The Future of Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A Constructive Conversation

by Luke Timothy Johnson; William S. Kurz

Publisher:

Eerdmans

, 2002

Luke Timothy Johnson and William Kurz are Roman Catholic New Testament scholars who think that the apparent good health of biblical scholarship in America is deceptive. Despite its huge production of learning, Catholic scholarship has lost some of its soul because of its distance from the life and concerns of living faith communities. In this volume, the authors open a conversation with others in the church concerning a future Catholic biblical scholarship that maintains the freedom of critical inquiry but within a living loyalty to tradition. Looking not to criticize but to strengthen, the authors model the type of dialogue that is needed today. Johnson first reviews the current state of Catholic biblical scholarship and then points out important lessons from throughout the tradition of interpretation. He calls for “imagining the world that Scripture imagines” as the presupposition for the organic use of the Bible in theology. Kurz responds to Johnson's chapters and then offers his own approach to biblical interpretation, showing how literary analysis of the Gospel of John can be brought into conversation with the Nicene Creed, with recent debates in ethics, and with the practices of the church. After Johnson responds to Kurz, the authors jointly conclude by addressing a series of questions concerning hard issues now facing Catholic biblical scholarship.

Contents

Top Highlights

“Catholicity can be expressed as a preference for the conjunctive more than the disjunctive. To be Catholic is to think inclusively rather than exclusively. Catholics tend toward the ‘both/and’ more than they do toward the ‘either/or.’” (Page 5)

“Scripture has a narrow focus. It is much concerned with law and morality. It has little interest in romance and affection. It is unconcerned with science and does not pay much attention to visual beauty.” (Page 120)

“Catholics also have a high tolerance for paradox!” (Page 5)

“For Christians to ‘seek to become wise’ meant not the acquisition of knowledge but the changing of their outlook and behavior. It meant the healing of the passions by good teaching. It meant battling vice and learning to practice virtue. Like Plutarch a century earlier, Origen saw the philosophical life as a progressive transformation of the soul.³⁸ As I will try to show, Origen’s spiritual reading of Scrtipture had very little to do with a platonic realm of forms, but had everything to do with moral conversion.” (Page 77)

“From the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, the phrase ‘Roman Catholic biblical scholarship’ would have been regarded by many as oxymoronic: it may have been Roman Catholic, but was it really scholarship? At the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, however, the phrase is equally oxymoronic: no one doubts the quality of the scholarship, but in what sense is it any longer ‘Catholic’?” (Page 4)

Product Details

• Title: The Future of Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A Constructive Conversation
• Authors: Luke Timothy Johnson, William S. Kurz
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Print Publication Date: 2002
• Logos Release Date: 2012
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
• Subjects: Bible › Criticism, interpretation, etc.--United States; Catholic Church › Doctrines
• ISBNs: 9780802845450, 0802845452
• Resource ID: LLS:FUTRCATHBBCL
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-25T19:51:34Z