The church rejects fundamentalism

The good news has never been better. The church has continued, through thick and thin, to encourage a revitalized respect for the Bible and its interpretation.

This approach has offered challenging opportunities, that close the door to constricting fundamentalist and literalist approaches, which have long demeaned the Bible.

Our church has thus opened the door to vigorous new perspectives that stimulate the rebirth now gracing Christianity at large.

But sometimes this is simply not known or told to our people. In 1993, it is often for gotten, the Pontifical Biblical Commission warned, "The fundamentalist approach is dangerous, for it is attractive to people who look to the Bible for ready answers to the problems of life. It can deceive people, offering them interpretations that are pious but illusory, instead of telling them that the Bible does not necessarily contain an immediate answer to each and every problem. Without saying as much in so many words, fundamentalism actually invites people to a kind of intellectual suicide. It injects into life a false certitude, for it unwittingly confuses the divine substance of the biblical message with what are, in fact, its human limitations."

On the other hand, valid criticism of the sacred texts "seeks to find the reality of faith there expressed, but also seeks to link this reality to the experience of faith in our present world"

John Meier, professor of New Testament at Catholic University, Washington, agrees. "Many scholars recognize some Gospel comment as the work of catecheses and reflection in the early church, not simply a verbatim report of what Jesus said".

The church's interpretational task, as Cardinal Carlo Martini of Milan has urged, is "always to go back and forth from the biblical text to the present, and from the present day experience to the text."

In this process of living dialogue between the past and present, which theologians call "reception', the people of God, according to Cardinal Jan Willebrands, "under the direction of the Holy Spirit recognize and accept new understandings, new witness to the truth and new expressions of theology, in line with apostolic tradition and in harmony with a sense of the faithful, of the whole church."

John Paul II has called this process a "sacrament of dialogue." It clearly embraces the relationship of science and religion, as the Pope taught in 1987. "Imagine," he wrote, "if the cosmologies of the Ancient Near Eastern world could be purified and assimilated into the first chapters of Genesis? Might not contemporary cosmology have something to offer to our reflections on creation? Does our evolutionary perspective bring any light to bear on theological anthropology? On the problem of Christology, and even upon the development of doctrine itself?. What, if any, are the eschatalogical implications of contemporary cosmology, especially in the light of the vast future of our universe?"

Renowned scripture scholar Walter Brueggeman agrees, calling the work of biblical interpretation that of "imaginative remembering". It is not remembering the Bible as historically accurate or as an ethical blueprint to be slavishly followed, but as a complex rendition of the mentality of the times, of "imagination and the role of divine inspiration," whereby "biblical interpretation is a living and dynamic process". It is like a musical score to be artfully interpreted by the performers.

This is good news. We are called to re-vision and to recreate, not to clone, but to rebirth the living, ever-revealing God.

Jim Roberts is a priest in Vancouver.

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