A Personal Reflection on Tradition
Image courtesy of Prof. Juan Jose Marcos in his article, “Paleographic Fonts for Ancient Greek” (http://guindo.pntic.mec.es/jmag0042/palegreek.html).
(Listen to an audio version of the blog post below!)
In my last blog on Scripture and Tradition, I mentioned that theology is faith . . . thinking. And such faith results from an intensely personal encounter with God, an encounter enabled by God’s freely-given gift of grace. Thus, faith is—in a very real and visceral sense—living out that personal, intimate relationship with God, not on our own, but within community, within the family of God, the Church.
It’s important to understand that our faith is not an isolated, disembodied feeling, but an organic entity that lives and grows, as we ourselves live and grow. Just as there are many ways by which our physical, mental and emotional lives grow, so are there many ways by which our faith grows, two of which are through a proper understanding of Scripture and Tradition, the subjects of the previous blog. Together, Scripture and Tradition comprise the fertile soil in which our Christian lives of faith are rooted, and as we sink our roots ever-deeper into that soil, the fruit that emerges becomes that much sweeter.
We’ve explored the relationship between Scripture and Tradition in these blogs, a relationship that is often misunderstood, however, even within the Church itself and across the ages. To understand that relationship, let’s start at the very beginning:
“In the beginning was the Word,
and the word was with God,
and the word was God . . .
[and] the word became flesh
and lived among us . . .
full of grace and truth.”
(John 1: 1, 14]
John’s Prologue recalls the opening words of Scripture: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth . . .” (Genesis 1: 1). From the moment of creation God’s λόγος infused all that is, all substance, all thought, all being. The Hebrew scriptures tell the story, a story told through mythopoeic literature, historical narrative, fable, drama and poetry. Then—at just the right moment in time—the λόγος stepped off the pages of scripture and entered the world enfleshed, full of grace and truth, and he walked among us. In John’s first epistle, John writes:
“What was from the beginning,
what we have heard [ἀκονω],
what we have seen [όράω]with our eyes,
what we have gazed [θεάομαι] upon
and touched [ψηλαφάω] with our hands
concerns the Word of life . . .
(1 John 1: 1)
John was Jesus’ cousin and the most intimate of Jesus’ Apostles. Indeed, at the Last Supper John sat at Jesus’ left and John fell asleep with his head on Jesus’ shoulder, much as a younger brother might do. Within the context of scripture, when we get to 1 John, our young Apostle John is now an old man, one who has pondered the meaning of Jesus’ life, death, burial and resurrection; one who has cared for Jesus’ mother, Mary; one whose thoughts drift back in time to the days on the road with Jesus. John knew what Jesus’ voice sounded like and what he looked like, in every detail, right down to his eyelashes; late at night when Jesus slept, John had gazed upon him and touched him. These intimate details defined and nurtured John’s faith. We read of them in scripture, and as readers we share in John’s most precious memories. That’s what scripture does. Through literature—through the written word, in all its genres—scripture brings to life the story of God’s presence in our human experience, in our humanity.
The Vatican II document Dei Verbum offers a framework for reading and studying Scripture, a framework that presents the subtle relationship between Scripture and our experience of Scripture and Tradition. In the wake of Dei Verbum, the Pontifical Biblical Commission presented to John Paul II in 1993 “The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church,” later published in Origins on January 6, 1994. It begins by saying: “The study of the Bible is, as it were, the soul of theology. . . [and] this study is never finished; each age must in its own way newly seek to understand the sacred books”; indeed, each generation must build upon the knowledge and experience of previous generations, or traditions. The document then goes on to outline current methods and approaches for interpretation, including the “historical-critical” method; literary analysis; approaches based on tradition; scientific approaches; and contextual approaches. All have their value; none is exclusive.
Based upon my own carefully researched understanding of Dei Verbum and on the documents that followed, it allow me to outline my approach to Scripture, one that has served me well and that has deepened my faith, my relationship with Christ and my scriptural teaching. During my Ph.D. studies in literature, I encountered Northrop Frye’s, The Great Code (1981). Frye, a professor of literature at the University of Toronto, was one of the era’s greatest literary critics, who burst upon the scene with the publication of his first book, Fearful Symmetry (1947), a brilliant study of William Blake’s prophetic poetry, and whose lasting international reputation was cemented with Anatomy of Criticism (1957), one of the most important works of literary criticism written in the twentieth century. In The Great Code, Frye argues that although many different people wrote the Bible over a period of more than 1,500 years, and although it passed through the hands of many editors and redactors, the Bible—as we have experienced it in the Christian canon across 2,000 years of Western civilization—is a unified literary work: it has a beginning, a middle and an end; it employs a consistent set of metaphors, similes and other literary devices; and it draws upon a consistent set of symbols, such as light, dark, water, fire, oil, and so on. The Bible’s main character is God, its conflict is sin, and its theme is redemption.
To me, Frye’s statement was an epiphany. Prior to reading The Great Code, I had viewed the Bible as simply an anthology of Jewish and Christian literature, rather loosely stitched together, a collection of independent myths, histories, poetry, exordia, epistles and letters, useful for “doing” theology, grist for a homily or for rooting out and applying principles for living. That’s basically what I had been taught in church while growing up and what I had experienced in the Christian community as an adult.
With this new literary paradigm for reading Scripture, my head spun with the possibilities. I quickly discovered Robert Alter’s, The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981) and The Art of Biblical Poetry (1985) as well as Meir Sternberg’s, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (1985). I devoured them, and they deepened my understanding of Scripture and of this new approach to reading it. At the same time, the Society of Biblical Literature, had begun a daring scholarly publication, Semeia: An Experimental Journal for Biblical Criticism (1974-2002), that focused on new and emergent approaches to biblical scholarship, a journal that welcomed a literary approach to Scripture.
In 1985 I found myself on the cutting edge of biblical scholarship. It was a very exciting place to be and a very exciting time to be part of it.
When I began teaching “The English Bible as Literature” at UCLA as an English Department faculty member, I designed the course to reflect this literary approach to Scripture, and when I formed Logos Bible Study in 1995 and took the course into the broader community, it enabled me to bridge denominational divides and introduce Scripture in a new way to my Logos Bible Study students, a way that transcends denominational differences, that brings the biblical characters to life, that adds color, tone and texture to the narrative, and that creates an unforgettable story.
I have been teaching Scripture for a long time now, and I’ve learned that regardless of the approach one takes, Scripture studies are best viewed as complimentary, not as competitive. I encourage my students to explore many different approaches to Scripture and to listen to many different teachers who have their own perspectives. There are very fine teachers out there who take a fundamentally different approach to Scripture than I do, and many of them are well worth listening to.
Reading the Bible from a literary perspective is only one way of approaching the text, but it is my way, and I think it has yielded superb results in meeting my goal of creating “educated readers of Scripture,” in bringing people into an intimate, personal relationship with Christ and in drawing them deeper into an authentic life of faith. It has been a terrific journey for me and for tens of thousands of Logos Bible Study students over the past thirty years.
I thank God from the bottom of my heart for falling in love with Scripture and for sharing that love with my students. Tradition, I propose, is the sum total of our human experience of Scripture, and in a very small way, I am blessed to be a part of that Tradition. Standing on the shoulders of giants, I am but a dim flicker of light in the blinding radiance of God’s presence in our world.