Participatory Biblical Exegesis: A Theology of Biblical Interpretation

FOUR: Participatory Biblical Exegesis and Human Teachers

— 90 — C H A P T E R F O U R Participatory Biblical Exegesis and Human Teachers Building on our examination of the centrality of the divine Teacher in participatory biblical exegesis, this chapter explores participatory biblical exegesis in light of the divinely ordained fellowship in which context exegesis proceeds.1 In this regard, some Christians have expressed hope that historical-critical exegesis can overcome the divisions that more participatory forms of exegesis seem to foster due to their emphasis on particular communal faith commitments . In light of such concerns about participatory forms of exegesis, the chapter takes up its inquiry from within the framework of Jewish–Christian dialogue.2 If participatory biblical exegesis highlights the particularity of divinely ordained interpretive communities in the quest for truth, does this emphasis undercut dialogue with those, such as (for Christians) our Jewish “elder brothers ,” who read some of the same texts as scriptural?3 At the heart of this question is an even more fundamental question: what happens to the texts of Scripture when read through the lens of the synagogue or the Church, rather than solely through the perspectives of the academy?4 This chapter explores these questions about the proper locus for biblical exegesis by proceeding in two steps. First, I examine Levering-04 2/11/08 11:30 AM Page 90 responses to the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s recent document “The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible,” which is marked by a strong commitment to historical-critical exegesis at the risk of attenuating the participatory aspects of Jewish and Christian biblical exegesis.5 As a second step, I survey the approaches to biblical exegesis put forward by the Jewish scholars Jon D. Levenson, Peter Ochs, and Michael Fishbane. Much Jewish biblical exegesis, like the Christian exegesis explored in previous chapters, strongly affirms the participatory and communal framework of biblical exegesis.6 On the basis of this investigation, I seek to show why ecclesial biblical exegesis is the most fertile ground on which Christians can extend and develop, in a dialogic fashion, their exegetical encounter with God the Teacher. Responses to the Pontifical Biblical Commission: Positive and Negative As a prelude to his summary, Henry Wansbrough points out that John Paul II personally requested that the Pontifical Biblical Commission take up the topic. In the context of John Paul’s consistent understanding of “relations with Judaism as being an internal rather than an external element in the Church,”7 Wansbrough explains the purposes of the three sections of the document. The first section explores the role given in the New Testament to the Old Testament, and the range of “similar attitudes and ideas” found “in Judaism and in the New Testament .”8 The document also finds similar “techniques of presentation,” exegetical methods, understandings of the relationship of Scripture and oral tradition, and processes in the formation of a canon.9 These similarities enable one to see that the community in which the New Testament was written was deeply Jewish in many respects and accepted the authority of the Old Testament. The second section of the document probes in detail how Old Testament themes are taken up in the New. This section defends the notion of fulfillment and affirms the validity of a Christological reading of the Old Testament, according to which Christ fulfills and confers an unanticipated (in the document’s view) fullness on the themes of the Participatory Biblical Exegesis and Human Teachers — 91 — Levering-04 2/11/08 11:30 AM Page 91 Old Testament. Wansbrough states that this section of the document notably proposes that “[t]he advance and focus of Old Testament ideas in the New Testament does not imply that the Christian should hold a Jewish reading of the Bible to be illegitimate. Each way of reading the Bible is valid.”10 With regard to patristic and medieval allegorical reading of the Old Testament, the document holds that because “such teaching was not based on the commentated text” but rather was “superimposed on it,” it follows that “[i]t was inevitable, therefore, that at the moment of its greatest success, it went into irreversible decline.”11 The document credits Thomas Aquinas for initiating this inevitable process of “irreversible decline.” According to the document: Thomas Aquinas saw clearly what underpinned allegorical exegesis : the commentator can only discover in a text what he already knows, and in order to know...