preserved in the museum
of Vienne shed no light on the significance of our Winged
Victory, whose unique characteristic suggests a bursting into
the future, her headless bust borne up by wings to which
the absence of arms gives true meaning. If the sculptor had
produced his statue with neither arms nor a head, we should
be shocked by so harsh a surrealistic conception. But the
hazards of its decay have stripped it with impunity of all
that detracted from its true meaning as a bastion of Greek
civilization in our ageless Western culture. To grasp the idea
of its flight, our attention must be fixed on the left wing,
the only authentic one; but it is the mass of the restored
right wing alone that enables the left wing to suggest soaring flight
instead of want of balance.
Our Bible also, as the Churches of Antioch, Rome and
Alexandria inherited it at the time of their foundation, is
something unique, heir of a thousand transformations. Some
books have been lost, others considerably altered. Centuries overlap,
voices intermingle. Yet in this precise form it
is for us the word of God. The Holy Spirit has willed to
give it to us in this state; and if critical research is useful in
helping us understand the steps by which it reached this
state, its object should not be to replace it by a more primitive
version. We must recognize that the form of the Christian Bible toward
the end of the first century is its mature
form, and that it possesses an internal coherence willed by
the Holy Spirit, whose inspiration brought it to that maturity in which
it was to become the sacred library of the
people of the new and eternal covenant. And the kind of
reading properly suited to this Holy Scripture is lectio divina,
that is, a reading that looks upon the Bible as the work of a single
author: God.
A work of "biblical theology", therefore, can be attempted
only on two conditions:
1. The refusal to isolate a book, or even a Testament,
since the Bible as a whole is as vitally integrated as a drama
in five acts.
2. To keep the mind fixed on what God tells us of himself. If we
fail to observe the first condition, we have no right
to call our theology biblical; if we fail to observe the second, our
biblical study cannot be called theology.
I will not insist on this paradox to the extent of saying
that it would be better to ignore the literary prehistory of
the sacred texts. But at all events, we must not be led astray
into shifting and uncertain criticism. It is enough for the
biblical theologian to know on which of the Victory's wings
he prefers to concentrate; but I think little is to be gained
by talking about it. Criticism can only help us to keep the
relationship between the various texts in due perspective;
occasionally this will set the synthesis of the whole in higher
relief. On other occasions, however, nothing is to be gained
by emphasizing the "relief" element, and a more telescopic
perspective will bring out the fundamental unity of God's
word. Whereas criticism comes near to certainty only by
means of the precision of its minute analyses, biblical theology depends
on the ability to form certain broad views,
whether it is a matter of integrating ideas that are apparently opposed
to one another, or of unifying what seem to
be the heterogeneous stages of some development.
To distinguish the theologian's point of view from that
of the critic, let us take another comparison. A newspaper
reproduction of a photograph consists of a number of black-and-white
dots. Imagine a reproduction that can scarcely
be made out because it is blotchy, uneven and far too dark.
The critic will make an analysis of the reproduction, carefully counting
the black dots in one section after another.
The theologian will hold the reproduction at arm's length
in a good light and half close his eyes in the hope of making out some
image. Since we are looking for an image to
give meaning to the whole reproduction, the second method
is the only sound one. Similarly, the way we should read
the Bible will depend on whether or not the Bible has a
meaning as a whole. If it has no meaning, the critic's analysis will be
able to set down the bewildering heterogeneous
details only where the darker shades predominate. But if
the Bible does have an all-embracing meaning, analysis will
have to give way to a general view, which implies that one
must step back and bring both eyelid and iris into play. A
keener look will be given only to certain details to check,
in a particular case, the probability of an interpretation suggested by
the more general effect. The texts used by the
theologian in support of his general views will benefit by
being presented in translations of varying degrees of literalness,
depending on whether the intention is to show the
tone of a whole passage at a glance, or to bring out some
characteristic detail by a kind of photographic enlargement.
But it is by no means easy to take a sufficiently synthetic
view of the fifteen hundred pages that make up the average
Bible. To achieve such an end, one must begin by tirelessly
delving into the whole Bible, so that it becomes engraved
on the memory in broad, distinct outlines. When one is
examining a particular text, the general outline must always
remain in one's mind, so that a particular intuition may
find its appropriate echo in some verse several hundred pages
away. To take up a concordance and study a word analytically may help in
giving precision to certain data, but it can
never replace that casual conversation that goes on in the
memory between the voice I am listening to today and another voice that
I was listening to in a different part of
the Bible several months ago, which I did not understand
at the time. Moreover, if the verse that I am reading today--and which I
have often read before, thinking I understood it--now speaks with a new
voice, it is because several months
ago I was struck by the tone of the other verse that I did
not then understand. Now I become aware of a dialogue
between the two, which previously I did not suspect.
It is not enough just to read and reread the Bible if we
want it to speak to us. Let us go back to our comparison
of a newspaper photograph that is hard to decipher. It
would be easier for me to make out the meaning of this
image if I already knew the reality it represents. In a way,
one can even say that it is only possible to make out something one is
capable of recognizing. I could recognize, even
in a very bad reproduction, the features of a face well
known to me, because these features are already engraved
in my mind. The smallest shadows and reflections will have
meaning if the object represented already dwells in my
memory. But realities that are of no real interest to me do
not remain as faithful guests of memory. For a voice to be
recognized, it is not enough that we should have already
heard it; it is at least necessary that it should have
spoken to
us in its normal tone. The man who has not yet identified the tone of
God's word in his life will not be able to
decipher the word of God in Holy Scripture. I shall never
succeed in getting on to the wavelength where his voice
can be recognized unless my loving silence is already at
home on that wavelength.
Now that these principles have been put forward I cannot pretend to have
applied them in the present work. It
was only in the course of the work that they progressively
came home to me, and I have tried to state them only now that this book
is finished. I did not start out on these chapters with a preconceived
plan, but here is the order they
have ended up by taking: after briefly introducing the Christian to the
Bible, and more particularly to the Old Testament, the first two
chapters enter, by way of a beginning,
into the problems of revelation and reparation that characterize the
whole Bible. The eight chapters that follow do not strictly speaking
deal in a uniform way with eight successive stages of God's work. Rather
they give eight views on the Bible taken with filters that pick out
certain colors
in a multicolored whole. Just as a color reproduction is made
by superimposing several one-color impressions from selective negatives,
each of which is a photograph of the whole
image, so, it seems to me, a balanced biblical theology can
be obtained only if the reader's mind puts together several
selective views taken from the entire biblical panorama. In
each of these views, one part of the image will appear in
special relief, since it is richer in the color chosen by this
particular filter. And so I find that I have classified these
views in the chronological order of the elements that they
particularly emphasize. For example, in the third chapter
what stands out most clearly is the coming of Moses on to
the scene, while it is the Decalogue that gives character to
the fourth. The fifth is concerned with the golden calf.
The sixth brings out the personality of David and the seventh that of
Hosea. The message of Jeremiah occupies the
eighth. At the center of the ninth, the Holy Grail shines
forth. In the tenth, we listen to the voice of the Paraclete.
We all know that faithful color reproduction is a difficult
matter. The difficulty here is even greater, because the spectrum of the
Word of God is not that of ordinary white
light. It is far from easy to identify the elements that make
up that perfect silence of colors which is the true light. We cannot
simply focus a lens and capture on an impartially selective film one
element in the spectrum of the Bible's
essential radiance. One dominant color will tend to swamp
the rest. A missing color will betray its absence by the consequent
overemphasis of one of the others.
The text of this work has already been published in almost
identical forms as ten articles in La Vie Spirituelle, from
November 1961 to April 1963. The first eight were a much-edited version
of the first six lectures in the Cours de Science
Religieuse given in 1960-1961 in the Aula of the University
of Fribourg. In this edition, a few glosses and further biblical
references have been added as notes.
Fr. Dominique Barthélemy, O.P.
Fribourg, Switzerland
March 10, 1963
ENDNOTES:
[1] Fr. Barthélemy refers to his study of the early history of the
transmission of the text of the Old Testament, a 'study that made use of the recently
discovered Dead Sea Scrolls. It appeared as Les Devanciers d'Aquila
(Supplements to Vetus Testamentum, 10; Leiden: Brill, 1963).--ED.
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Fr. Dominique Barthélemy, O.P., was an internationally recognized expert on Old Testament studies and a member of the
Pontifical Biblical Commission. He was the author of a number of scholarly works on the Greek and Hebrew texts of the Old Testament.
His work on the Dead Sea Scrolls as well as other scrolls, such as the Dodekapropheton (Twelve Prophets scroll) found at
Nahal Hever, revolutionized the study of the historical development of the Greek texts of the Bible. For 35 years he was a professor
of Old Testament at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.
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