Dark Passages of the Bible: Engaging Scripture with Benedict XVI and St. Thomas Aquinas

by Matthew J. Ramage

Overview

Multiple gods? Divinely mandated genocide? Rejection of an afterlife? If the Scriptures are the inspired and inerrant word of God that Christians claim them to be, how can they contain these things? For many believers in the modern age, traditional Christian answers to these challenges are no longer convincing. Though spiritually edifying, they are unable to account for the sheer scope and depth of problems raised through the advent of historical-critical scholarship.

Following the lead of Pope Benedict XVI, in Dark Passages of the Bible Matthew Ramage weds the historical-critical approach with a theological reading of Scripture based in the patristic-medieval tradition. Whereas these two approaches are often viewed as mutually exclusive or even contradictory, Ramage insists that the two are mutually enriching and necessary for doing justice to the Bible's most challenging texts.

Ramage applies Benedict XVI's hermeneutical principles to three of the most theologically problematic areas of the Bible: its treatment of God's nature, the nature of good and evil, and the afterlife. Teasing out key hermeneutical principles from the work of Thomas Aquinas, Ramage analyzes each of these themes with an eye to reconciling texts whose presence would seem to violate the doctrines of biblical inspiration and inerrancy. At the same time, Ramage directly addresses the problems of concrete biblical texts in light of both patristic and modern exegetical methods.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK

"Ramage uses three difficult biblical motifs as proving grounds for this method: the nature of God, the nature of good and evil, and the afterlife. Exegetes and theologians will appreciate the author's wrestling with these issues in a considered way that tries to be true to both scientific methodology and the demands of a community of faith." -The Bible Today

If a sacred text can be literally incorrect about topics on which it claims to speak authoritatively, how can its words be trustworthy? Dark Passages sets out to raise the reader's awareness of how to use the Bible in ways that are not so cut and dried. The Method C reader appreciates myth or authorial overreach where they exist, and always reads the biblical word theologically, as an encounter with the divine Word. Method C goes beyond a simple, formulaic answer to problematic Bible passages." -First Things

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813221564
Publisher:	The Catholic University of America Press
Publication date:	09/19/2013
Pages:	312
Sales rank:	862,569
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

MATTHEW J. RAMAGE is assistant professor of theology at Benedictine College.

Read an Excerpt

DARK PASSAGES OF THE BIBLE

ENGAGING SCRIPTURE WITH BENEDICT XVI & THOMAS AQUINAS

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By MATTHEW J. RAMAGE

The Catholic University of America Press

Copyright © 2013 The Catholic University of America Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8132-2156-4

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CHAPTER 1

THE BIBLE'S PROBLEMS

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Responding to the question of how the extremely bleak book of Ecclesiastes made it into the biblical canon, Peter Kreeft has written that there is nothing more meaningless than an answer without its question—and Ecclesiastes is in the Bible precisely because it provides the question to which the rest of the Bible is the answer. The solutions proposed in the present work would likewise be meaningless if we did not first survey some of the problems in biblical exegesis today. The goal of this chapter is to elicit in the minds of readers questions such as "How can that be in the Bible?" and "How can the Bible be the inspired and inerrant word of God if the evidence presented here is true?" After arousing this wonder at the text of scripture in the present chapter, we will be in a better position to suggest a meaningful theological response in the chapters that follow.

THREE CHALLENGING BIBLICAL THEMES

The following pages introduce the reader to some of the greatest challenges a Christian must face in his quest to vindicate the truth of Sacred Scripture. To this end, I will be using the same method I employ in the university classroom where I group the Bible's problems into three major themes which run throughout the canon, each of which poses unique difficulties. What immediately follows here is a survey of the problems bound up with these themes; at the end of this book we will revisit them and offer a solution in light of the hermeneutical principles laid out in subsequent chapters.

Theme 1: The Nature of God

It is foundational to the Christian faith that our God is the one and only divine being in existence. Just as we saw above in the case of the afterlife, however, scripture as a whole does not paint the uniform view of God's nature that Christians tend to assume. An authority no less than Pope Benedict himself takes it as an obvious given that ancient Israelites once believed in the existence of Sheol as well as in the existence of multiple deities. Taking up both of these issues in the same breath, he writes, "The official religion of Israel ... no more denied all existence to Sheol than, at first, it denied the existence of other gods than Yahweh." Whereas the previous section explored problems bound up with the biblical portrait of the afterlife, in this section we will address scriptural evidence which seems to contradict orthodox Christian teaching concerning the nature of God, in particular his oneness.

Let us begin with the issue of whether the Bible paints a unified portrait of God's oneness. Monotheism is at the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and it is rightly touted as one of our religion's unique and great contributions to civilization. To be sure, the Old Testament gives us many clear declarations of Israel's monotheistic faith, as we will see later in this work. However, what concern us at this point are those times when the Israelites seem to have accepted as a matter of course the existence of multiple divine beings; for, if this indeed is the case, one would be hard pressed to find a more salient challenge to the inerrancy of scripture's teaching. We witness the subtle presence of this view in passages like the following from the book of Exodus:

But Pharaoh said, "Who is the Lord, that I should heed his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and moreover I will not let Israel go." Then they said, "The God of the Hebrews has met with us; let us go, we pray, a three days' journey into the wilderness, and sacrifice to the Lord our God, lest he fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword" (Ex 5:2–3).

Here it is interesting to consider how Moses and Aaron reply to Pharaoh, "The God of the Hebrews has met with us." It is not farfetched—indeed it is common—to see in this statement the assumption that Yahweh (translated "the Lord" in the RSV) is the God of the Hebrews alone, that is to say one specific divine being among others who also exist but are simply worshiped by nations other than Israel. This would be consonant with Yahweh's command forbidding the worship of foreign deities, "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me" (Ex 20:2–3). Again, this statement does not claim that other gods are unreal but rather that they are not to be worshiped by the people of Israel. In the eyes of Moses, Israel's worship of Yahweh is something the nation should be proud of, for the gods of the neighboring nations are simply not as close to their subjects as Yahweh is to the people of Israel: "For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as the Lord our God is to us, whenever we call upon him?" (Dt 4:7)

If the above sketch is correct, it clearly presents us with a problem; for both faith and reason inform Christians that only one God exists, but here we seem to have the Old Testament assuming the existence of more than one God. Of course, there are multiple ways we could explain this statement without accepting such an interpretation: Moses could be speaking of "the God of the Hebrews" merely as a way of relating better to Pharaoh, and the "other gods" described in the First Commandment could simply refer to created physical or spiritual idols. The question, however, is whether these alternative explanations satisfactorily account for the evidence. This problem will come into much sharper focus as we begin to adduce other trace evidence of polytheism in ancient Israel.

Several passages in the Psalms have a similar feel to the former in that they appear to be concerned with demonstrating Yahweh is the greatest among the many gods that exist. For example:

There is none like thee among the gods, O Lord, nor are there any works like thine (Ps 86:8).

For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods (Ps 95:3).

For great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; he is to be feared above all gods (Ps 96:4).

For thou, O Lord, art most high over all the earth; thou art exalted far above all gods (Ps 97:9).

For I know that the Lord is great, and that our Lord is above all gods (Ps 135:5).

O give thanks to the God of gods, for his steadfast love endures for ever (Ps 136:2).

As usual, the Christian tradition has various ways of interpreting the "gods" described in these passages. The gods could be idols, or even angels as the later tradition came to understand them. While such explanations are theoretically possible, a more thorough examination of the biblical data reveals their shortcomings and makes many question their credibility. At the same time, the fact that these passages speak of multiple gods does not mean simply that ancient Israelite religion was polytheistic. Indeed, scholars of religion in the Ancient Near East often describe these passages as an expression not of polytheism but of "henotheism" or "monolatry." Henotheistic systems are those which acknowledge the existence of multiple gods yet see all but one as unworthy of worship.

If ancient Israel embraced a henotheism akin to other nearby Canaanite religions, it would not be surprising to see it closely bound up with the ancient Canaanite conception of a "divine council," a royal court in heaven headed by a king with divine beings as his counselors, political subordinates, warriors, and agents. Indeed, as Jarl Fossum states, "The Israelites took over the Canaanite concept of an assembly of gods under the supremacy of El, even designating Yahweh as the 'master in the great council of the holy ones.' " In the following texts we are introduced to the "heavenly beings" who comprise this council:

Ascribe to the Lord, O heavenly" beings, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength (Ps 29:1).

God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment (Ps 82:1)

For who in the skies can be compared to the Lord? Who among the heavenly beings is like the Lord, a God feared in the council of the holy ones, great and terrible above all that are round about him? (Ps 89:6–7)

For who among them has stood in the council of the Lord to perceive and to hear his word, or who has given heed to his word and listened? ... But if they had stood in my council, then they would have proclaimed my words to my people, and they would have turned them from their evil way, and from the evil of their doings (Jer 23:18,22).

The members of the divine council spoken of here, sometimes called "gods," or "holy ones" (a term referring to divinities in ancient Ugarit) and other times "sons of the gods" or "sons of God," preexisted the creation of the material world. Brendan Byrne explains the rationale for the term "sons" being applied to the members of Yahweh's divine council:

The use of the expression "sons of God" (more correctly, "sons of the gods") with reference to heavenly beings does not imply actual progeny of God (or the gods) but reflects the common Semitic use of "son" (Heb. ben) to denote membership in a class or group. "Sons of the gods," then, designates beings belonging to the heavenly or divine sphere. Such allusions to a plurality of divine beings, occurring especially in the Psalms and related poetic literature, represent a stage when Israel's Yahwism found room for a pantheon in many ways similar to Canannite models (cf. the literature of Ugarit). In the Bible, however, these beings are clearly subordinate to Yahweh, forming his heavenly court or divine council.

The "sons of God" of the Old Testament enjoyed special powers such as the ability to intervene in the world's affairs. We see this in the case of Satan in the book of Job and in the mythological Nephilim or "giants" in the book of Genesis:

Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them. The Lord said to Satan, "Whence have you come?" Satan answered the Lord, "From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it." (Jb 1:6–7)

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth ... when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (Jb 38:4,7)

When men began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of them as they chose.... The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown. (Gn 6:1–2, 4)

In the above texts it is shown that the "sons of God" have the ability to test humans and, strangely, to intermarry with them. Other passages present us with more subtle echoes of the divine council's activity and deliberation among its members:

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (Gn 1:26).

Then the Lord God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever" (Gn 3:22).

Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech (Gn 11:7).

And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" Then I said, "Here am I! Send me" (Is 6:8)

We have already observed that the divine council was typically thought to be headed by a king who was served by subordinate divine beings in their various roles. The Old Testament appears to maintain remnants of this polytheistic tradition, especially in the Genesis narrative of man's creation and original sin. God says, "Let us make man in our image," "Man has become like one of us," and "Let us go down," while in Isaiah he asks "Who will go for us?" Once again, Christians have various means by which to deny traces of polytheism here (for example, stating that God is speaking with the "royal we" or that the "us" refers to the persons of the Trinity). The question is whether these explanations hold up when we honestly confront all the trace evidence of polytheism in the Old Testament.

The issue of polytheism becomes all the more acute when we acknowledge the probable dependence of Genesis on other, much older myths of creation and flood from the ancient Near East. The book of Genesis was written no earlier than the thirteenth century B.C. (the time of Moses, who was traditionally held to be the author of Genesis), and current scholarship indicates Genesis was most likely redacted by multiple authors over a period of centuries (between 900 and 400 B.C.). However, Babylon's polytheistic creation myth Enuma Elish—with the like of which the people of Israel would almost certainly have been familiar—dates to the second millennium B.C. Scholars possess tablets of the Enuma Elish which date to the seventh century B.C., meaning the story is likely several centuries older than Genesis. While there are significant theological differences between the creation account of Genesis 1–2 and the Enuma Elish, both operate within the same cultural milieu, share concepts, and at points even narrate their stories in the same order (the "waters," creation of heaven and earth followed by creation of the heavenly bodies and of man, etc.). Similarly, the flood narrated in Genesis 6–9 has close parallels in much more ancient polytheistic myths with which the Israelite authors of Genesis would have been familiar. For instance, we possess copies of Gilgamesh dating to the first half of the second millennium B.C. (though the story itself may date as early as the middle of the third millennium B.C.) and copies of Atrahasis dating to the seventeenth century B.C. What is the most probable and logical explanation for the similarities between Genesis and these other myths? It is conceivable that these parallels are purely coincidental, but as Kenton Sparks states, "The most sensible explanation for the similarities is that the pentateuchal authors [of Genesis] borrowed some of their materials from the ancient world."

Returning to the Bible's divine council and the identity of its individual members, we find traces in various places, but perhaps some of the most interesting are those which seem to interchange "The Lord" with subordinate agents such as his dabar or "word" (used over 600 times in the Old Testament) and ruach or "spirit" (used forty-six times in the Old Testament). Here, however, we will consider a few examples of confusions between the God of Israel and his divine messenger or "angel" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]):

Then the angel of God said to me in the dream, "Jacob," and I said, "Here I am!" And he said, "Lift up your eyes and see, all the goats that leap upon the flock are striped, spotted, and mottled; for I have seen all that Laban is doing to you. I am the God of Bethel, where you anointed a pillar and made a vow to me. Now arise, go forth from this land, and return to the land of your birth" (Gn 31:11–13).

And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, "I will turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt." When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, "Moses, Moses!" And he said, "Here am I" (Ex 3:2–6).

And the angel of the Lord appeared to [Gideon] and said to him, "The Lord is with you, you mighty man of valor." And Gideon said to him, "Pray, sir, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this befallen us? And where are all his wonderful deeds which our fathers recounted to us, saying, 'Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt?' But now the Lord has cast us off, and given us into the hand of Mid'ian." And the Lord turned to him and said, "Go in this might of yours and deliver Israel from the hand of Mid'ian; do not I send you?" ... And the angel of God said to him, "Take the meat and the unleavened cakes, and put them on this rock, and pour the broth over them." And he did so. Then the angel of the Lord reached out the tip of the staff that was in his hand, and touched the meat and the unleavened cakes; and there sprang up fire from the rock and consumed the flesh and the unleavened cakes; and the angel of the Lord vanished from his sight. Then Gideon perceived that he was the angel of the Lord; and Gideon said, "Alas, O Lord God! For now I have seen the angel of the Lord face to face." But the Lord said to him, "Peace be to you; do not fear, you shall not die." (Jgs. 6:11–23).

On that day the Lord will put a shield about the inhabitants of Jerusalem so that the feeblest among them on that day shall be like David, and the house of David shall be like God, like the angel of the Lord, at their head (Zec 12:8).

Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him. And the Lord said to Satan, "The Lord rebuke you, O Satan! The Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is not this a brand plucked from the fire?" (Zec 3:1–2)
(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: "How Can That Be in the Bible?" 1

1 The Bibles Problems 17

2 Benedicts "Method C" Proposal and Catholic Principles for Biblical Interpretation 53

3 The Problem of Development 92

4 The Problem of Apparent Contradictions 114

5 Method C Exegesis, the Nature of God, and the Nature of Good and Evil 155

6 Method C Exegesis and the Afterlife 196

Conclusion: Method C Exegesis in the Church 274

Bibliography 281

Scripture Index 297

General Index 301

Editorial Reviews

""Unlike many other books, Dark Passages of the Bible does not limit itself merely to describing and applying abstract theories or doctrines of inspiration or inerrancy to "difficult passages" in Scripture. Rather, it reconciles actual biblical passages or themes that seem to contradict or be incompatible with doctrines of biblical inspiration and inerrancy . . . A significant contribution to explaining Pope Benedict XVI's interpretive approach, which reconciles the best of pre-critical and post-critical exegesis."--William S. Kurz, SJ, professor of theology, Marquette University"--

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