“Any interpretation of Scripture must therefore be incorrect if it makes us fail in our duty to love God or our neighbor” as “Augustine rightly reasoned,” notes Catholic theology professor James L. Papandrea in a new Sophia Institute Press book. His perceptive Reading Scripture Like the Early Church: Seven Insights from the Church Fathers to Help You Understand the Bible interprets the Bible through a law of love, in contrast to Islamic doctrine’s often morally troubling scriptural literalism.
As previously discussed, Papandrea reads the Bible in a nuanced, erudite manner. By contrast, any fundamentalism “tends toward an anti-intellectualism that often assumes education is actually a hindrance to correct interpretation,” he observes. This derives from the “idea that Scripture can be interpreted only from within itself,” or sola scriptura, a “major component of the Protestant Reformation,” which has no basis in the Jewish faith of Jesus and the apostles.
Sola scriptura recalls the Quranic proclamation that Muslims should emulate Islam’s prophet Muhammad in everything. His canonical example thereby establishes the Quran, his biography (sira), and recorded sayings about his life (hadith) narratives as Islam’s doctrinal basis, which received Islamic orthodoxy interprets literally. This has led to outrages such as Georgetown University professor Jonathan Brown, a Muslim convert, refusing to condemn slavery outright, for slavery is historically Islamic, given that Muhammad himself owned slaves.
Whether in Islam or Christianity, Papandrea will have none of this, as indicated during a Conservative Casual Friday podcast interview with this author. The “doctrine of sola scriptura is self-contradictory, because it claims that everything should be in the Bible, but the concept itself is not in the Bible,” he writes. John 21:24–25, for example, indicates that the “Bible does not contain everything that Jesus said and did.”
In particular, the “Bible doesn’t tell us which books should be included in the Bible,” Papandrea observes. “The question of which documents were to be included in the collection of Scriptures that the Christian Church would consider authoritative was a question that took hundreds of years to answer definitively,” he notes. Accordingly, a “good way to think about all this is that Scripture is really a part of the Tradition.”
Such a rational approach to revelation is particularly important, for to believe that “everything anyone needs to understand God’s revelation is within the pages of the Bible” morally “creates several problems,” Papandrea notes. “If the Bible were ‘complete’ in this way, then we would be forced to conclude that polygamy is acceptable because we see it condoned in the Old Testament, and don’t find any prohibition of it in the New Testament,” he writes. Yet as he discussed with this author, rational analysis of polygamy, both in the real world and as presented in the Biblical text, where conflicts always arise among polygamous households, reveals polygamy’s numerous problems. Correspondingly, modern Jews find almost no justification in the Jewish scriptures or Old Testament for polygamy, in contrast to still contemporary Islamic doctrines of polygamy.
Especially slavery’s horrors call forth Papandrea’s Biblical insight: “Love is the key. Correct interpretation of Scripture will always lead to love of God and neighbor.” As St. Augustine had noted, Jesus’ “greatest commandment is to love God, and the second greatest is to love your neighbor (Matt. 22:37–40; Mark 12:29–31),” an imperative that no scriptural interpretation can contradict. “This insight alone should have been enough of an indication that any interpretation that condoned slavery could never be correct,” Papandrea notes when examining historic debates over slavery among Christians.
Contrastingly, the “very anti-abolitionists who tried to use Scripture to justify slavery were the precursors to the fundamentalist movement that uses this same limited methodology for interpreting Scripture,” Papendrea recalls. However, as others have noted in comparing Biblical and Islamic scriptures, historic references to slavery in the Bible are merely descriptive. They are not prescriptive in the form of an eternal standard, in the way that jihadists have interpreted Islamic canons to justify holy war.
“As it turns out, slavery was a very established practice in the ancient world. Few, if any, human cultures ever existed without some form of slavery,” Papandrea notes. The apostle Paul in his New Testament writings “assumes that it is so engrained in the culture, that he can’t even imagine a world without it.” But Papandrea does not grant the contingent circumstances of Paul’s life any absolute value:
So, for example, even though we may read in St. Paul’s epistles that women should keep their heads covered, or that it is disgraceful for a man to have long hair (1 Cor. 11:5–15), or that women may not speak in the church (1 Cor. 14:34; cf. 1 Tim. 2:9–12), we recognize that these are pieces of advice that are specific to a particular time, in a particular place, for a particular culture….Therefore, there is nothing wrong with female lectors or professors, and we do not need to mandate head coverings for women in church.
Cultural context likewise applies to Psalm 137, one Biblical passage among others that falsely suggests to some that the Bible is just as violent as the Quran. Herein exiled Hebrews under Babylonian captivity proclaim a “call for revenge—and not just revenge on those who destroyed their city and captured them, but revenge on future generations of their enemies.” Yet Papandrea does not draw any divine mandate from the psalm’s Hebrew authors, for
even if they truly believed that it was God’s will for them to kill some babies, that does not mean that it actually was God’s will. In other words, the historical meaning of this text is that real Hebrew people harbored a real hatred and resentment—and desire for revenge—against their Babylonian captors.
“Remember that the Old Testament sometimes tells us more about the people who wrote it, and their understanding of God, than it actually tells us about God,” concludes Papandrea. “But God reserves the right of payback for himself alone (see Rom. 12:17–21)” and Christians should “give priority to the New Testament, where we are told to love even our enemies.” This reflects another Papandrea insight on hermeneutics: “Earlier Scripture is clarified by later Scripture. Also, clearer texts are used to interpret more obscure texts.”
Contrary to the Islamic doctrine of abrogation, in which chronologically later Quran verses can annul earlier verses, Papandrea describes a consistent message unfolding across the Bible:
When we say that revelation is progressive, we mean that in the grand trajectory of Scripture, God has ordained that meaning gets clearer over time. On the other hand, revelation is also conservative, in the sense that what is revealed always preserves what has been revealed in the past and builds on the foundation of what was revealed before.
Across human history, God’s revelation improves with time. “Scripture written earlier in time had the disadvantage of a limited perspective on the part of the human author, and from God’s perspective information was given to them on a kind of need-to-know basis,” Papandrea states. He thus takes a broad view of scriptural interpretation, for “it’s very important to let the clearer passages, the majority of passages, and the whole consensus of Scripture interpret the more obscure and the fewer passages.”
Such logic and love exhibited by Papandrea make for a far more compelling understanding of God’s revealed relationship to man than received Islamic orthodoxy. These doctrinal differences in turn rebut Western secularists who, in their desire to overthrow Western Judeo-Christian traditional norms, dismiss all scriptural traditions as being equally spurious. As judged by God-given human conscience, not all writ is holy.
Alkflaeda says
How is sola scriptura like the Islamic interpretation of the Qur’an, when in practice Islam does use tradition – i.e. the hadiths – and legal precedent in its application of Qur’anic texts?
Furthermore, why need it be a problem if the Bible does not contain everything that Jesus said and did? It contains enough to do the job of convincing anyone who comes to it with an open heart and mind that He is both the Messiah, and the only begotten Son of God. The Gospels cannot be compared with modern biographies – any commercial editor receiving such material today would immediately pronounce it unbalanced, with a lack of childhood anecdotes and a huge over-emphasis on His death.
We are promised that the Holy Spirit will lead us into all truth, and it is the guidance of the Holy Spirit that we need to rely on in determining whether we should regard any book as inspired. After all, the one who inspired it should know (though in my view it is quite telling that there appear to be no quotations from the Apocrypha in the New Testament). We need to rely on the Holy Spirit in deciding whether to trust writings from after the NT period as well – I was taken aback to find that Julian of Norwich attributes Pelagian sentiments to her vision of Jesus.
The Jewish Law sows the seeds of the ending of polygamy, by ruling that a man must treat all of his wives equally. This is impossible for a mere human being to obey, so is in effect a way of forbidding polygamy. Similarly, with slavery, the Israelites are urged to remember that they were slaves in Egypt. How can you enslave anyone with whom you empathise? It has taken many years for the seeds sown in the Torah to germinate – but that is not a reflection on the Scriptures, only on man’s hardness of heart. On slavery, it should also be noted that Paul made a case for the manumission of Onesimus in the Letter to Philemon. So perhaps he did not take slavery entirely for granted.
One (non-Catholic) example of how far we can go astray when we elevate tradition to a position similar to Scripture, is in the Boer justification of apartheid, which prioritised some Scriptures relating to race
more than others.
I do not agree that Scripture improves over time. What does happen is that (1) God reveals more of Himself, without contradicting the foundational material, and of course this culminates in the Incarnation; (2) with the help of the Holy Spirit, man becomes better able to understand what is there; (3) the Cross makes a difference to what God both does Himself, and authorises us to do. There are a number of behaviours in the OT which attract the death penalty, including sexual variations and witchcraft. I believe that one reason for this is that these behaviours could engender demonisation, and in OT times the only way to deal with demons was to get rid of the person who was acting as a vehicle for them. However, during the ministry of Jesus, and after His death, His disciples were given authority to deal with the evil spirits directly, without needing to “shoot the messenger”.
mick says
As a reluctant non believer, I like what he says.
The Bible is a complex, contradictory, debatable text, thankfully. It was written by, and can only be understood by a committee. Preferably one speaking Amaraic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin..
The word servus in Latin means bondsman, servant, indentured labourer, guest worker and slave.
Each generation must decide how original texts are best interpreted and applied to their world.