Sacred Scriptures

Discovering Christ
What is the origin of Fr. Giussani’s Gospel exegeses? What is the identification referred to by Fr. Carrón in this year’s Opening Day speech? Why do we find recognizing Jesus so difficult? It is “a problem of realism,” and a Bible scholar explains why

edited by Alberto Savorana

Anyone who listened to Fr. Giussani reading the Gospel felt naturally carried to the places of Jesus’ life, hiding in the crowd on the hill of the Beatitudes or on the shore of Lake Tiberias. At the CL Opening Day in Lombardy, Italy, (Cf., Traces, vol 10, n. 9 [October], 2008, pp. 1-12) Fr. Carrón pointed out the difficulty in recognizing Christ’s unmistakable traits as He came up against facts and people that proved that a new humanity was possible. Carrón added, “It’s difficult, because we lack the identification with Jesus, with the Gospel, that Fr. Giussani testified to throughout his entire life; we wouldn’t have known how to identify with these episodes if we hadn’t heard Fr. Giussani repeat them to us many, many times.” Prompted by this judgment, we asked Fr. Ignacio Carbajosa Perez (born in Cartagena, Spain, in 1967), a doctor in Biblical Science, Professor of Sacred Scripture in the Theology Faculty of San Dámaso in Madrid, and of Semitic Languages at the St. Justin Institute of Classical and Eastern Philology, to help us to deepen its impact.
“We ourselves carry on the dualism Carrón described in the summer”–Carbajosa begins–“the detachment between God as origin of life and God as a matter of thought. Thus, we live the reality in which He manifests Himself, but then we approach the Gospel, the Liturgy, or prayer in a spiritualistic and devotional way. In Fr. Giussani, there was the unity expressed so well by St. Augustine and quoted by Carrón at the Synod: In manibus nostris sunt codices, in oculis nostris facta: that is, the powerful facts of His Presence are before our eyes and the Gospels are in our hands, telling us of the origin of that Presence, with its truly unmistakable traits.”

Yet a spiritualistic reading of the Gospel–even a certain way of preaching it–removes it far from real daily life, making it unavoidable to ask the question, “Why should we waste time in trying to follow what the Bible says?” This question marked the recent Synod of Bishops, which was focused on God’s word and its reading, with reference to the life and the mission of the Church today.
This way of reading derives from the dualism I have hinted at. In describing reality, we stop short at appearances. We don’t go all the way with reason up to Mystery. So reality is no longer a sign. You get tired of your woman sooner or later. Fr. Giussani, on the contrary, taught us a way of looking at reality that recognizes the Mystery that generates it continually. Indeed, it is he who taught us that sign and Mystery coincide, and are offered for our interpretation. In the concrete, carnal, real sign, the Mystery offers Itself to me, tender and even more real, without which there would be no sign.

Then how can we stay without looking and being moved by reading,  in the Gospels, the traits and the gestures of that Presence that touches us here and now through a boundless ebb and flow of facts and witnesses?
It is a problem of realism. It is a matter of looking seriously at the reality we have before us, all the way to its origin, which is testified to in a unique, inspired, and canonical way in the Gospels. In other words, we are too virtual in our relationships. By his way of reading the Gospels, Fr. Giussani challenges us once again to establish a very intense relationship with what is real: a sign charged with passion and affection.

When it is not an excuse for escape into a “heaven” detached from reality, the Gospel becomes an opportunity for moral appeals, as if it were a regulations manual: things to be done and things forbidden, all showing the effort of coherence demanded of the faithful person if he wants to be a good disciple of Jesus. Is this enough to make Christ’s announcement contemporary and convincing?
When I was a child in my parish, there was a priest who kept repeating, as a refrain, “Therefore, my brothers, we must engage ourselves…” It was his logical conclusion from the Gospel. My question is: How can a man avoid reducing the Gospel to moral regulations? What would the Torah be for the first disciples of Jesus, if He had not approached them, entering into such a convincing relationship with them? Rules, just as for the Pharisees. But once they bumped into Him… yes, the whole of Scripture spoke of Him!

Are you saying that only an encounter freed Jesus’ disciples from the danger of reducing the Scripture to law?
Precisely. It is spectacular to watch, almost to catch the New Testament authors unawares as they discover with astonishment in the Old Testament (which was the Scripture for them) the forecast of that of which they were protagonists. In his first letter, Peter says this, speaking about prophets: “It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things which have now been announced to you by those who preached the good news to you through the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look” (1 Pt 1:12).
We need to stick to what the Gospel witnesses point to. Either Jesus makes Himself present today, so that He touches my reason and my affection, like He did with John and Andrew on the Jordan bank, or reducing the Scripture to what I think or feel will be inevitable.

Yet the modern times pursued the claim of an objective knowledge, worked out by a reason separated from faith (which was considered subjective and therefore unreliable) and also from affection, from feeling (understood as something which alters objectivity). It is said: only a detached reason, which is not emotionally involved with the object, can truly know reality. Yet Sola Ratio, as a method of knowledge of the “fact,” was revealed to be impracticable, as proved for instance by Albert Schweitzer’s research about the historicity of Christ and the Gospels: a total uncertainty about what needed to be defined…
Indeed, before Sola Ratio, Luther’s Sola Scriptura was born, as an attempt of dodging the Church tradition (dogmas, Pope, sacraments), which accompanies the Scripture in its interpretation. But without the living presence of Christ in the tradition of the Church, what is left to us in order to interpret the Scripture? Reason–a reason detached from the Christian event which in the first place had opened it wide. But history has proved well enough that Sola Ratio has destroyed the reliability of the Bible. It has reduced the historic exceptionality described in the Gospels to something that can be foreseeable. “Miracle,” for instance, must be erased, for it is not reasonable: it does not happen today, it could not happen then.

What is left of Jesus then?
Jesus is nothing more than the highest expression of the religious man (as in Kant and Harnack). And the Scripture that brings us this Jesus is increasing every day His distance from us. This is the great moat that cannot be filled, of which Lessing spoke, existing between me and Jesus. In modern exegesis, a lot of research on the historical Jesus still starts from this moat. The results are terribly uncertain about Jesus, and diffident on the Gospel data, which are classified as an expression of faith, and therefore not “objective.” This is the dramatic situation that has pushed the Pope to publish his Jesus of Nazareth, which could have remained in his drawer after he was elected Bishop of Rome.

Let us go back to Carrón’s challenge: “The Gospels are and always will be the canon, the rule that helps us discover when an experience is Christian, when we truly find ourselves before a Christian experience. In the present and in every moment of history the same thing happens (with other faces) that happened in the beginning; it passes through different faces, but He makes Himself contemporary to us within faces with unmistakable features, which are His.” In terms of method, what does this affirmation imply?
It is enough to look at the method Fr. Giussani used to read the Gospel. To him, it was truly a “correction,” a continual source of novelty. It was like a dialogue with the Mystery he had in his eyes, who offered Himself with an exceptional, canonical witness in the Gospels. Today, we are unable to speak of morality without thinking once again of the dialogue between the risen Lord and Peter on the shore of Lake Tiberias. We cannot speak of Christianity as event without going back to the account of the first encounter between Jesus and John the Baptist’s disciples. Was it an exaggeration when Fr. Giussani told us to read these passages every day?

Right, it was for an identification. In a 1993 document of the Biblical Pontifical Commission, we read: “The contemporary hermeneutics is a sound reaction to historical positivism and to the temptation of applying to biblical study the objective criteria fitting to natural science. On the one hand, the events reported in the Bible have been interpreted; on the other, every exegesis of the accounts of these events necessarily implies the exegete’s subjectivity. The right knowledge of the biblical text is accessible only to him who has a lived affinity with what the text describes.” What do we mean by this expression, “lived affinity”?
The second Vatican Council used a similar expression: read the Scripture “in the same spirit as it was written.” Either there is a contemporaneousness with Jesus (and it is the Spirit who generates in the Church today the same history told of in the Gospels), or I am forced to reduce what I read to what I think or feel, as we have seen. At the Synod, Carrón quoted an episode that happened to him in Madrid. A woman he knew who had just encountered the faith through Christian friends listened to the Gospel and said, “These people experienced the same thing as we!” Here is the lived affinity: I have today the experience of that exceptionality described in the Gospels.

The experience of identification belongs to the dynamic of human life. A child grows through his relationship with his parents; the pupil in the relationship with his master. Yet, the ’68 revolution proclaimed liberation from every bond as the secret for the realization of the “I”…
This claim is very old! As far back as the prophet Isaiah we read: “Sons have I reared and brought up, but they have rebelled against me. The ox knows its owner, and the ass its master’s crib; but Israel does not know, my people does not understand” (Is 1:2-3). The prophet shows us, with a very powerful image, the irrationality of this rebellion, and its consequences, namely destruction and exile. Today we are not too far from this prophecy.

Reading Fr. Giussani in Is It Possible To Live This Way?, identification is similar to imitation. Why doesn’t imitating an other annul the distinctive traits of the one who identifies himself? In a nutshell, why is it not an alienation?
Imitation is a work for the gaze, the heart, the intelligence; an identification with the reasons of the other, with an otherness that corresponds to me, which I want to become mine. He who doesn’t imitate repeats. Today, people repeat all the time–in their way of dressing, thinking, relating with girlfriends… Only imitation frees you and gives you back a face of your own–your heart–making you a protagonist, capable of approaching everything starting from your character and genius. This is what it was like between Jesus and His Apostles. Judas repeated, he remained on the surface, on what he could agree upon with Jesus. Peter, on the contrary, identified with the reasons of an Other: he discovered the relationship between Jesus and the Father, and had an intuition about the mystery of Jesus’ claim. He was a protagonist in history, with a capacity for affection that led him to give up his life for Christ.

Try and read again this sentence of then-Cardinal Ratzinger in the light of our subject: Faith is the heartfelt obedience to that form of teaching to which we were entrusted.
This sentence starts off from a passage by St. Paul in the Letter to the Romans: “Thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed: (Rom 6:17). The heartfelt obedience does not oppose freedom, but slavery. Let’s be clear: through experience, we discover that obedience to the beauty one has encountered brings us to freedom. To pursue one’s opinions in the name of freedom takes you only to boredom, and to destruction of the things you love most.

When we read commentaries to the Bible made by scholars, it is difficult not to remain cold before the list of literary, historical, and contextual data. There seems to be no room for the divine that has entered into history. But even those scholars, when they preach, feel forced to add something more spiritual…
Rationalism and devotion call for each other. I was always struck by the way Strauss ends his life of Jesus, written at the beginning of the 19th century. After destroying the historical foundations of faith in Jesus, he feels he must reconstruct that very faith on different foundations. Let’s quote his exact words. “Piety turns a horrified gaze on the tremendous attempt, and in the infinite certainty of its faith it sentences: in spite of every effort of temerarious critique, all that the Scripture says and the Church believes remains eternally true and no syllable can be sacrificed. Thus at the conclusion of the critique about the history of Jesus we are faced with the problem of reconstructing in dogma what we had destroyed in critique” (§ 144).
Thus, faith must affirm itself beyond history and reason–in spite of reality. But since the critical examination of the Gospels is not enough to live, we must then add the spiritual one. That passage will necessarily be perceived as an addition, something that is not compelling, an option. Not so. Mystery is a factor of reality. If we don’t describe reality all the way to the Mystery, we are not taking into account the whole of reality; something will always be missing; our analysis will not be exhaustive. It’s a problem of reason, and unless we reach this point, the dualism we have touched on will always remain there in the interpretation of Scripture.
Some time back, Ratzinger said, “The debate on modern exegesis is not a debate among historians, but a philosophical one.” This is why we must not ask the exegete to be more spiritual, but more realistic and reasonable.