Saturday, April 23, 2005

James Alison. Again.

I use the argument quite often that lesbianism is not forbidden anywhere in the Bible, and so neither, quite obviously, is "homosexuality" per se. That nobody in the Christian world - including Augustine and Clement of Alexandria, both of whom wrote on Romans 1 - read this passage as referring to lesbianism, until Chrysostom. That therefore the passages that we get hit over the head with constantly (all 4 of them!) refer to something else entirely. I first read about this in the article "A Catholic reading of Romans 1," by James Alison, a Catholic priest in Ireland. It's a discussion of the general assumption of what the "text plainly says," or doesn't say. Read the whole thing, as they say.

But I'm not going to argue about lesbianism this time. This time I'm interested in the όι Ίουδαιοι [hoi Ioudaioi] question: the issue of how to understand Gospel passages that refer to "the Jews" - and more generally, the issue of how modern people can read and understand Scripture. Here's what James Alison has to say on the subject:
According to the official teaching body of the Catholic Church, Catholic readers of the Scripture have a positive duty to avoid certain sorts of what the authorities call ‘actualization’ of the texts, by which they mean reading ancient texts as referring in a straightforward way to modern realities. I will read you what they say, and please remember that this is rather more than an opinion. This is the official teaching of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, at the very least an authorized Catholic source of guidance for how to read the Scriptures, in their 1993 document The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church:
‘Clearly to be rejected also is every attempt at actualization set in a direction contrary to evangelical justice and charity, such as, for example, the use of the Bible to justify racial segregation, anti-Semitism or sexism whether on the part of men or of women. Particular attention is necessary ... to avoid absolutely any actualization of certain texts of the New Testament which could provoke or reinforce unfavourable attitudes to the Jewish people.’2

The list which the Commission gives is deliberately not exhaustive, but it has the advantage of taking on vastly the most important of any possible improper actualization, which is that related to the translation of the words όι Ίουδαιοι [hoi Ioudaioi], especially where they are used in St John’s Gospel. I ask you to consider quite clearly what this instruction means. It means that anyone who translates the words όι Ίουδαιοι literally as ‘the Jews’ and interprets this to refer to the whole Jewish people, now or at any time in the past, is translating it and interpreting it less accurately, and certainly less in communion with the Church, than someone who translates it less literally as something like ‘the Jewish authorities’, or ‘the local authorities’ who were of course, like almost everyone in St John’s Gospel, Jewish.

Now, given how vitally important the Jewish people and the relation between the Jewish people and the Church has been in the development of Christian Doctrine, if we are urged to avoid absolutely any actualization of the text, then the following statement must, a fortiori, be at the very least perfectly reasonable, if not actually highly recommended, as a guide to a properly Catholic reading of a passage dealing with something rather less important. Here it is: given the possibility of a restricted ancient meaning in a text which does not transfer readily into modern categories, or the possibility of one which leaps straight and expansively into modern categories and has had effects contrary to charity on the modern people so categorized, one should prefer the ancient reading to the actualized one.

Isn't this instruction clear? And BTW, doesn't this lead in an authentically Christian direction? Why, then, this endless dispute? This is "the official teaching of the Catholic Church," and yet it's like pulling teeth to get anybody to pay any attention to it.

Secular people simply scoff when this issue comes up; they don't take what the Bible says literally in any case, or even very seriously, and think that the dispute is simply over a cultural code in the ancient world. They're right. But I do take the Bible seriously, if not literally, because this is where our faith originates. I want to understand what's being said, and to be taken seriously when I argue about it.

7 comments:

jpe said...

Good post. I read the actualization principle as a kind of cautionary principle. Clearly, categories themselves aren't to be avoided, but one has to be careful rendering, or translating, those ancient categories as contemporary ones.

One very interesting passage is this one:

Clearly to be rejected also is every attempt at actualization set in a direction contrary to evangelical justice and charity

There are times when ya gotta love the Catholics for their readiness to explicitly interpolate pre-existing moral commitments into their hermeneutics.

*Christopher said...

bls...a fine post by one of my favorite theologians. I hadn't read this work before. This is a hermeneutical caution that needs to be taken so much more seriously when presenting issues and persons are before us.

Unfortunately, I don't think the Roman Catholic Church itself has applied this principle in a fashion that in fact does justice to sexism within the Church as opposed to in society--a dichotomy that too easily and falsely posits the work of the Spirit in the Church and not in society.

Official teaching on women still officially discriminates against women being in persona Christi in the sacramental celebration, and hence, because of their femaleness, women cannot represent Christ physically.

This raises of course a serious objection that most priests are European, of non-Jewish heritage... And to my mind is obviously an attempt to theologize prejudice and mysogyny given that women have represented Christ in their persons--we call them saints, given that a more Trinitarian understanding would recognize the entire community represents the Body of Christ in the celebration, and given that if women cannot represent Christ, we have a serious salvation problem, unless we go with Augustine and most of the Fathers who saw women as defective men saved by men who represent Christ.

But this is biologically crap, given that in mammals, like us humans, our proto-form, if you will, is female, from which the male takes form through a hormonal genetic nexus (Now if we were talking about avians, the opposite would be the case.)--hence our (male that is) fragility in terms of genetic disease due to the shrunken y chomosome and too often it seems our fragile egos in which we define our maleness as anti-femaleness. Tragic in my opinion and doesn't give due to how diverse humans really are within men and women...

LutheranChik said...

This post reminded me of a recent Sunday morning when my elderly mother decided to stay home and watch a televised mass rather than come to church with me. As I was getting ready to leave I was listening to the priest's homily, which touched on Jesus' respectful and lovingly familial relationships with the women in his life, contrary to social norms, and the priest made some remark to the effect of, "...and that's why we as the people of God are called to treat one another as equals." I snorted my morning java right out of my nostrils at that statement. Can you say cognitive dissonance? Oh, I knew thatcha could!

LutheranChik said...

This post reminded me of a recent Sunday morning when my elderly mother decided to stay home and watch a televised mass rather than come to church with me. As I was getting ready to leave I was listening to the priest's homily, which touched on Jesus' respectful and lovingly familial relationships with the women in his life, contrary to social norms, and the priest made some remark to the effect of, "...and that's why we as the people of God are called to treat one another as equals." I snorted my morning java right out of my nostrils at that statement. Can you say cognitive dissonance? Oh, I knew thatcha could!

Derek Olsen said...

btw, the latest edition of the BDAG--the big dictionary that's the standard for NT types--states that the preferred translation of Ioudaioi is "Judeans" rather than "Jews." I'm not sure I agree. The John text *is* anti-Judaic and that's something we have to come to terms with and to disagree with the author about. (The change was accomplished by the most recent editor, Robert Funk of Jesus Seminar fame.) The hermeneutic referred to is Augustine's from De Doctrina Christiana which can be summarized as: the true interpretation of a passage is the one that most promotes charity, virtue, and the upbuilding of the church.

bls said...

" The John text *is* anti-Judaic and that's something we have to come to terms with and to disagree with the author about. "

If what you say is true - and I take your word for it - I agree with you about that. Ironically, this is simply another fundamentalist impulse: another attempt to make an idol out of the Bible so that we don't have to do any work in making sense of it, or deal with any of its contradictions and problems.

Revisionism of this type makes us all ignorant, and also possibly less able to deal with other, similar problems. We really don't need pap; we need to understand things as they are or were, I think. In any case, it's an excellent object lesson that we should always have in front of us, so that it won't ever happen again.

I understand the impulse in this case, though, considering the horrific damage that has been done on account of this, and I think it comes from a good place. But I think it actually makes things worse.

bls said...

"There are times when ya gotta love the Catholics for their readiness to explicitly interpolate pre-existing moral commitments into their hermeneutics."

Yep - but this is how things really should be, don't you think? I mean, this is what happens in physics; you don't hang onto outdated theory - you take the new and better stuff and toss it in there.

And you live with whatever contradictions this sets up until you understand things more clearly.