My approach to Scripture: Where I am in the journey
This is a personal statement of my approach to Holy Scripture. I cannot state that I speak for the Celtic Catholic Church in this matter, nor would I want to. This approach is mine and mine alone. I am firm in it, as I'm sure one would expect me to be. I pray that I am always open to change, but I would suspect that the sweet members and friends of the Celtic Catholic Church would want me to express the truth, as I believe it. I don't pretend to be a professional theologian, church historian, or even great Bible scholar, but this is simply the map of the road down which I am walking. I know in my heart that God accompanies me every step of the way. I may not always be correct, but I know that He is proud of my growth and my use of the freedom of thought He created in me.
I grew up in a Missionary Baptist home. While there I came to a sad realization: Fundamentalist religion plays a major role in the pain and suffering of many struggling and seeking people through self-righteousness, legalism, and hypocrisy. Quote the Bible and all discussion suddenly comes to an end. I now realize that Religious Fundamentalists, whether Christian, Moslem, Jewish, or of whatever stripe … are all Terrorists!
This is only one little reason I became a Celtic Catholic -- as thinking people we do not presume the Bible provides the last word on a number of issues. In my mind, the matter is more complicated than that. People differ passionately about what the Bible teaches. These passions rest on the way one interprets the texts. The major question is not, "What does the Bible say?" but rather "How do we interpret what the Bible says? How do we determine what the Bible really means?"
Some say we should take the Bible as it reads and not "interpret" it. But interpretation surely simply means getting the meaning out of a text. In this sense, there is NO such thing as reading the Bible, or anything else, without interpreting. Without a reader, the text is only words -- markings on a page. In themselves these markings mean nothing! To have meaning they have to pass through someone's mind. Understanding the words, determining the meaning of the text, IS interpretation. Any time people read anything they are interpreting.
It is important to pay attention to the different ways of reading a text, especially when dealing with ancient texts like the Bible. The words might suggest one thing to us in the Twentieth Century but may have meant something very different to the people who wrote them long ago.
Take an example from everyday life. In the United States we have an expression: to be out in left field. To understand this expression one has to know something about baseball. Areas of the baseball field are center, right and left field (as viewed from the batter's position). Most batters are right-handed. They swing from right to left. So they tend to hit the ball more often and more deeply into left field. When they do hit a ball into right field, the ball is not likely to go as far. So the player covering left field needs to be positioned far back in the field, far from the other players. In many ways the left fielder is isolated and out of touch - off in his own world
So, to say someone is "out in left field" means he is disoriented, out of contact with reality, wrong, unconventional or loony.
Now, what if you spoke perfectly good English but knew nothing of baseball or American usage and you heard that expression for the first time: "You're wondering about Bishop Dwain? He's really out in left field." You might go out looking for me in a field somewhere off to the left! You understand the words, but you missed the point. We say the same thing when we say: "Bishop Dwain is a real space cadet," or today you might say, "Dwain just doesn't compute."
These sayings have nothing to do with real fields, space travel, or computers, and they all make the same point. But ignore the culture in which they belong and you'll miss the point despite understanding the words. The problem with Fundamentalism is not Scripture's inerrancy but rather the errancy of the interpretation that accompanies such an idea. The whole problem of dealing with Scripture seems to narrow down to what we do with it -- how we apply and understand what is inerrantly said. I hope that by saying this I have not left the impression that I do not think the Bible reveals the truth of God. I would always affirm that Scripture can and does give us the truth of God!
Slavery in the New World produced one of the tragic examples of what I am talking about. Especially in sixteenth century Spain and in the United States between 1730 and 1860, biblical texts were used, as if they inerrantly supported slavery. The Spanish controversy was largely about encomiendo, a form of labor slavery imposed on native people of New Spain by the Laws of Burgos (1513). Fundamental theological spokesmen cited the conquest of Canaan (Deut. 20), the destruction of Sodom (Gen. 18:16-19), and Jesus' parable of the wedding feast (Matt 21:1-14) to advocate encomiendo as part of a just Christian war against New World "barbarians." It is just this kind of thinking, or more accurately, the rethinking about it, that has prevented Father Serra's canonization.
Reform-minded missionaries led by Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican friar and the bishop of Chiapas in Mexico, condemned encomiendo as unjust and rejected its biblical defense. He suggested that all three texts were historically conditioned. I would agree.
By the way, a good example of the encomiendo conflict in Brazil is wonderfully portrayed in the film Mission. The inerrancy of the Bible became the center of debate in the slavery of Africans in much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in this country.
Biblical views of slavery were not only at the roots of the Civil War but the "inerrant and obvious view" of Scripture placed much of the American Church into such a disarray as to be a scandal to Christ. Southern Methodists, Southern Baptists, the Episcopal Church, and even Roman Catholics split over this issue. But, I think I will keep this historic discussion until next time!
