Book Review: Dark Passages of the Bible by Matthew J. Ramage

Dark Passages of the Bible: Engaging Scripture with Benedict XVI & Thomas Aquinas by Matthew J. Ramage

Plenty of passages in the Bible are hard to square up with Christian beliefs in the twenty-first century. The most famous is Abraham nearly sacrificing his only son on the command of God, a seemingly senseless and cruel request. Plenty of other verses command or condone lying, murder, and full-scale genocide. How can these texts be inspired? How can they be reconciled with teachings like "turn the other cheek" (Matthew 5:39) or "love your enemies"(Matthew 5:44)? These problems draw a lot of contemporary interest. It has been grappled with through the years by a variety of theologians. And by "years" I mean three millennia of Judeo-Christian thought.

The classical solution is to look at the whole of Scripture and the spiritual meaning of passages. The enemies of the chosen people are metaphors for sins that should be cast away or destroyed without mercy. Isaac's sacrifice is clearly meant to foreshadow Christ's sacrifice. Often the literal sense of passages are ignored or twisted to make a theological point. Some of these interpretations are sublime; others are not very convincing.

With the advent of the historical-critical method in the 1800s and 1900s, bible scholars started looking at the historical contexts of the human authors, exploring why they would write what they did and how it compares to other ancient texts. The method allows thinkers to stay on a strict literal interpretation with clever guesses or conjecture about what the human authors meant and how they could and did contradict one another and future Christian teaching. The method stays at the human level, resulting in a lot of debunking or disbelief.

Pope Benedict XVI (the retired pope) has spent a lot of time and ink on the problem of the relationship between classical interpretations (what he calls "Method A" exegesis or analysis of scripture) and the works of the historical-critical method (what he calls "Method B" exegesis). Benedict acknowledges that both methods have flaws and strengths. He proposes a "Method C" to use the best of both approaches. Ramage explains all of this in the context of the more difficult passages of scripture, including issues like the conflicting evidence in the synoptic gospels and John's gospel about the date of Jesus's crucifixion. Benedict acknowledges the problem in his Jesus of Nazareth book covering Holy Week and offers suggestions to help resolve the difficulties. 

Ramage does a great job laying out the problems and the potential solutions. He also draws out how this idea of combining methods goes back at least as far as Saint Thomas Aquinas (who lived in the 1200s). Even though Aquinas didn't have historical-critical exegetes to deal with, he did see the tension between the literal and the spiritual understandings of scripture and made a lot of effort (similar to Benedict's) to reconcile the two. Ramage acknowledges that there are too many passages to deal with in just one book but his method, inspired by Benedict and Aquinas, is a great tool to have in developing a deeper understanding of the Bible as God's inspired word.

Highly recommended.