HEROES AND BOOKS: GOD AND THE BIBLE

In another context I was asked why I didn’t name God as my hero or list the Bible as my favorite book. The answers are interrelated, but will take a little time to explain. The Greeks had stories about the gods as heroes. It’s something fairly common in a polytheistic world-view. No one god is all-powerful. Each is limited by the other gods and the forces of nature. No god, for example, could change the decision of the Fates who spun out a person’s life, measured it, then cut it off. The gods were prey to all the emotions of humans, but they could cause a lot more damage because they were so much more powerful that mortals. In these circumstances it was possible to have a god who was a hero, a divine being who triumphed over an adversary.

That won’t work in a monotheistic religion like Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. When there is only one, all-powerful God, there is no overcoming the adversary. The Jewish and Christian Scriptures are quite clear that God has no equal. Even the stars which are sometimes called in Hebrew elohim (gods) are nothing more than lights created by the One God. Satan is not the evil equivalent of God. Satan is a creature made by God and limited by God. In what seems to be a heavenly conflict between the forces of good and evil, there is never any question that God wins.

In that sense God can never be a hero, certainly not one we can imitate. God is the “totally other,” pure being without limitation, without beginning or ending. While it is true that we are created in the image of God, this does not mean we are in someway divine, chips off the old block (or sparks off the divine fire as the Stoics would say). No, we are always creature, not creator. Being in the image of God means we have a special correspondence with God. With the Spirit breathed into us we have some limited capacity to know, understand, and love God, but only insofar as God chooses to be revealed. On our own, we can know nothing about God.

This brings me to books and the Bible. It is quite possible to read the Bible as an ordinary book. In fact, it can be profitable to do so. It can be treated as a primary historical sources from which we can extract some knowledge about peoples between about 2,000 B.C. and A.D. 100. We can discover things about their religion and culture. It always fascinates me, for example, that the oldest part of the Bible, Judges 5, portrays two women, Deborah and Jael, as the heroes who save Israel. Quite a contrast with some of the later views of women.

We can read the Bible to appreciate its qualities as literature. We can read it for very entertaining stories. We can explore it to see how it conceived the cosmos. We can study it for the moral teachings it contains. In this sense we read the Bible as we would any ancient book.

But there is another way in which we can read the Bible: as the bearer of the eternal Word of God. It is important to understand “Word” as an English translation of the Hebrew dabar and Greek logos. Word is not just spoken sounds or written characters, but reason, revelation, truth. The Word is God, and always has been so. Through the Word, God created the cosmos. In Christ the Word became flesh. The Word was proclaimed by believers thus acquiring a form in words first orally and then in writing. The Word continues to be active in our own day as the means by which people are brought to faith.

Since God is the one who is totally other, there must be a way that God can be mediated to us so that we can comprehend God. That is the Word. The Word to us is always mediated in some way whether that is through creation, through the person of Christ, through the Scriptures, through the Sacraments, or through the telling of the Good News.

The Word of God is alive. It cannot be limited to some rules or propositions about things. Dead words don’t have the power to transform people the way the living Word does.

If we understand that Christ was the Word in flesh, then we view the Bible as a testimony to the Word. I believe that the people who wrote the Bible were inspired by the Word of God alive within them. They wrote not thinking they were creating Holy Scripture, but simply putting into writing what they had heard, taught, and believed. In doing so, however, they were communicating the living Word.

So many approaches I have seen to reading the Bible seem to ignore the Word alive in the community of the faithful. The Word was present among believers before ink ever touched parchment or papyrus. The people who wrote what became the Bible were members of the community of faith. And it was the community of faith that made inspired decisions about what writings rightly bore the Word of God.

I have had a frustrating time teaching students who seem to regard the Bible as something that simply dropped from heaven as a whole in King James English. Most Christians, for example, seem ignorant of the fact that in the first few centuries of our era, many Christians did not regard James, Jude or 2 Peter as part of the Bible, and other Christians regarded 1 Clement, Barnabas, and the Shepherd of Hermas as parts of the Bible. It was a long process is reaching agreement about what constituted the Bible–a process that still isn’t over because Christians still disagree about what constitutes the Old Testament.

I mention these things as a reminder of the dynamic nature of the Word of God in the community and the effect of that dynamism on the Bible. That is often lost when people treat the Bible as the Word of God trapped between the covers of a book. We have to read the Bible as a way of letting the living Word of God move and shape us.

In general, I believe there needs to be a combination of methods employed in reading the Bible so that we can hear the living Word. There needs to be an approach that involves the active intellect to explore the meaning of scripture. There needs to be a meditative type of reading, lectio divina, where we mull over and chew on the Scriptures. There needs to be a prayerful use of the Bible, especially of the Psalms, where we allow the words of Scripture to become our prayer. And there needs to be a communal reading of scripture which allows us to benefit from the insight granted to others.

Heroes and books make good companions on our earthly pilgrimage. I wouldn’t want to be without them. But without God, the living Word, we wouldn’t have the slightest chance of ever getting to our destination.

May the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne