RECLAIMING THE BIBLE FOR THE CHURCH
Rokert WO. Ucnton
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I have organized my remarks under no fewer than six headings.
Under the first is a disclaimer.
I fully participated in devising the title for this conference.
Yet I must begin by rejecting one suggestion it might make. ‘The
historical-critical scholars are not holding the Bible captive out there:
there has been no conspiracy to kidnap the church's book nor need we
mount an expedition to rescue it.
It is of course true that "historical-critical" reading of the Bible
was in part devised as a weapon against the faith. It is also true that
the dominance of this reading in mainline Protestant and now in most
Catholic seminaries, as it has worked out, has created a situation iri
which we think we have to ask the heathen what our book says. But
there is no intrinsic reason why historical-critical reading must function
as a weapon against the church, or why we must suppose pagans know
best how to do it. ‘
The fault that mandates this conference is in us and not in our
stars. If we need to reclaim the Bible, it can only be because we are
uncertain in our claim to it. If I may address this gloriously mixed as-
sembly as somehow "the church," the first thing I have to say is: the4 2
Bible must necessarily be there for us any tiite_we need it. For the
unitary book we call the Bible exists only inside the church.
iB be +
The volume wei: J'the’tiible is a collection of documents. The
various tradents and auith?s who produced these various documents did
not’ intend them as coritributions to a composite volume - the project
perhaps: of an editor at Thomas Nelson. The single book exists because
and only because the church has for her own purpose assembled a
Witertain selection of documents from the very ancient ‘Near East and from
lx. ofirst-century Mediterranean antiquity.
“documents impose themselves on the church; Catholicism emphasizes that
It 18 the church that recognizes the exigency. I mean only to make the
. _ “lGpte point pré-supposed by and included in both emphases: the
“Setiirch’put this collection together.
* As to the purpose for which the church put the Bible together,
“I watit to state this also in the most simple-minded and ecumenically in-
disputable form. It is in service of her calling to speak the gospel that
the church needs to have the one book, composed of these and no other
documents, that we call the Bible. God gives her the book in service of
her calling to proclaim Israel's God and the one he raised, as a message
of salvation ‘to the world and in appeal and praise to God.roa
Where the-church’s