In a recent festschrift fittingly titled, The Church and Her Scriptures: Essays in Honor of Patrick J. Hartin, editors Catherine Brown Tkacz and Douglas Kries have provided readers with an eclectic and fascinating collection of essays. Ranging from topics as varied as the interpretation of Dei Verbum, to the Mariology of St. Ephrem, to Pauline Christology, this volume is a worthy addition to the library of any Catholic theologian and any student of biblical theology and the Christian tradition regarding biblical scholarship.
Opening with an essay by the honoree, Patrick Hartin's contribution in ‘The Gift of Dei Verbum’ is a largely laudatory reception and commentary on what is likely the most significant document to come out of the Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum, otherwise known to English readers as the Constitution on Divine Revelation, promulgated in 1965. The chapter does a marvellous job introducing the reader to the principal contributions of the document, and while Hartin unfortunately continues to disseminate the myth of the big, bad manuals of pre-conciliar infamy—an opinion which the current reviewer finds fragile at best—the one significant criticism that can be levied against the piece is the confused notion of inerrancy that the author puts forth as an interpretation of the infamous passage in DV §11 concerning the ‘truth’ of Scripture revealed for the sake of our salvation.
Hartin seems to interpret this passage as a conciliar enshrinement of a limited inerrancy approach, but authors such as Michael Waldstein (see his 2010 essay ‘Analogia Verbi: The Truth of Scripture in Rudolph Bultmann and Raymond Brown’ published in Letter & Spirit 6) have convincingly demonstrated that this limitation is not present within the document, which is, in fact, wholly in line with a methodology that would assert plenary inerrancy. It is unclear why Hartin would consider an approach that takes plenary inerrancy seriously as one that ‘degenerates into fundamentalism’ (p.23), but happily this is the only blemish on an otherwise informative and finely-wrought essay. One delightful contribution is the reminder of the Church's reverence for the Septuagint, the use of which in the early Church has given it a unique authority, and as Hartin reminds us, ‘The Septuagint is the authoritative Bible for Catholics, not the Hebrew Bible’ (p.34). Closing out his discussion, Hartin is also to be praised for emphasising the need to synthesise various exegetical methodologies and pointing contemporary exegetes back to the examples set by the Patristic exegetes—especially Origen—as faithful examples of scholars and saints working within an ecclesial context.
Chapters two and three concentrate on Scripture in the Syriac tradition, as Sebastian Brock explores the exegetical method St. Ephrem, St. Jacob of Serugh, and St. Isaac of Nineveh—whose theology ‘remains just as pertinent today for anyone approaching the Bible form a starting point of faith as it was for their own contemporaries’ (p.58)— while Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent explores the contribution of St. Ephrem to the Mariology of the early Christian theological tradition, for as she notes: ‘No other author in the early Church gives so much attention to Mary as Ephrem the Syrian, (p.84). Continuing themes in the Eastern tradition, Anna Silvas offers up a jewel of an essay on St. Macrina and her engagement with the sacred page. Eschewing a contemporary scepticism of the biographical account offered by her younger brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa, she deftly casts aside ‘those in the reductionist spirit of textual criticism who readily dismiss all that Gregory has to say about his sister as purely a function of literary genre’ and shows that we can be confident in our knowledge of ‘Gregory's Macrina’ (p.90) and the truth of her character and person. Silvas proceeds to draw out the mystical ascent achieved in Macrina's life due to her perpetual contact with, and embodiment of, the truth presented in Sacred Scripture, concluding with a profound commentary on the prayer offered up to God in Macrina's final moments of life. Few theological essays are imbued with such a sense of the author's own contact with the theological realities dealt with on the page, but this was such a one.
Chapters six and seven turn to one of the cornerstones of the tradition in St. Augustine. Michael Cameron looks at how Scripture functions in Augustine's Confessions, and ‘his ever-restless reading of Scripture’ (p.124), while Douglas Kries explores Augustine's work, The Lord's Sermon on the Mount, and the great saint's teaching on justice, mercy, and warfare in light of the precepts of charity and virtue offered by Christ in the Beatitudes. For his part, Richard Ounsworth gives the reader a wonderful piece on the relationship between the old and new covenants in the eighth chapter, concentrating on how ‘typological interpretation seeks to explore the many, sometimes surprising ways in which that covenant and the record of the salvation history of God's chosen people is precisely ordered to its own fulfilment in the person, the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth’ (p.142).
Chapters eight and nine center the perspective of women in the biblical narrative. Catherine Brown Tkacz, whose work has contributed to the ‘recovery of the Christian tradition of interpreting women as types of Christ’ (p.162) offers a thought-provoking essay on the figure of Susanna as presented in the book of Daniel, especially in the narrative parallels between the crisis of Susanna's accusation and subsequent judgment and the trial of Jesus in the Matthean account of His passion. As she notes: ‘At least thirty aspects of the experience of Jesus in his Passion as recounted by Matthew correspond to the experience of Susanna’ (p.175), a fact that should not be overly surprising if God, in His providential ordering of history, so guided the authoring of the book of Daniel—in its twin centering of the figures of Susanna and the Son of Man—should so orchestrate things in such a way ‘so that a woman and a man could be complementary prophetic indications of the good news’ (p.188). Sara Butler concentrates on the ‘women of Galilee’, whose presence and importance ‘contributes to a vision of the church in which the complementarity of the sexes is acknowledged and women's full collaboration is promoted’ (p.194). While acknowledging the inherent risks in drawing on feminist critiques, Butler is able to show how bringing the Gospel's inclusion of women in Christ's public ministry into the light ‘enlarges the circle of New Testament role models for women’ (p.213) in a useful and positive manner. Concluding the volume are chapters ten, with Patrick Reardon giving a fine introduction to the ‘Christocentricity of the Psalter’ (p.224), and eleven, where Thomas Weinandy investigates the primacy of Christ as presented in the various hymns of the Pauline corpus, itself the fruit of his recent masterful work in the Jesus Becoming Jesus volumes.
Taken as a whole, The Church and Her Scriptures is a very helpful and very interesting contribution to the contemporary recovery of doctrinally orthodox and ecclesially-centered biblical theology and scripture studies which takes the Christian tradition—especially as witnessed to by the saints of the Patristic period—seriously. It is a prime example of what the late Rev. Matthew Lamb would recognize as theology characterized by wisdom and holiness, science and scholarship.
