With your indulgence I’d like to return once more to last month’s meeting of the Catholic Biblical Association in Chicago. There remains one more element of that gathering which I would like to explain and perhaps explore with you.

Needless to add, the entire three-day session was enormously inspiring as always, and filled with insights for every participant.

Last month, I noted that for many years I have been an active participant in the continuing seminar on biblical issues associated with Jewish/Christian relations. This year our entire group decided to join the seminar on “typology,” namely the patterns of salvation which Christians find in the books and stories of the First (Old) Testament.

As guests overhearing someone else’s discussion, we found ourselves listening carefully to the presentation of papers which celebrated the great themes of our Christian faith as found in the stories of that First Covenant. This is the way that our early Christian writers (we call them the “Fathers” of the Church) tested and studied the sacred writings of Israel. Much was very wise and rich in theological spirituality.

As a group, however, we were also very uncomfortable at times because of the ease with which Christianity was read back into the books of Israel’s Scripture, almost as if it should all be so patently clear to anyone of good will!

The fact of the matter is that those books of the First Covenant must be allowed to speak first in their own voice. Certainly it is true that the New Testament is hidden in the Old (Shared), and the Old prefigured in the New! So also is Judaism “hidden” in the sacred books of ancient Israel. Two distinct religious traditions come from the same roots.

For that reason, we Christians need to be more careful about presuming that the patterns we see are equally visible to all other readers! It is only because of our Christian faith in the Lord’s resurrection that we can see the biblical clues and hints about that type of glory still to come.

Those without the lenses of Christian faith, and those who live within the enduring promises of God for Israel will not see precisely what we do! Our Jewish neighbors deserve to be respected for they too live as members of a community of salvation, and within divine promises which are irrevocable (as Paul reminded the Romans in 11:29). These are fresh insights from our post-Holocaust world.

The search for the general biblical patterns in order to understand the way God deals with us is a very fruitful exercise, and the discovery of those patterns can bring a great deal of understanding about the way God deals with us!

An additional problem comes if we try to find deeper spiritual meaning by assigning a special significance to every tiny detail in each inspired passage!

We call that method “allegory” and it’s certainly not the most useful approach encouraged by the church. The fact that the Samaritan woman, for example, left her bucket at the well (John 4:28) does not mean her abandonment of concupiscence, no matter what St. Augustine, wise and holy though he was, may have suggested 1,600 years ago! Similarly, nor does the fact that the ailing gentleman lay beside the Pool of Bethesda for 38 years (John 5:5) … two short of the symbolic number of 40 … mean what he lacked the two great commandments of love of God and neighbor, no matter what saints may have taught!

As Fr. Tom Suriano used to say when teaching New Testament at the seminary, we are obliged to make sure that our interpretations are “in the text, not the eyelashes!”

As you can tell, I came away from that visit to the neighboring seminar with a keen renewed resolve to allow the sacred texts to speak in their own voice, and not to impose meaning upon them in a reckless fashion. These days, as I return to the classroom at Sacred Heart School of Theology, I try to share those convictions with the fine students I encounter there, lay and seminarian alike.

There is an energetic movement these days to return to the writings of the Fathers. That is fine if the practice keeps us within the rich and fruitful currents of our Christian spiritual traditions. Those great figures often gave us superb theology and were classical models of the engagement of faith with the greater culture of their age, but they didn’t always provide solid examples for the study of Scripture!

I feel much better, having gotten that off my chest! Thanks for listening.

By the way, for some time teachers have struggled with a sense of frustration and loss when students in public schools are not able to learn something of the enormous influence which the imagery of the Bible has on our American literary tradition and culture.

If the Bible may not be taught lest such instruction be viewed as imposing religious convictions, students simply graduate less educated. To remedy that defect a group of experts have published a text on the Bible as literature for public high schools.

After broad consultation with representatives from most Christian churches in our country, the richly illustrated work of 387 pages was published in 2006 by the Bible Literacy Project under the title of “The Bible and Its Influence.” Cullen Schippe and Chuck Stetson are the general editors. It isn’t perfect, but it is a fine first step and might make a useful Christmas present for anyone professionally engaged in the ministry of public education.