From Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard (edited by Charles Moore):
The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.
I confess that I fear being alone with the New Testament. I have a small library of Bible commentaries and other works of Christian scholarship that the authors produced in order to provide illumination and instruction. But I mainly stack them up and use them as a defensive wall, a barrier between me and God’s word.
June 25th, 2009 | 11:55 am
Somewhere in “The Public Square” archives is a short piece by Father Neuhaus in which the Church is described as primary reader, endowed by God with understanding of the Bible, as part of her Magisterisum. I took this to mean that a Catholic is not alone with the Bible but reads the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, in the Communion of Saints (It is possible you are being too hard on yourself.)
June 25th, 2009 | 1:02 pm
I agree with Kierkegaard to an extent, but the new testament is unlivable. Take for instance the one phrase on the sermon on the mount, “Give to however asks”. If you follow this religiously, you’ll be a begger within a month and die soon after because the other beggers ask you for your food, you’re forced to give it away. But that is not how anyone in the New Testament actually acted, even Jesus, since he would sometimes flee the crowds, especially for quiet prayer or when he thought that they stopped listening and just wanted food or miraculous entertainment from him.
An honest person like Kierkegaard recognizes the weight placed upon us by the New Testament and the justness of that weight. And an honest person also recognizes that the burden is too heavy for this life. Life on earth is not heaven. Thankfully, the New Testament also teaches that if we come to Jesus in humility, he will forgive us and lighten our burden. From my readings on Kierkegaard, it’s not entirely clear he acknowledges this. But then again, he was more focused on outing the nominal Christians that wanted to believe that since Jesus will forgive all our sins, we can just ignore the burdens which are not too heavy for us and pretty much reinterpret even clear passages in the New Testament, like Matthew 25:14-30, to their own convenience.
June 25th, 2009 | 1:43 pm
Ms. Smith points out one of the joys I find of being Catholic; however, I believe Mr. Carter has mentioned in a previous post that he is a Southern Baptist, and therefore is on his own, “with the Holy Spirit as his guide”, as a Protestant would say. Given the prodigious number of sects Protestantism has splintered into, it seems the Holy Spirit, in the role of offering infallible individual interpretation, is prone to long coffee breaks.
However, he does have a point in that the New Testament does offer many challenges to anyone in any age. Some of these challenges I see as proof that Jesus was divine: no mortal man I can imagine would ever come up with “if you look at a woman with lust in your heart, you are guilty of adultery” on his own.
Fr. Neuhaus referred to some of the more harsh passages as the “hard” sayings of Jesus, and often these are the ones that get a prime dosage of the “gloss-over” treatment from scholars and commenters. Also, for us capitalists, some of Jesus’ words expressly run counter to what a person in a capitalist society would feel is “right” or “fair”. For me personally, the parable of the owner of the vineyard who, at the end of the day’s work, pays each worker the same wage regardless of whether they spent 1 hour or 8 hours toiling away. As a fellow who did a lot of manual labor growing up, I still somewhat reflexively recoil from embracing this parable. I know God’s blessings, including everlasting salvation, are His to do with as He pleases, but still…..
June 25th, 2009 | 2:49 pm
Dear GeronimoRumplestiltkin,
Great comment. I especially loved “…but still…”
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