Tuesday, May 22, 2007

A Jesus Beyond Politics

Pope Benedict becomes the teacher he always wanted to be.

By George Weigel
Special to Newsweek

May 21, 2007 issue - At one poignant moment in Chaim Potok’s novel The Promise, Abraham Gordon, a distinguished Jewish scholar with a skeptical cast of mind, muses on one of modernity’s discontents while walking through Central Park with Reuven Malter, a brilliant, Orthodox rabbinical student: “Of course, that’s the problem … How can we teach others to regard the tradition critically and with love? I grew up loving it, and then learned to look at it critically. That’s everyone’s problem today. How to love and respect what you are being taught to dissect.” In that elegiac passage, written almost forty years ago, Potok defined precisely the problem that Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, addresses in his new book, Jesus of Nazareth. “Everything” in Christianity, the Pope writes, depends on building an “intimate friendship with Jesus.” That was true in first-century Galilee; it is just as true in the twenty-first century. But twenty-first century believers have a problem that their forebears didn’t face: the many issues posed by modern methods of reading ancient texts. Now, after two centuries of reading the Bible according to the historical-critical method-“dissecting” the biblical text, as the fictional Abraham Gordon might put it-many Christians are “in danger of clutching at thin air” in seeking this friendship with their Lord. Or so the Pope worries.

And not without good reason. Caricatures notwithstanding, Benedict XVI is no reactive anti-modern. He readily and gratefully acknowledges that, thanks to historical-critical scholarship, we know much more, today, about the different literary genres of the Bible; about the ways in which a Gospel writer’s intent affected his portrait of Jesus; about the theological struggles within early Christianity that shaped a particular Christian community’s memory of its Lord. The difficulty is that, amidst all the knowledge gained in the biblical dissecting room, the Jesus of the Gospels has tended to disappear, to be replaced by a given scholar’s reconstruction from the bits and pieces left on the dissecting room floor. And that makes “intimate friendship with Jesus” much more difficult, not just for scholars, but for everyone.
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