Fr. Robert Barron on Biblical Interpretation

cyril

FrRobertBarron: I don't know what possessed me to watch Real Time with Bill Maher because Bill Maher is by far the most annoying anti-religionist on the scene today...
The other night, I was watching it and Ralph Reed was on, the former head of the Christian Coalition and now he's an advocate for religious causes and so on in the political world. He's a bright guy. They were talking for, I don't know, 4 or 5 minutes about families and a lot of social theory around intact families, broken families, and Ralph Reed was making, I thought, a number of good points. It became clear that Bill Maher knew he wasn't making a lot of headway, so he then abruptly changed the topic to religion.
Here's what he said to Ralph Reed. "So, Mr. Reed, you're a man of faith, which means you're someone who suspends all critical judgment and accepts things on the basis of no evidence," to which Ralph Reed astonishingly responded, "Yes."
I remember, I was in my room. I shouted at the TV screen, "No! That's not what faith means." Then he said, "And I presume that you take the Bible literally in its entirety," to which Ralph Reed responded, "Yes."
At that point, I said, "Oh, God, here we go again." What Bill Maher did then was he took out a piece of paper that had listed on it all these outrageous things that you can find in the Bible and asked Ralph Reed to justify them. The last one was slavery. Poor Ralph Reed, rather pathetically, tried to distinguish between the chattel slavery we had in our country prior to the Civil War and the much more benign form of slavery they had in the Roman Empire that Biblical people were talking about, to which Bill Maher responded, "Oh, so it's the good kind of slavery that God approves of." At that point, I said, "Oh, gosh. Religion has taken another step backward in the public forum."
Can I just say a couple things about these issues that were raised by Bill Maher and were not very well defended by someone like Ralph Reed? Look first at this question of faith. This drives me crazy, and the Bill Maher characterization of faith as just silly credulity, just superstition, just accepting any old wild claim without evidence. That is exactly what faith does not mean.
Faith, as I've often said, is not irrational. That means below reason. That's credulity. That's superstition. That's accepting things on no evidence. That's childish and all of that. God gave us brains and he wants us to use them. Authentic faith never involves a sacrificium intellectus, as the medievals say, a sacrifice of the intellect. Never. In fact, that's a sign that your faith is inauthentic. If you feel obligated to leave your mind aside to have faith, it's not real faith.
Real faith is not irrational, it's suprarational. That means it's beyond reason and inclusive of it. Faith is a response to God. God is not a being in the world. God is the source of the existence of the world. More to it, God is a person. Right? Both those things imply that God can never be controlled. God can never be seen directly, can never be managed by the mind, the way an object of the sciences can, the way an object in my visual field can. I can look at it. God isn't like that. God can never be like that if He's the ground and source of all existence.
That's why faith does indeed involve darkness, but not the darkness of insufficient light, but rather, as Thomas Aquinas said, the darkness caused by a surplus of light. God can't be seen clearly because He's not a thing in the world. He's the transcendent source of all being. That's why there's darkness involved. It's the darkness on the far side of reason, not on the near side of reason.
Therefore, there's never a suspending of one's critical faculties. In fact, authentic faith awakens the mind, awakens the critical faculty. So much more I could say about it, but just I would urge anyone that's tempted to believe Bill Maher's characterization, pick up any 2 pages of Augustine or Anselm or Thomas Aquinas or John Henry Newman or Joseph Ratzinger, and tell me you're dealing with someone who has suspended his critical faculties. Please don't go down that route. That's not what authentic faith is.
Now, just a word about the Bible. Do you take the Bible literally? The minute he said yes to that question, we were off and running in precisely the wrong direction. I go back now as a Catholic to the great statement of Vatican II called Dei Verbum. It means the Word of God. One of the great statements of Vatican II. There's a line in Dei Verbum that is enormously clarifying. It says, the Bible is the Word of God, but in the words of men. That little laconic statement really packs a punch.
The Bible is the Word of God. In the Bible, God speaks to us. The whole Bible is inspired by God. Absolutely. But it's the Word of God, in the words of men. In other words, God did not dictate to automatons who simply took down the words literally like robots. Rather God worked much more subtly and respectfully with real human subjects, writers, and He expressed Himself through the writings of these all together culturally conditioned figures, whose writings were conditioned by the audiences they were addressing and by the genre they were employing.
This is why one of the great questions Dei Verbum says we must attend to when reading the Bible is the question of genre. What's the genre of the text we're dealing with? Is it a saga? Is it a legend? Is it a letter? Is it an apocalypse? Is it a history? What is it? There are all kinds of genres on display in the Bible. That's why the question, do you take the Bible literally, is about as helpful as the question, do you take the library literally. It's just a stupid question. You take some books in the library literally. Others you don't. Sensitivity to genre is absolutely key in correct Biblical interpretation.
Here's a second observation. I get this from William Placher, the theologian. He said we must distinguish always between what's in the Bible and what the Bible teaches. There are a lot of things in the Bible. That is to say, they were in the cultural milieu of the time of the various authors. They were part of the maybe intellectual furniture of the authors of a given time. What the Bible teaches is not always reducible to what's in the Bible.
What the Bible teaches is what God intends us to know, what's inspired by God through the Bible. To get that, we have to be attentive to the patterns and themes and trajectories within the whole of the Bible. Now, a good example is Maher's example of slavery. Was slavery part of the scene in the whole period in which the Bible was written? Yeah, sure it was, as it was in almost every ancient culture. Was it along for the ride? Was it part of the mental furniture of the time? Yeah, of course it was. Are we surprised therefore that Biblical authors mentioned slavery? Even in some cases, offer tentative words of approbation? No, that's part of the cultural milieu in which they wrote.
But is slavery something taught by the Bible? Is slavery something encouraged by the Bible, what God wants? I would say no. To get that, we look at the totality of the Bible, in its great themes and patterns and trajectories. Mind you, the people that opposed slavery and brought it to an end in the 18th and 19th centuries, both in Europe and America, were precisely Biblical people. People attentive to patterns, themes, and trajectories listening to what the Bible teaches and not simply reading dumbly what's in the Bible. I think that distinction is very important for a Biblical interpretation.
Now, all of this was out of the picture on Real Time with Bill Maher. Can I suggest please, the path that Bill Maher and Ralph Reed went down, is precisely the wrong path to be going down. There are far more sophisticated ways to respond to the questions that he asked.