Two years ago, a colleague of mine, a specialist in the OldTestament, sidled over to me at a faculty party and asked, “What are youworking on?” I replied eagerly, “Actually, something right up your alley. I’mwriting a commentary on Second Samuel.” His face darkened and, leaning in closeto me, he whispered, “You have no business writing a commentary on SecondSamuel.”
We laughed together, but his comment reflects an attitudefairly common among biblical scholars, namely, that there yawns a great gulfbetween serious analysis of Scripture and my field of systematic theology. Howcould someone not well-versed in Hebrew and other ancient Semitic languages andnot thoroughly trained in the science of the historical-critical methodpossibly compose a worthwhile commentary on a major Old Testament text?
My own formation had actually predisposed me to accept thelegitimacy of this separation between theology and the Bible. My route ofaccess to things religious was philosophy. When I was a teenager, ThomasAquinas’s arguments for the existence of God and his rational approach to Godhad a massive impact on me. During my university and seminary years, I concentratedon philosophy and philosophical theology, and my interest in the Bible remainedcomparatively minimal. Moreover, the manner in which the Bible was presented tome during the years of my intellectual formation did little to pique mycuriosity about the scriptural world.
The 1970s and 1980s represented the high-water mark ofhistorical criticism in the Catholic Church. A major preoccupation of mybiblical instructors was to show the inadequacy of a literalistic reading ofthe sacred texts. However valuable this insight was, the result of the approachwas largely negative: “These things didn’t really happen.”
They also placed great stress on discerning theintentionality of the human authors and the specificities of their historicalsettings, which resulted in a loss of the sense of the integrity of the Bibleas a whole. That the Scriptures represented, in some way, the intention of atranscendent author who used both words and events to convey a coherent messagewas never a serious option. Finally, most of the Bible scholars I read duringthose years tended to see systematic theology as something of a distortingoverlay that had to be stripped away in order to get at what the Scripturesreally mean.
What made things worse was that the principal theologicalauthors I read when I was coming of age—Tillich, Rahner, Schleiermacher, Tracy,and their peers—were remarkably unbiblical. One can plow through thousands ofpages of much of the systematic theology of the last two centuries and findprecious little of the Scriptures.
Thoroughly understandable is N. T. Wright’s dry remark thatmost of the Christology of the last two hundred years, both Protestant andCatholic, has been Marcionite in form, that is, developed in almost completeabstraction from the Old Testament. Thus it appeared to me that there wasindeed a gulf between the Bible and theology, and that I had placed myselfsquarely on one side of it.
A turning point was a course I taught for the first time inthe late nineties, which I called “The Christology of the Poets and Preachers.”In preparation for this class, I read the sermons of many of the greatestdogmaticians whose theological work I knew well: Origen, Augustine, Bernard,Anselm, Aquinas, Newman, and others. What struck me was how profoundly biblicalthey were.
Whereas my generation had been taught to preach in a very“experiential” way, taking a prompt from the biblical readings but then movingquickly to stories from our own experience, the most significant preachers ofthe great tradition, I learned, showed extraordinary patience with thecomplexity of the biblical world. In the manner of Karl Barth, they drew theirreaders and listeners through the thicket of the Scriptures.
This immersion in the preaching of the great systematiciansconvinced me that the historical-critical animus against theology wasmisguided. I saw that authentic doctrine grows organically out of the Bibleitself, and nowhere is this clearer than in the work of Thomas Aquinas, who wasfirst a magister sacrae paginae (a master of the holy page) and onlysecondarily and derivatively a theologian. The irony was thick: Whilecontemporary Scripture specialists, soaked in the historical-critical method,had led me away from the Bible, the systematic theologians of the greattradition had led me back to it.
It was in the wake of this turn that I was asked to writethe text that caused my colleague to chuckle, a contribution to the Brazosseries of theological commentaries on the books of the Bible. Having insistedon the problems caused by a one-sided and ideological embrace of historicalcriticism, I hope it isn’t too surprising that in preparation for writing thecommentary, I read contemporary historical criticism of Second Samuel withgreat interest and to great profit.
I pored over every word of P. Kyle McCarter Jr.’s definitivetreatment in the Anchor Bible series, benefitting enormously from hisexhaustive study of the history, language, and cultural setting of the text.Another key book was Robert Alter’s beautiful translation of and commentary onthe Samuel literature. Alter’s grasp of ancient biblical Hebrew, hisextraordinarily wise perception of the ways that the text conveys its meaning,and his canny and often funny insights into the psychology of the maincharacters were an indispensable help.
Walter Brueggemann’s numerous studies sensitized me, in thepostmodern manner, to many of the deep ambiguities in First and Second Samuel.But what most struck me, as I entered deeply into the text itself, was preciselythe congruity between Second Samuel and the classical theological and doctrinaltradition. Let me demonstrate this by drawing attention to but one theme out ofmany I could have chosen.
One of the characteristics of the books of Samuel is thatGod’s activity, though clear and definite, is never in competition with humanagency. According to the author of these texts, the God of Israel never“intervenes” or appears as a deus ex machina.
In fact, the entire narrative—from David’s youth, throughhis adventures with Saul and Jonathan, to his accession to the kingship and hisultimate demise—makes perfect sense when read through psychological orpolitical lenses. It is a coherent human story. But at the same time, theauthor insists that through all of this very human drama, through theseordinary events and activities, God is working his purposes out.
But such a state of affairs is possible only if God is notone finite cause among many, not one more item in a nexus of conditionedagencies. Only if God is construed as a properly transcendent actor could thissort of arrangement obtain, for otherwise he would be jostling for position onthe same playing field with human agents.
And this, of course, is precisely what we find within thebiblical context, wherein God is presented, not as an item, however supreme,within the world, but as the creator of the world in its entirety. SecondIsaiah signals this truth with particular clarity by highlighting, over andagain, the qualitative otherness of the creator God. Yahweh is not only greaterthan the other gods; he is incomparable to them.
When we turn to the tradition of systematic theology, wefind the same truth articulated in more precise philosophical language. Hencethe mainstream Catholic metaphysical tradition refers to God not as a beingbut as Being itself. In Aquinas’s pithy Latin, God is not ens summum(highest being), but rather ipsum esse subsistens (the sheer act of “tobe” itself). Moreover, Thomas insists that God is not an individual, nor amember of any genus, even of that most generic of genera, namely, being.
Anselm signals much the same thing when he names God “thatthan which nothing greater can be thought.” At first blush, this seems astraightforward designation of the highest being, but this cannot be the case,for the highest being, plus every other being, would be greater than thehighest being alone, and hence not that than which nothing greater can be conceived.
This qualitative otherness of God is also the ground for thepermanently stunning claim at the heart of Christianity that God becamea creature, without compromising the creature he became or undermining his ownintegrity. Such a “becoming” is possible only if predicated upon the logic ofGod’s qualitative otherness to the world.
Thomas Aquinas spent nine years as a young man in theBenedictine monastery of Monte Cassino, where he was immersed in the world ofthe Bible, especially the Psalms. It is said that when he was imprisoned for ayear by his family, who hoped to dissuade him from his Dominican vocation, helargely memorized the Sacred Scriptures. Thomas wrote massive and detailedcommentaries on the prophet Isaiah, the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans, thebook of Job, the Gospel of John, and many other biblical texts.
He was undoubtedly shaped by his study of Aristotle, but theGod whom Thomas describes owes far more to Isaiah than to Aristotle. Histheology was an explication of the structuring logic of the biblicalnarratives, and this became eminently clear to me as I explored the peculiarmanner in which the God of Israel manifested himself in the adventures ofSamuel, Hannah, Saul, Jonathan, and David.
Did a systematic theologian have any business writing acommentary on Second Samuel? I suppose my readers have to decide. But in doingso, I was confidently standing with some of the greatest masters in theChristian tradition. And I was consciously bridging a false divide that has,unhappily, been visited upon both the Church and the academy.
Robert Barron is the president of the University of St.Mary of the Lake and Mundelein Seminary.