God, Man, and Scripture (Part One)

Conflicts foreign and domestic over faith and morals wrack the modern world, as jihadists rage globally and Western sexualized secularists subvert God-given natural law, making rational interpretation of Holy Writ never more relevant. Particularly timely then is Catholic theology professor James L. Papandrea’s new Sophia Institute Press book, Reading Scripture Like the Early Church: Seven Insights from the Church Fathers to Help You Understand the Bible.

As Papandrea discussed with this author in a recent Conservative Casual Friday podcast, Papandrea begins his penetrating analysis of the Bible with a key insight: “The Scriptures—like Jesus Christ Himself—are both divine and human.” The “Church Fathers understood the Scriptures to be both inspired by the one perfect and omniscient God and also written by fallible humans with limited understanding,” he writes. “The divine Author speaks through the pen of the human author.”

This orthodox view rejects the “extreme…of divine dictation,” Papandrea observes. Hereby “God has taken over the human author’s consciousness, and created a text in which the human author contributed nothing from his own perspective, personality, or experience.” This interaction between a perfect God and fallible men is a far more modest and believable claim than the Islamic doctrine that the Quran is God’s immutable, coeternal word, merely proclaimed by Islam’s prophet Muhammad.

Yet “what is written in the Bible cannot mislead or deceive us. In fact, most of the Church Fathers would say that everything is there for a reason,” Papandrea adds. “The Scriptures are infallible, but the Church Fathers would not have agreed that they are what fundamentalists and some evangelicals call inerrant,” he concludes. This namely entails “historically, and even scientifically, accurate in the literal sense of the words,” a doctrine that has bizarre results when applied by Muslims to the Quran.

Papandrea illustrates his points by referencing common controversies concerning the cosmological origins narrative in Genesis’ opening chapter. “A fundamentalist divine dictation’ approach begins with the assumption that the word day must mean an actual, historical, twenty-four-hour day. But the Church Fathers never thought this way,” he cautions. “In other words, the Church Fathers understood that the text could be divinely inspired without being a science lesson,” contrary to a “perceived antagonism between the Christian Faith and science.” The “purpose of the text was not actually to describe how God created everything, let alone how long it took, but simply that God did create everything,” Papandrea explains.

Similarly, the “Church Fathers knew that often numbers in Scripture are not meant to be understood as numerically precise,” Papandrea writes. The “numbers in Scripture often have a symbolic meaning that might be only indirectly related to their numerical value,” he specifies. “In fact, there are times when the numerical values of numbers in Scripture simply do not add up.”

Papandrea also offers compelling reasons for variations in the Gospel accounts of Jesus that have often puzzled readers. For example, the “Church Fathers recognized that Jesus would have said the same or similar things on multiple occasions, and He would have done the same kinds of things many times,” Papandrea writes. Correspondingly, “what may appear to be contradictions in the accounts of a single event are probably actually the evangelists’ accounts of separate events.”

Jesus’ own words are not always literal. As Papandrea notes, “Jesus told people that if their hand causes them to sin, they should cut it off, or if their eyes cause them to sin they should pluck them out (Matt. 5:27–30; 18:8–9; Mark 9:43–48).” Yet this was simply “hyperbole,” or an “exaggeration meant to make a point,” contrary to literal readings of numerous violent Quran verses.

Differentiation and nuance are key for Papandrea in interpreting the Bible. After all, “no one reads the Bible all literally, or all non-literally. Even self-described fundamentalists who say they read the Bible literally do not do so with every passage,” he observes. Otherwise, these Protestants would have to accept John 6 as describing Jesus’ real presence of body and blood in the Eucharist.

Underlying Papandrea’s criticism of common understandings of Biblical literalism are the Bible’s variegated linguistic tongues, unlike the Quran, in which Arabic is somehow the sole authentic language for God’s final revelation. The “Church Fathers believed that the infallibility of the text was in the meaning, not in the exact verbiage,” something that “becomes obvious when we remember that that Scriptures were not written in English,” he notes. For example, the “words of Jesus and the apostles were probably translated twice to get into English: first from Aramaic to Greek, then from Greek to English.”

“Most of the time, we are reading the Scriptures translated into our most comfortable language,” Papandrea writes, but much can go lost in translation on black and white text pages. As he notes,

it helps to know that, for example, Hebrew poetry is all about repetitions and parallelisms with synonyms—so it doesn’t make sense to look for different meanings for two words that are meant to reiterate the same thing. On the other hand, sometimes the same word can mean two different things in two different passages.

Such concerns underlie Papandrea’s suspicions about various English Bible translations such as the New International Version (NIV). “While we maintain the conviction that the words of Scripture are infallible and will not lead one astray, it is unfortunately the case that you can’t always trust every translation of Scripture,” he writes. Yet substance over style remains his motto as he remembers the example of St. Augustine (354-430), who initially “had rejected the Faith of his mother (St. Monica) because he thought that the Latin in his Bible was not eloquent enough.” Such criticism of scriptural style is inconceivable under Islamic doctrine, which holds that the Quran is a miracle of Arabic linguistic majesty.

As analyzed by Pope Benedict XVI in his September 12, 2006, Regensburg address with its controversial references to Islam, the essential interrelationship between reason and right revelation, shapes Papandrea’s Biblical outlook. This faith-based rationality also has significant moral implications for the differing traditional interpretations of the Bible and the Quran, as the concluding article in this series will analyze.