Cardinal Ratzinger on Biblical Exegesis

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Cardinal Ratzinger on Biblical Exegesis

By Rowland Croucher and others ⋅ May 16, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

Cardinal Ratzinger, Biblical Exegesis and the Church

By Stephen Hand

“At its core, the debate about modern exegesis is not a dispute among historians, it is rather a philosophical debate” —Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Interpretation in Crisis On January 27, 1988, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, dropped something of a large bomb on the neo-modernist Biblical establishment. The Cardinal, theoretically the second most powerful man in the Church, delivered the Erasmus lecture for that year in New York City (1) , sponsored by the Rockford Institute Center on Religion & Society, entitled Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: On the Question of the Foundations and Approaches of Exegesis Today. Needless to say, any lecture given by the head of what was formerly known as The Holy Office and which promised to be examining and critiquing the very “foundations” of modern exegesis (which today is completely identified with the so-called historical-critical method) was bound to raise eyebrows and cause no little commotion.

The Cardinal did not disappoint. Surrounded by both friends and foes (including the American exegete Raymond Brown) the Cardinal delivered the most trenchant critique of the erring philosophical and theological presuppositions which lay behind the historical-critical method since the early days of the Pontifical Biblical Institute founded by Pope Leo XIII. What was just as interesting perhaps, was that Ratzinger, in what may have been more than a tongue-in-cheek literary device, opened the lecture by recalling the Church’s eschatalogical awareness, quoting Wladimir Solojews’s History of the Antichrist, in which the Arch-enemy of Christ is said to have earned his doctorate in theology at Tubingen and was renowned for his pioneering exegetical works. That Cardinal Ratzinger himself (not to mention his classmate, Hans Kung) attended Tubingen was an irony surely not lost on the audience.

While Ratzinger did not question the validity of the historical method per se, he clearly attempted to undermine much of it it ( at least to the extent that it has been practised for over two hundred years) by summoning orthodox Catholic theologians and exegetes to “get beyond disputes over details and press on to [a critique of] the foundations”, calling for “the work of a whole generation” which he referred to as a “criticism of criticism”. The Cardinal suggested that only now could such a thorough “criticism of the criticism” be undertaken, precisely because the method has been around so long; indeed almost to the point of exhausting itself in variations on its central theses. The kind of criticism that the former theology professor called for is one that would aim at and be able to expose the “appearance of quasi-clinical-scientific certainty” which posed as the method for so long.

Ratzinger is confident that such a critique will give the lie to the notion of pure objectivity as an “absurd abstraction”, and show that “every exegesis requires an ‘inter’, an entering in, and a being ‘inter’ or between things; this is the involvement of the interpreter himself. Pure objectivity,” he says, ” is a myth”. Indeed, the Cardinal called for the application of the chief insight of the Heisenberg principle to the historical-critical methodology. That principle indicates that “the outcome of a given experiment is heavily influenced by the point of view of the observer”. In the case of the higher critics (as opposed to the “lower”, merely textual, critics) this point of view involved presuppositions and errors alien to the traditional faith of the Church. He said it is clear that “…after about two hundred years now of exegetical work on the texts, one can no longer give all their results equal weight”; and that “…at a certain distance, the observer determines to his surprise that these interpretations, which were supposed to be so strictly scientific and purely ‘historical’, reflect their own overriding spirit…”; a spirit that must now be humbled.

Cardinal Ratzinger minced no words in debunking some of the more obvious pretensions of the method. Reciting how the so-called search for the “historical Jesus” led only to the multiplication of contradictory theories and hypothesis’ based on the prejudice of unbelief, he shows how “a veritable fence” was placed around the Scriptures, blocking all but the “initiated” new exegetes from its sacred precincts. Even these, the Cardinal said, were no longer really “reading the Bible” anymore, but were “dissecting it into the various parts from which it [ their "new" gospel, 2 Cor 11:4] would have to be composed”. He referred to this dissection as “picking history to death”, so that the trees ended up blinding the exegetes to the forest, as it were.

“…One must challenge the basic notion dependent upon a simplistic transferal of science’s evolutionary model to spiritual history. Spiritual processes do not follow the rule of zoological genealogies…One can easily see how questionable the criteria have been by using a few examples. Who would hold that Clement of Rome is more or complex than Paul? Is James any more advanced than the Epistle to the Romans? Is the Didache more encompassing than the Pastoral Epistles? Take a look at later times: whole generations of Thomistic scholars have not been able to take in the greatness of his thought. Lutheran orthodoxy is far more medieval than was Luther himself. Even between great figures there is nothing to support this kind of developmental theory. Gregory the Great, for example, wrote long after Augustine, and knew of him, but for Gregory, the bold Augustinian vision is translated into the simplicity of religious understanding. Another example: what standard could one use to determine whether Pascal should be classified as before or after Descartes? Which of their philosophies should be judged more developed? All judgements based on the theory of discontinuity in the tradition and on the assertion of an evolutionary priority of the “simple” over the “complex” can thus be immediately called into question as lacking foundation” —(ibid p. 10; emphasis ours)

From Bultmann to Schillebeeckx (though the latter is not named), the method has been hashed and rehashed, ad nauseum, until the final “disintegration of interpretation and hermeneutics” was wrought. The Gospel, in consequence, was inevitably surrendered to the zeitgeist, and the Fathers and the perennial teachings of the Church were thus replaced according to the current fashion. There followed any number of new exegetical schools; Marxist exegesis, feminist exegesis, gay exegesis, and more. Hard Biblical truths were easily mitigated or eliminated according to this method. The most vicious and devastating consequence was a total revisionist Christology and Ecclesiology which amounted to an undermining of the Faith itself.

Cardinal Ratzinger showed how Bultmann’s methods emphasize the priority of interpretation over the events of Scripture themselves, reducing the events to “mythological developments”. Discontinuity and any alleged discrepancies in accounts were given priority over all continuity and harmonizations. Especially the fantasy that “what is simple must be original”—a notion contradicted everywhere in literature and history—was uncritically accepted. Indeed, this presupposition (alone) when shown to be false, ensures that the whole house of cards must tumble, so central is it to the theses. Ratzinger shows how absurd is a notion which would have to conclude that St. Paul was less complex than the later Clement of Rome.

Finally, Ratzinger perceives that the reduction of Christ, according to this method, into a mere “Judaic” eschatalogical prophet or rabbi, however unique, is the result of philosophic prejudice, unbelief, not the result of necessary, objective—much less “scientific”— scholarship.

Interestingly, the reaction and fallout to Cardinal Ratzinger came some five years later in 1993 when the Pontifical Biblical Commission, headed by none other than Ratzinger himself, published a document entitled “The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church”. It turned out to be far less than an enthusiastic response to the Cardinal’s call to foundational criticism of the criticism. Instead the Commission simply reaffirmed the legitimacy and centrality of the historical-critical method with precious little that echoed the Cardinal Prefect’s core concerns. Father Albert Vanhoye, who not long after the lecture began his second five-year term as Secretary of the PBC, said in an interview:

“In that talk [Ratzinger] strongly criticized form criticism as practiced by Rudolph Bultmann and Martin Dibelius, and he argued that form criticism had been built upon philosophical presuppositions contrary to the faith of the Church…We responded to [Ratzinger's lecture] by indicating that, in its essence, the historical-critical method is not tied to the a priori assumptions of Bultmann and Dibelius, and that it is necessary to employ this method in a manner that liberates it from any a priori assumption that would be contrary to the Church.” First Things, June/July 1997, p. 35 Thus the bang was morphed with a shrug into a whimper. Fr. Vanhoye appears to gloss over the Cardinal’s particular criticisms of the a priori assumptions of the method; the methodological assumptions, it should be noted, accepted not only by Bultmann and Dibelius, but by not a few Catholic theologians, with dire effects for Catholic theology. He said, “Cardinal Ratzinger was always present in our discussions except when he had a conflicting commitment, but he was admirably discreet, not insisting on his criticism.” (emphasis mine)

Cardinal Ratzinger is discreet indeed. Prophets know when to speak and when to remain silent—and how to wait. So the call to “a critique of the foundations” relative to biblical studies may still belong to the future, to future theologians who will soon replace their teachers, too many of whom, having wed themselves to the present age, must now become widows of the next; who were too often productive of very little because their faith, maybe, was weak, their prejudices strong, and their vanity finely tuned. Others, however, we may safely assume, are working quietly on this foundational criticism even as we speak. The bomb only awaits detonation. In God’s good time. (2)

The search for a “historical” Jesus who lies “behind” the biblical text and witness, who can be divorced from the “Christ of Faith, ” has failed over and over, precisely because it is the Jesus of history who from “the beginning” was proclaimed by the first witnesses in the Church’s kerygma as the Christ of Faith, the Word “made flesh” (Mt 20:28; Jn 1:1-14; 20:27, 28; Acts 1:11, etc.), the Alpha and Omega of being.

EndNotes:

1. The event took place at Saint Peter’s Church, NYC.

(2) See also The Historical Critical Method and “Cleverly Invented Stories”

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