Carey Walsh Takes Us Into the Thicket of Scripture, Thorns and All, in Order to ‘Chase’ the Divine Mystery
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“Carey Walsh takes us into the thicket of Scripture, thorns and all, in order to ‘chase’ the divine mystery. Though trained as a scholar, she is less interested in textual analysis than in exploring those moments of disclosure when the Bible breaks open and breaks in. Reading a quirky Old Testament narrative can be aggravating as well as difficult. But for those who persist, she argues, joy awaits, a journey begins—a bumpy movement from disturbance to awe to contentment. Sharing her own experience, Walsh helps us see where the holy may be lurking unnoticed, waiting to be discovered.” —Peter S. Hawkins Yale Divinity School Author of Undiscovered Country: Imagining the World to Come Chasing Mystery A Catholic Biblical Theology Carey Walsh A Michael Glazier Book LITURGICAL PRESS Collegeville, Minnesota www.litpress.org A Michael Glazier Book published by Liturgical Press Cover design by Jodi Hendrickson. Cover image: Thinkstock. Excerpts from documents of the Second Vatican Council are from Vatican Council II: The Basic Sixteen Documents, by Austin Flannery, OP © 1996 (Costello Publishing Company, Inc.). Used with permission. Scripture texts, prefaces, introductions, footnotes and cross references used in this work are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc., Washington, DC All Rights Reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner. Excerpts from the English translation of The Roman Missal © 2010, International Com- mission on English in the Liturgy Corporation. All rights reserved. Excerpt from “Saint Francis and the Sow” from THREE BOOKS by Galway Kinnell. Copyright © 1993 by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reverved. “Funeral Blues,” copyright 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden, from COLLECTED POEMS OF W. H. AUDEN by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. (North American rights.) Excerpt from “Funeral Blues.” Copyright © 1940 by W. H. Auden, renewed. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. (World and electronic rights.) At time of publication, the following permission was pending: Excerpt from W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). © 2012 by Order of Saint Benedict, Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, microfilm, microfiche, mechanical recording, photocopying, translation, or by any other means, known or yet unknown, for any purpose except brief quotations in reviews, without the previous written permission of Liturgical Press, Saint John’s Abbey, PO Box 7500, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321- 7500. Printed in the United States of America. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walsh, Carey, 1960– Chasing mystery : a Catholic Biblical theology / Carey Walsh. p. cm. “A Michael Glazier book.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8146-8069-8 — ISBN 978-0-8146-8094-0 (e-book) 1. God—Biblical teaching. 2. Bible—Theology. 3. Bible—Hermeneutics. 4. Catholic Church—Doctrines. I. Title. BS544.W35—2012 230'.041—dc23 2012029288 Contents Chapter 1: Where Did God Go? 1 The Purpose of This Book 4 Biblical Theology 6 A Note on Absence 9 Methodological Perspectives 14 Deuteronomy’s Choice 18 In the Beginning 20 Chapter 2: Mystery and Modernity 23 The Issue of Invisibility 23 Modernity’s Worldview 25 The Numinous Mystery of the Divine 30 Incomprehensibility and Hiddenness of God 35 Chapter 3: Holy Text and Revelation 39 Access to the Bible 39 Jacob Wrestles with the Angel 42 Ask and Seek 43 Losing Jesus in the Temple 44 Wandering in the Desert 45 A Hermeneutics of Trust 49 Chapter 4: Torah and the Agility of Faith 57 Theophany 57 The Burning Bush 58 v vi Chasing Mystery Mount Sinai 63 The Guidance of a Cloud 66 The Death of Moses 74 Chapter 5: Angels, Holy Sites, and Prophets 75 Angels 76 Holy Sites 78 Prophets 81 Chapter 6: The Problem with Omnipotence 85 The Contesting Theophanies of Wisdom 86 The Power Theophany of Job 87 Ecclesiastes’ Search for the “Vanity of Vanities” 91 From Vanity to Vapor 93 Chapter 7: The Dilemma of Suffering 101 Job in Crisis 101 Theodicy in Christian Tradition 111 Varieties of Atheism 114 Faith after Desolation 120 Chapter 8: Jesus 123 God Made Visible 123 The Father’s Silence 131 The Vanishing Jesus 133 The Road to Emmaus 138 Chapter 9: Real Presence 141 Remaining Present with God 141 Empirical Bias 143 Paradox of Faith 144 Real Presence 146 Bibliography 151 Subject Index 159 Scripture Index 161 1 Where Did God Go? I have no faith. [S]o many unanswered questions live within me—I am afraid to uncover them—because of the blasphemy—If there be God—please forgive me. I am told God loves me—and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.1 . just that terrible pain of loss—of God not wanting me—of God not being God—of God not really existing.2 The oppressive sense of the absence of God . has left its mark on us all today.3 hese are the veritable road conditions for the person journeying in faith today. It is the condition in which I find myself as a biblical T theologian whose very subject matter lies in the suspended ani- mation of radical doubt. Vampires and wizards, it would seem, are more culturally viable than divine presence. A kind of doubt-fatigue hovers over all expressions of the living God in modern, secular culture, and this is true even for the heroes of the faith. 1. Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta,” ed. Brian Kolodiejchuk (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 187. 2. Ibid., 192–93. 3. Pope Benedict XVI, The God of Jesus Christ: Meditations on the Triune God, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 15. 1 2 Chasing Mystery The first quotation above is from Blessed Mother Teresa; the second, Pope Benedict XVI. Mother Teresa gave her life to God by helping the poor- est of the poor, the diseased people in Calcutta, India. Most of us simply assumed a robust spiritual connection lay behind her sacrificial lifestyle. She daily bore exhaustion, filth, and, as we learned some years after her death, a felt sense of God’s absence for almost fifty years. Her experience of a dark night of the soul, then, was no solitary phase but rather lasted decades, virtually the entirety of her mission in Calcutta. Throughout that time, she did not experience even the relief of God’s intermittent presence. Instead, darkness of the soul was for her a persistent, agitated state. Mother Teresa of all people did not enjoy a fluid, easy intimacy with God, which then fueled her service to the destitute. The pragmatist in me could not help wondering why she did not just book a flight out of there and serve in less severe conditions. And Pope Benedict, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, the man who may preside over Mother Teresa’s canonization to sainthood, has also felt the dry sting of God’s absence. He knows well the spiritual malaise that grips our age. Why does God have to be so exasperatingly silent? Why can’t we see him at least long enough to allay doubt? Our time is often referred to as the Age of Disbelief,4 where religion, like everything else, is a matter of private choice. And the one place where people had found God in ages past was Scripture, but the rise of secularism has had a corrosive effect on biblical literacy. As a result, there are recent efforts to recover biblical knowledge for the broader culture beyond and within its houses of worship. Stephen Prothero’s best-selling book Religious Literacy (2008) points to the desire for many to know more about faith, while the 2010 Pew Research Center poll on religious knowledge (where agnostics/atheists scored highest!) may well reflect a need. At the same time, there is a resurgence of atheism expressed in popular writers, such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who relegate biblical faith to a best-forgotten past. Both responses to biblical illiteracy offer passionate, even moral claims. With the former perspective, “we should still know the Bible”; with the latter, “we should discard it in the name of progress.” The Bible’s iconic status is clearly used as a political football in a larger debate about religion in the public square. What is utterly glossed over in both these positions—surprisingly—is dis- cussion, not of the Bible’s historical impact, but of how Scripture remains holy, that is, “separate,” divinely beyond the political discourse of any era, 4. Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2001); Pope Benedict XVI, Handing on the Faith in an Age of Disbelief (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006). Where Did God Go? 3 including our own. The Bible is frequently the subject of debate over its authority, canonical status, ideological premises, and use and abuse through- out history but, so far, not on what holiness actually means. Surveys routinely show that the majority of Americans believe in God yet prefer to speak generally of spirituality rather than religion.5 This trend is so prevalent that sociologists have coined a new acronym for it: SBNR, “spiritual but not religious.” The market that has grown up around this SBNR demographic—with products like Eat, Pray, Love; The Shack; The Secret; Deepak Chopra books; etc.—does brisk business indeed.6 Curiously, Americans prefer not to define who God is.