not of this world

Modern exegesis has brought to light the process of constant rereading that forged the words transmitted in the Bible into Scripture: Older texts are reappropriated, reinterpreted, and read with new eyes in new contexts. They become Scripture by being read anew, evolving in continuity with their original sense, tacitly corrected and given added depth and breadth of meaning. This is a process in which the word gradually unfolds its inner potentialities, already somehow present like seeds, but needing the challenge of new situations, new experiences and new sufferings, in order to open up… it is necessary to keep in mind that any human utterance of a certain weight contains more than the author may have been immediately aware of at the time. When a word transcends the moment in which it is spoken, it carries within itself a “deeper value.” This “deeper value” pertains most of all to words that have matured in the course of faith-history. For in this case the author is not simply speaking for himself on his own authority. He is speaking from the perspective of a common history that sustains him and that already implicitly contains the possibilities of its future, of the further stages of its journey.

…Neither the individual books of Holy Scripture nor the Scripture as a whole are simply a piece of literature. The Scripture emerged from within the heart of a living subject - the pilgrim People of God - and lives within this same subject. One could say that the books of Scripture involve three interacting subjects. First of all, there is the individual author or group of authors to whom we owe a particular scriptural text. But these authors are not autonomous writers in the modern sense; they form part of a collective subject, the “People of God,” from within whose heart and to whom they speak. Hence, this subject is actually the deeper “author” of the Scriptures, And yet likewise, this people does not exist alone; rather, it knows that it is led, and spoken to, by God himself, who - through men and their humanity - is at the deepest level the one speaking.

from the forward of Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth

just cracking the surface of this already wonderful book, in the forward der Pabst gives a succinct and helpful overview of a project that he has contributed to over the years towards what he has called a “method C” hermeneutic in other places - that is, one which incorporates the best of what modern exigetical tools and historical-critical insights has to offer, while delineating and critiquing their limits along with their strengths, and folding their proper contributions into the larger picture found within the continuous faith tradition out of and within which the Scriptures have come down to modern man. with such vast extremes on both sides of the isle, with the textologists wanting to ignore the divine element, and the fundamentalists the human one, it is truly a great gift to the Christian world which in large numbers seems either to have their faith slip through the critical cracks, or walls it into a constricting irrationality by their denials of substantive modern historical-critical discoveries that require serious engagement with.

but he doesn’t give the strict textologists a pass by any means, as this passage that made me smile deftly illustrates:

As historical-critical scholorship advanced, it led to finer and finer distinctions between layers of tradition in the Gospels, beneath which the real object of faith - the figure [Gestalt] of Jesus - became increasingly obscured and blurred…If you read a number of these reconstructions one after the other, you see at once that far from uncovering an icon that has become obscurred over time, they are much more like photographs of their authors and the ideals they hold…