The Greek word synkatabasis refers to God’s “stooping” to meet human beings at their own level, just as a parent gets down on the floor and “lisps” to a child.
The practice of reading from a lectionary presupposes that God speaks through the Bible to a community of faith. That is why the Bible has special authority for the believing and worshiping community.
In our previous discussion,a we found that some locate this authority primarily in a confession of faith (or theological statement) and from this vantage point read selectively from the ancient biblical literature. Others locate authority in experience, for instance in women’s experience, as with modern feminist interpretations, or in the experience of the oppressed poor, as with Latin American liberation theology.
These views place authority outside the Bible. Many people, however, have found that the Bible itself speaks with its own authority—authority that judges our theologies, experiences and traditions.
Today many conservatives stoutly defend the authority of the Bible on the basis of biblical literalism, believing that the Bible contains the literally inspired words of God. But this popular view fails to account adequately for the Bible’s very human words, which reflect the limitations of human speech, the influence of the cultural environment and the sociological situation of ancient Israel (Hebrew Bible) or of the early church (New Testament). Indeed, many literary critics have engaged in “deconstructing” the biblical text, showing that these texts were composed to justify existing social values or national aspirations and, in sociological perspective, to support the “ideology” of those who held power. These critics engage in a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” approaching the Bible with a wariness toward the hidden sociological agenda of texts that claim to be the word of God.
This critical approach has helped us understand the human, cultural and sociological dimensions of Scripture. The Bible is composed in human languages: Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek, with their respective strengths and weaknesses. It reflects patriarchal society, with its sexual mores and particular understanding of the roles of men and women. With its “three-storied view of the universe” (heaven, flat earth, underworld), the Bible reflects a prescientific cosmological worldview. When people have ascribed divine authority to any of these human aspects of scripture, the Bible has been used oppressively, as when the Catholic church forced Galileo to recant his scientific views or when the Bible was used to sanction slavery.
The fundamental weakness in this critical approach, however, is that it fails to start with a community of faith for whom the Bible is sacred scripture, not ordinary literature (such as Shakespeare) that is studied in an academy or university. When approached from a standpoint of faith, whether in the Jewish or Christian community (perhaps Moslem should be added), the interpreter engages in what has been called “a hermeneutic of trust,” expecting the biblical text to mediate God’s judgment on our thoughts and ways and God’s grace for guidance and renewal.1
This hermeneutic, or mode of interpretation, understands that much of scripture speaks to the imagination in poetic or narrative style. As Catholic theologian Karl Rahner once remarked, “The poetic words and the poetic ear” are prerequisites for hearing the word of God in the human words of Scripture.”2 Even the biblical description of the Temple and its rites (Exodus 25–40, Leviticus), as the Jewish scholar Jon Levenson observes, “can be conceived as the means for spiritual ascent from the lower to the higher realms, from a position distant from God to one in His very presence.”3
Some of the great scriptural interpreters of the past (for example, the church father John Chrysostom [344/354–407]) spoke of God’s condescension to a humanity limited by its language and social relations. The Greek word for it was synkatabasis and the Latin was accomodatio—terms that refer to God’s “stooping,” as it were, to meet human beings at their own level, just as a parent gets down on the floor and “lisps” to a child.4 This view is echoed in the foreword to The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, where the editors speak of “the marvelous condescension of God in transmitting His word in human language.”5
God’s condescension, however, should not be taken to establish norms that endorse patriarchal society, sanction war as a political strategy, or validate prescientific views of the universe. When we were children, we spoke, reasoned and acted like children (see 1 Corinthians 13:11), but now that we are mature and enlightened we are no longer bound by earlier limitations. It is therefore fitting to accompany the reading of scripture with a “targum” (to use a Jewish term) or free translation (see Nehemiah 8:8) so that modern people might understand the 056sense of the original text. That is the task of the rabbi, minister or commentator.
In the community of faith the Bible has a privileged status. Modern translations appropriately attempt to render the biblical text in language that is grammatically accurate, esthetically pleasing and, as much as possible, inclusive of women and men. It would be a mistake, however, to rewrite the Bible in modern terms or revise the canon so that it contains other books written down through the centuries. From the faith standpoint of the believing and worshiping community, the Bible is the “Word of God in human words,” to use a traditional formulation. Its down-to-earth stories, even those that reflect the seamy side of life, enable us to see ourselves as in a mirror. Its theological diversity enables us to compare one viewpoint with another, scripture criticizing scripture, as we search for divine guidance on the meaning of life and our human responsibility.
When we read with a “hermeneutic of trust,” to allude again to the insightful essay by Richard Hays, the Bible is the medium of the judgment and the grace of God. The authority of the Bible lies in the Bible itself, when read in a community of faith where the Holy Spirit enables the sacred text to come to life with contemporary meaning and power.
The practice of reading from a lectionary presupposes that God speaks through the Bible to a community of faith. That is why the Bible has special authority for the believing and worshiping community. In our previous discussion,a we found that some locate this authority primarily in a confession of faith (or theological statement) and from this vantage point read selectively from the ancient biblical literature. Others locate authority in experience, for instance in women’s experience, as with modern feminist interpretations, or in the experience of the oppressed poor, as with Latin American liberation theology. These views place authority outside […]
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See the essay, written from a Christian standpoint, by Richard B. Hays, “Salvation by trust? Reading the Bible faithfully,” in The Christian Century (January 26, 1997), pp. 218–223.
2.
Quoted by Roland Murphy, The Psalms, Job Proclamation Commentaries (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1977), pp. 12–13.
3.
Jon Levenson, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985), p. 142.
4.
See Ford Lewis Battles, “God Was Accommodating Himself to Human Capacity,” Interpretation 31 (1977), pp. 19–36.
5.
The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990), quoting the encyclical Dei Verbum.
