Pope John Paul II first delivered this address on September 12, 1979. For those of you interested in the full text of the lecture, it will be really helpful if you read the article with me. However, I will do my best to summarize and develop key points as they come along.
Having established that he desires to study the teachings of Christ and delve into this “from the beginning” The Holy Father, will now begin to unpack a theology of the human body by looking at the Creation account with this in mind. This post will most deal with two things, higher criticism and the text itself. If neither of these is a concern to you, then you can stay tuned for next week’s post. If you care to read on, feel free.
The Holy Father reminds us of the context of what he will continue to expound here by saying; “As we recall, the Pharisees who questioned him appealed to the Mosaic Law. However, Christ went back to the “beginning,” quoting the words of Genesis.” Christ reframes the argument, is another, simpler way of saying what Pope John Paul II is teaching.
Christ Himself reinterprets the law and the prophets to us, and offers His own teachings on marriage, celibacy and offers us this strange, dense and mysterious interpretation of “from the beginning” for his own teaching on the nature and purpose of creation in the image of God, both male and female.
In order to know for sure what exactly the Holy Father is saying about the text itself, the English translation of the passage will be of assistance. Matthew 19:3-9 in the NRSV says:
Some Pharisees came to him, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?”
He answered, “Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
They said to him, “Why then did Moses command us to give a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her?”
He said to them, “It was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another commits adultery.”
So, now that we have established the text from which we draw Jesus’ teachings on this, we move forward now to the very beginning, to the Genesis itself. The Holy Father will be working with higher criticisms in his analysis of these texts.
A Brief Word on Higher Criticism:
Catholicism is by far the most balanced Christian perspective on higher criticisms and often presents a view of higher criticism that is able to often transcend the unhealthy divide between faith and reason that is often present in many other circles of Christian thought. Liberalizing tendencies are not unheard of in Catholic thought, but when approached on its own terms, the Church has a well balanced set of teachings that embrace scholarship so long as they are guided by faithfulness to the deposit of faith.
In 1943 Pope Pius XII gave license to the new scholarship in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu: “[T]extual criticism … [is] quite rightly employed in the case of the Sacred Books … Let the interpreter then, with all care and without neglecting any light derived from recent research, endeavor to determine the peculiar character and circumstances of the sacred writer, the age in which he lived, the sources written or oral to which he had recourse and the forms of expression he employed.”
Unlike the Fundamentalist position which ultimately shuts the bible off from history and secular scholarship that attempts to establish fictions outside the voice of the Tradition of the Church, The Catholic church desires healthy and faithful scholarship. The Church’s position sees as beneficial the use of higher scholarship. In fact the Catechism says: “”In order to discover the sacred authors’ intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking and narrating then current. For the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts, and in other forms of literary expression”(The Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church. Article 3, Section 110.)
This is a highly reasonable position, and it encourages further study towards authorial intent. The Church accepts scholarship because she has various senses with which the Holy Scriptures are read. A personal aside: as an undergraduate student at a Charismatic, and Protestant University, we had surprisingly many fundamentalist positions among students that would come in. I always found myself surprised at how many people would be intolerant of higher learning when it came to the bible. It was seen as something that could cause you to lose your faith, if pursued. And yes, there have been anti-higher-learning positions even among Catholics, but this has not always been the case, nor did it remain the case.
One thing that compelled me to keep studying Catholicism and ultimately made me decide on confirmation was the respect and appreciation of scholarship that was present not just among the educated, or the intelligent, but even among the laity en masse. It is an educated and educating Church, but enough about that, let’s get back to the Holy Father and to our lecture.
So, as the Holy Father, approaches the Genesis accounts He does so with a reading of Genesis that sees the chapters as mutual and affirming each other, while differing from each other. Pope John Paul II says that the words
Have you not read that the Creator from the beginning made them male and female…?” (Mt 19:4) [provide the larger Context]. [These words refer] to the so-called first account of the creation of man inserted in the seven-day cycle of the creation of the world (cf. Gn 1:1-2, 4)However, the context nearest to the other words of Christ, taken from Genesis 2:24, is the so-called second account of the creation of man (Gn 2:5-25). But indirectly it is the entire third chapter of Genesis.
The Holy Father says that these words are indirectly the third chapter of the Genesis. I think what He means by this is that these words shape the whole outworking of our understanding of the third chapter of Genesis. I think we should understand that the Holy Father’s use of the two creation accounts approach to Genesis actually serves to his and to our benefit. The glory of the Catholic Church is her freedom to be orthodox without being fundamentalist. She reveres, but she does not ossify. She takes both her own witness and careful attention to the historical nature of the texts. We will continue our discussion next week with our next article that will focus on the rest of the second article in the Theology of the Body.
A Journey with the Holy Father 