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THE BIBLE HAS MANY MEANINGS, Fourth in a series
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Donald Senior, C.P., is President of Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, the largest Roman Catholic graduate school of ministry in the United States, where he is also a member of the faculty as Professor of New Testament. Born in Philadelphia in 1940, he is a member of the Passionist Congregation and was ordained a priest in 1967. He received his doctorate in New Testament studies from the University of Louvain in Belgium in 1972.
Fr. Senior is a frequent lecturer and speaker throughout the United States and abroad, and serves on numerous boards and commissions, including the Board of Directors of William H. Sadlier, Inc. He has published extensively on biblical topics, with numerous books and articles for both scholarly and popular audiences. In 2001, Pope John Paul II appointed him as a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission and he was reappointed in 2006 by Pope Benedict XVI.
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In exploring important principles for interpreting the Bible in Catholic tradition, we will often find that such principles are shared by many other Christian denominations. That is certainly true of the fundamental principle we want to talk about in this installment.
Some people approach a biblical passage expecting that it has only one true meaning. Biblical interpretation, in this view, is something like digging for a hidden treasure--until the treasure is uncovered anything else turned up along the way is meaningless. But understanding the meaning of a biblical text is not like a treasure hunt. In fact, the Bible in whole and in part is capable of many authentic meanings. The stories and sayings of the Bible are rich in potential meaning and have many dimensions that reveal themselves to the attentive reader.
This is true of much great human literature. By contrast, a stop sign at the corner may have only one meaning: stop! But great literature, whether one of Shakespeare's plays or an epic saga such as Homer's Ulysses or a Robert Frost poem, carries many authentic meanings. People refer to such literature as "classics." The Bible, too, is surely a "classic" in this sense. As we noted in an earlier segment, for people of faith the Bible is God's inspired word, but it is also a fully human word. And on both counts, the Bible opens itself to many possible meanings.
This insight, in fact, was well-known in the earliest centuries of the Church. The Church fathers traditionally referred to four classic meanings inherent in a biblical text: 1. The "literal" or historical meaning, i.e., the apparent original meaning of a passage as intended by its author and received by its original audience; 2. The "allegorical" meaning that finds other levels of meaning in the story beyond the historical or literal sense, applying the biblical passage to other religious truths, similar to the way Jesus himself explained the parable of the sower by giving a special meaning to each of the types of soil. This allegorical method was a favorite of Christian authors in the early centuries of the church; 3. The "anagogical" or mystical meaning whereby a particular biblical passage was seen to refer to transcendent and heavenly realities beyond the literal sense of the story; and, 4. the "tropological" meaning which referred to the moral teaching that could be drawn from a biblical passage.
An example of finding multiple meanings in a biblical passage might be the variety of ways of understanding Jesus' famous parable of the Good Samaritan found in the Gospel of Luke (10:25-37). One could read this as a story that attacks prejudice against people of other cultures (e.g., the Samaritan as a type of a despised stranger), or as a way of defining what it means to be a "neighbor" (which seems to be the point of Jesus' question in this story), or as an explanation of what is the most important obligation of those who seek to do God's will (see the introduction to the parable in 10:25-28). Much depends obviously on the perspective and experience and interest of the reader or interpreter. Each of us individually and all of us collectively bring different vantage points to our understanding of the text. Our social and economic status, our cultural heritage, our particular spirituality--all of these and more influence the meaning we might discover in the Bible.
But what if someone were to use this story of Jesus as a justification for an anti-Jewish interpretation? After all, the Jewish priest and a Levite walk by the man in the ditch without taking care of him. Here is where another important aspect of the principle of "multiple meanings" comes into play. In Catholic tradition, the range of possible meanings of a biblical passage should always cohere in a credible way with the literal or historical meaning. An authentic interpretation cannot be justified that runs directly counter to the fundamental literal or historical meaning. In Luke's Gospel, for example, Jesus' story is situated as a response to the lawyer who tries to test Jesus. Jesus, in turn, responds by directing the lawyer's attention to a fundamental statement of Jewish belief that stands at the heart of the law: "you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself" (Luke 10:27). In the literal setting of Luke's Gospel, the parable of the Good Samaritan is an illustration of the Laws true meaning--not an attack on Jews and Judaism.
Not infrequently someone will ask me: "what is the Catholic Church's interpretation" of a particular biblical passage. As far as I know the Church has rarely, if ever, given an official single meaning to any passage in the Bible. Certainly the Church has often cited some key texts in its official teaching--for example, citing the blessing of Peter in Matthew 16:18 ("You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church" ) as an affirmation of the papal office . But the Church leaves open--even regarding this passage--the possibility that a theologian or a preacher or an individual Christian reading the Bible for spiritual reading will find other levels of authentic meaning in the biblical text. The safeguard against bizarre or harmful interpretations includes squaring a particular interpretation with the literal or historical sense--but there are also other helpful safeguards that we will take up in later segments.
WAYS TO IMPLEMENT
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AT HOME
1. What does it mean to say that the Bible is a "classic" text?
2. If a biblical passage can be interpreted in a variety of ways, how can we know if a particular interpretation is an authentic or helpful way of understanding this passage?
3. Take a favorite biblical story and see how many different meanings you (and perhaps some of your friends) might find in this story.
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