In my father’s study, as I remember from earliest childhood, was a five by seven framed print of Franklin Roosevelt with an inscription, entitled “Keeping Faith.” Although I cannot recall FDR’s words verbatim, the gist of the message is etched in my memory: If we but keep faith with ourselves and our God, however long the present struggle, we shall not only survive, but prevail. After I left for college, a matched print of John XXIII—bearing no inscription—was placed beside the FDR print. They seemed to belong together.

With the possible exception of Jefferson, no other American has ever matched FDR’s capacity to express the exceptional religious resources of the American people. None ever marshaled those resources to better effect than the man who was until his death a dutiful vestryman of the Hyde Park parish.

Keeping faith with ourselves and our God eloquently expresses the meaning of the work of the theologians, biblical scholars, pastors and committed believers who belong to the Biblical Theology Bulletin family. Keeping faith is far more than a mere nuance away from keeping the faith. It is a far cry from defending the faith. Keeping faith compels us to liberate the best that lies within us and all who share our time and place. Keeping the faith, on the other hand, evokes the world of pre-modern banking and a deposit entrusted to be passed down intact—not unlike the talent consigned to the ground for safekeeping (Matt 25:14–30). And defending the faith is nurtured in an inner and/or institutional insecurity that, doubting even survival, imagines a world hostile to the truth, in the spirit Pope John XXIII satirizes in his opening speech at Vatican II:

In the daily exercise of our office, we sometimes have to listen, much to our regret, to voices of persons who, though burning with zeal, are not endowed with too much sense of discretion or measure. In these modern times they see nothing but prevarication and ruin. They say that our era, in comparison with past eras, is getting worse, and they behave as though they had learned nothing from history, which is, nonetheless, the teacher of life. . . . We feel we must disagree with those prophets of gloom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand.

Challenge to Clarify Facts

We live in a moment that tries those of us most committed to keeping faith. We are told there is a culture war out there. Evidence for culture war sometimes appears incontrovertible. Worse still, we might read in the evidence notice that significant forces are allied, if not against us, then against the values that enable us to us keep faith. Religiously and politically a mean spirit appears ascendant in America. Nor can those who keep faith with Catholic people dismiss the chilling effect of a long series of repressive measures that recently culminated in the papal motu proprio, Ad tuendam fidem, To Defend the Faith.

But the end of the world is not at hand. (Why should we credit the sense of time of people who miscalculate the date of the threatening third millennium, imagining that 2000 years will have elapsed between the putative 1 CE and 2000 CE?) No, not only is judgment not at hand, the deeds that might be judged have yet to be done. Those deeds await those of us who choose to keep faith. Will we do them? This is our test.

To pass this test thoughtful people must clarify the facts. Perhaps no tool is more useful in this task than the social scientific approach to religion many dedicated scholars have made available in this journal. Those who face the world as defenders of the faith and conservators of a deposit of faith must be seen in their cultural context. Critical comparison of their cultural context with our own will reveal that not only is their spirit alien to our own, but the issues and questions which preoccupy them have but slight bearing on the lives of contemporary American believers. Their defensive posture contrasts sharply with our pragmatic conviction that within each human being there lies sufficient good will that individuals who but try will find a way to relate effectively with other individuals. This is not to say that we always succeed at first try, only that we approach others with what often appears to people from other cultures as an almost childlike conviction that it is possible. So firm is this conviction that when we fail with one approach we almost inevitably experiment with other approaches to reach the other individual.

Some of the issues Roman authorities insistently try to remove from discussion, women’s ordination for example, are unlikely to be effectively ruled out of bounds by Americans. At a fundamental level, the argument that what was never tried before may not be tried now conflicts with our experimental instincts. To the most punitively enforced “Tradition says x or y” we will always say “So what?” Asking “Why?”, we mean “Let’s see if it works.”

If we are unable to un-ask our questions, cross-cultural studies may nonetheless help us see why the defenders act as they do. Very likely we will ultimately sum up their transactions with us in the manner we employ in many day-to-day personal relationships in our own culture. “They have a right to their feelings,” we will say as we grasp the fact that their words are less answers to our inquiries than expressions of their deeply felt social psychological convictions about the world.

Realization that efforts at thoughtful discussion with the defenders will prove counterproductive may lead us to rethink the significance of the questions. Rethinking could yield surprises. Who set our agenda? Does the agenda represent what we must do in contemporary America? We need to reexamine presuppositions we have accepted that do not fit our needs. For some time people on the cutting edge have asked, for example, whether women should want to be included in the priesthood as it is presently constituted. Our forms of ministry were shaped by cultures quite different from our own. One of the signal achievements of the American church of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to reshape these forms to nurture the growth of an ever more self-reliant people. No greater symbol of this transformation was the inclusion of sisters to provide critical pastoral and social needs and, indeed, become the first women in history who can be described as the primary instructors in faith not only for lay persons, but for virtually all the male clergy.

Who we are as a people was manifest, indeed sacramentalized, in the vast energy and imagination an immigrant church poured into works of healing, learning and mutual support. Our pastors were never relegated to the sacristy. But they were also but one component in a community of many ministries—long before the term ministries became fashionable. Becoming a community of mutual support was in part response to the ghetto created by nativist hostility. But nativist hostility scarcely accounts for the long term orientation of our community to prepare to enter the American mainstream. Surrounded by walls, we opened gate after gate.

Since World War II—perhaps more from the impact of wider social forces such as the G.I. Bill of Rights than that of Vatican II—we have found our place as Catholics in the wider orbit of America. In the last half-century in ways good and imperfect we have lived with a new agenda and a renewed spirit. We have not, I think, sufficiently reflected on all that has come to pass. This should not surprise us. Reflection follows experience. And reflective systematic interpretation of experience is in the final analysis a secondary, specialized task, in this case that of theologians, biblical scholars and the like.

Challenge to Look Ahead

No starting point for our reflection is more sure than John Winthrop’s proclamation in 1630: “We shall be a city upon a hill.” Americans are, now as ever, a people bent on redemption. Although we have always differed on the particulars, we have a perfectionist dream. Neither individually nor collectively should we settle for less than God calls his people to be. This assumption explains our best as well as our worst exploits: the battle for Europe and the Vietnamese debacle, the Peace Corps and Manifest Destiny, the pursuit of happiness, spiritual and temporal, individual and collective, often marred by naive insensitivity to built-in contradictions. One ecumenical group’s 1995 Cry for Renewal, “We love a Creator who calls for justice and stewardship,” may have been directed at the Christian Coalition. But its call to “judge our economic and environmental habits and policies by their impact on the next generation” is, however ironically, strikingly attuned to the theme set by a half-million men gathered by the Promise Keepers, and indeed earlier the mass led by the Nation of Islam.

Three hundred years after Winthrop, Martin Luther King, Jr. opened the book of Isaiah before his own people—us all—proclaiming, “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted . . . and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” King did not have to convince a perfectionist America that the text applied to us, that this word should legitimately cut into the fabric of this nation’s status quo, and more directly so than to any other people. In contrast to the scene in Luke 4 where Jesus confronted his fellow townspeople, King was honored precisely as a prophet—one who brings the word—rather than as a prophetic savior expected to relieve people of their task of feeding and healing. It is the rare prophet in American who cannot gather a following to act on the prophetic word, at least for a while. Our prophet-problem is that we are perhaps too susceptible to them, and susceptible as well to too many of them.

Europe-based renewal projects of the twentieth century are fairly characterized as focused on a return to the sources, the Bible, the fathers, sacramental and church tradition. Their most solid achievement lies in simplification and a clearer focus on the foundational elements of faith. The limit of their achievement may be aptly expressed in two different types of frustration, the first typically expressed by the ordinary believer, the second by the scholar. Of course, these two are quite frequently but phases in one person’s experience. But when presented a spiritual menu modeled on the best in the sources, the ordinary believer often senses that a rather arid form has replaced the abundance of the recent baroque tradition. Likewise, the scholar is troubled by the distance between the gospel and early tradition on the one hand, and current church teaching and practice, however simplified, on the other. In the Reformation about half the Europe-based church acknowledged the disconnect between gospel (usually along with the early councils) and later church development. For the most part, the Bible became their norm. In recent Catholic renewal the gap between the revelatory experience witnessed in the Bible and the composition and canonization of the texts themselves has been given due weight. The same has scarcely begun for later teaching and practice; the existence of an essential core, normative because unchanging and unchangeable, is taken for granted. The Southern Baptist Convention’s Restatement on Marriage and the Family and the Doctrinal Congregation’s Commentary on the Profession of Faith’s concluding paragraphs represent the flip sides of the same coin.

What might we who keep faith do? The logic of the social science approach BIBLICAL THEOLOGY BULLETIN has encouraged suggests that we may not only understand others and ourselves more analytically, but that we may also revive and develop an element of biblical and legal practice that has been too long neglected, namely the notion of the reception of the text. Reception is the process by which a text is disseminated and interpreted. Europe-based biblical studies generally looking backwards chart the history of the composition and editing of the text. Were we to focus on reception we would look forwards from the text to the vast effect the Bible has had, and continues to have, on our lives. The same might be said of church teaching in general. In the spirit of Newman reception-focused reflection is a matter of consulting the faithful.

Challenge of the Faithful

In America the multifaceted word that is Christianity—and perhaps Judaism and other religions as well— was disseminated under unique circumstances. These circumstances significantly include the fact that our religious tradition is sectarian in its roots and relied from the beginning so heavily on the individual’s reading of the then so recently available printed Bible. It is finally less significant that Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists and Anglicans are sociologically described as churches than that they and all other religious groups in America must function as voluntary associations of individuals in a pursuit of meaning in their lives. That agenda is the source of vitality in American religious experience. This, I suggest, does not call for opinion polls. Pollsters ask people to react to someone else’s agenda. When the average Catholic American says, “Of course, women should be ordained,” there probably lurks an implied question, “Why did you have to ask?” It is not an issue people spontaneously think about. A better gauge of their appreciation of ministry is found when they spontaneously collaborate with whomever they find making Christ present in their own lives and the lives of others.

Is the biblical scholar, theologian, pastor or committed fellow believer to deny or affirm this insight? Will wrong-headed, even wrong-hearted misreadings of the God-experience result? You bet they will! God’s voice has been heard endorsing slavery and segregation, unbridled capitalism and capital punishment, corporal punishment and “Christian militias.” The record and even the current scene are not terribly different from that of the rest of the church universal. But remember, this is a perfectionist culture of which we speak. In the clash of viewpoints and agendas it will very likely always produce dissenters insistently calling for reform and renewal.

Reception of the word is not a passive process. As the text moves forward into our present and its future, it reveals its true character as a seedling to be cultivated, pruned and made fit to bear good fruit. A rabbinic story claimed that because the Torah was God’s gift to the people of Israel, not even an angel had the right to interpret it. That right belonged only to a majority of the people of Israel.

Judging the word’s significance in the light of the history in which we live, contemporary readers keep faith even as they challenge what have heretofore been received as crucial points. For example, what are we to make of the idea that God chooses one individual or people, thereby excluding others? How many readers have paused in their account of Cain and Abel to ask about the Lord who “had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard” (Gen 4:5)? Does this accounting of God possibly set the pattern for Cain’s subsequent exclusion—by death—of Abel? Why is Cain’s gift of no value? Those who keep faith with God, who rely on God’s justice, may find themselves asking Cain’s question. The legacy of simple acceptance of the idea that God chooses whom God wills has too often led to holy war, in the Bible and elsewhere, the crusades, the inquisition and finally in the twentieth century the holocaust. (See Regina M. Schwartz, THE CURSE OF CAIN [Chicago, 1997].)

At times, active critical reception will require only that we look at the text so many other readers have overlooked. Is salvation, eternal life, available apart from belief in Christ? A few weeks back I heard a Baptist minister point out—contra zealots intent on saving Jews—that we have Jesus’ own word for it. When the lawyer asks what he must do to gain eternal life, and cites the great commandment of the Torah in response to Jesus, Jesus’ answer is quite direct: “Do this, and you will live” (Luke 10:28). Torah brings eternal life.

Christians who keep faith with the justice of God as we today understand it will not be convincing if we claim that the gospel and church teaching stand on more unquestionable ground than the First Testament. Consider this. God blesses Abraham precisely because Abraham had “not withheld” Isaac, his only son from him (Gen 22:12). The Genesis account may be read as putting an end to patriarchal power of life and death. Not so, however, subsequent Christian interpretation of Jesus’ death as a sacrifice his Father willed! How we who keep faith with children subject to parental abuse and whim today, as well as to a just God, will deal with this dark word is not altogether clear. That it demands that we question is all the clearer.

That there exists no zone of comfort in our culture where many will respond to a demand to stop questioning is equally certain. Perhaps Europe–based church people will figure us out. We have our work to do in response, not to their dicta but to the word incarnate among us: to keep faith.

In this issue of BTB, Walter Brueggemann’s Suffering Produces Hope traces the way Jews and Christians forged their common hope on the anvil of suffering. “People who hope are not people who have a vague sense that things will work out . . . [but] who act in the conviction that God’s future is reliably present . . . not in hand, but at hand . . . enacted as present neighborliness.” Could there be a better description of keeping faith?

Roland E. Murphy insists on the indispensability of historical criticism in What Is Catholic about Catholic Biblical Scholarship?—Revisited, but orients scholarship towards the present and future community of believers by demonstrating the open-ended character of the task of reading the word in the light of the living tradition of the church. John N. Collins’Did Luke Intend a Disservice to Women in the Martha and Mary Story? challenges recent reception of the Lukan account by some feminist scholars, insisting that Jesus’ word bears on the contrast between hearing the word and anxious behavior rather than between service (ministry) and listening. Finally, in an extended review, The Anthropology of Christian Origins, John H. Elliott demonstrates the distinctive contribution of scholars at the University of Bologna to cross-disciplinary studies on biblical writings and their socio-cultural settings.