Cur Deus Verba: Why the Word Became Words

By Jeremy Holmes

Cur Deus Verba unfolds a systematic theology of Scripture from a single key question: What did God seek to accomplish by making the Bible? The answer requires seeing why the Holy Trinity made anything at all, why the Word became flesh, and finally why the Church needs an inspired text. As Christ is more fully "man" than any mere man, so his Church is more fully "society" than any merely human society. And as every society has its literary tradition, so the Church needed a canon of literature that would be more fully "book" than any merely human book.

But to grasp what God intended to accomplish, we have to see how he intended to do it. To the extent possible, God wanted human beings to cause not just the text but revelation itself, and paradoxically this exaltation of human agency gave rise to the need for Scripture’s spiritual sense. The spiritual sense of Scripture leads in turn to a meaning of the term "literal" that is unique to the realm of theology, and the connection between the two means that we cannot follow the literal sense without grasping the spiritual as well.

Once God has made what he intended in the way he intended, one question remains: How does this inspired text continue to exist? As with any text, the answer is that Scripture exists in physical books, but really and principally in the hearts of the readers. And Scripture's own place in the salvation history it records means that one human heart is preeminent: the text of Sacred Scripture exists exemplarily in the Heart of Jesus Christ.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: May 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781642291612

Book preview

PREFACE

When the Nestorian heresy threatened to undermine the truth of the Incarnation, Cyril of Alexandria grounded the orthodox faith with one simple argument, borrowed from Athanasius: the purpose of the Incarnation was our salvation, and no mere man could save us. Christ had to be true God and true man. When Eutyches took Cyril’s more difficult teachings too far and proposed a single nature in Christ, Pope Saint Leo the Great returned to Cyril’s central point: the purpose of the Incarnation was our salvation, and the savior had to be a true member of our race. In different centuries, and in response to different errors, the Church has repeatedly asked the question Saint Anselm would phrase so memorably: Cur Deus homo? Why did God become man?

The Church’s faith about the Incarnate Word parallels her faith that Scripture is both truly the words of men and truly the words of God. In a vivid poem, the prophet Baruch describes God’s wisdom as desperately needed by men but as dwelling far from them. The giants of old perished for lack of her; no one has gone up into heaven and taken her or gone over the sea and found her. But God found the whole way to wisdom, Baruch says, and afterward she appeared upon earth and lived among men (Bar 3:37). The Christian draws in a sudden breath—could this be the Incarnation of God’s Word and Wisdom, drawn out in plain terms in the Old Testament? But Baruch continues: She is the book of the commandments of God (Bar 4:1). The closest the Old Testament comes to saying that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (Jn 1:14) is a panegyric on Scripture.

The parallel has not been lost on the Christian tradition.¹ Ignatius of Antioch says that We must go to Scripture as to the flesh of Christ. Origen says similarly, Just as this spoken word cannot according to its own nature be touched or seen, but when written in a book and, so to speak, become bodily, then indeed is seen and touched, so too is it with the fleshless and bodiless Word of God; according to its divinity it is neither seen nor written, but when it becomes flesh, it is seen and written. Quoting John Chrysostom, Vatican II’s Dei Verbum makes the same point:

While preserving always God’s truth and holiness, in Sacred Scripture there is manifested the marvelous condescension of eternal Wisdom, that we may learn God’s inexpressible kindness, and how greatly he has adapted his speech out of concern for and foresight regarding our nature. For God’s word, expressed in human languages, has been made like to human speech, as of old the Eternal Word of the Father was made like to men, taking on our flesh with its human weakness.²

All of this suggests that the guiding question for a theology of Scripture should be that of purpose: Cur Deus verba? Why did God’s Word become words? Saint Augustine, in his seminal work on biblical interpretation, takes this approach: Book 1 of De doctrina christiana argues that the key to understanding Scripture is to see that it was given to us for the purpose of increasing our charity.³

However, no one can answer this guiding question well unless he thinks, not only about God, but also about words. Here again we have a likeness to the mystery of the Incarnation: explaining why God became man required closer attention to what man is. For example, the Apollinarian heresy, which said Jesus has no human soul but rather has the divine Word in place of a soul, arose in part from a Platonic inattention to what makes the human soul different from other spirits. Along similar lines, to explain why God’s Word became words one has to think carefully about the written word: what it is, what it is for, how it relates to human nature. Saint Augustine made a beginning on this front as well by considering how signs work in general and how words work in particular.

The first three chapters of this book mirror the first book of De doctrina christiana. The immediate context of Scripture is the Church, while the context for understanding the Church is the Incarnation, and the context for understanding the Incarnation is the Trinity. So, as a preparation for asking why God made Scripture, chapter 1 asks why God created anything at all and delves into the mystery of the Trinity to answer the question. Chapter 2 considers that point where we see God’s purpose in creation most clearly and fully achieved, namely, the Incarnation. Finally, chapter 3 asks directly about the purpose of Scripture and offers an account in terms of the nature of the Church. Chapters 1 through 3 together form the first part of the present work, and they culminate in a definition of Scripture.

Having set out a definition of Scripture, the rest of this book unpacks what the definition implies. All language begins with things that are described by words, and those words are then received by a hearer—or reader, in the case of the written word. Things, words, reader: these three are inseparably present wherever we find writing. The second part of this book deals with the things of Scripture; part three, the words of Scripture; and part four, the reader.

The discussion of the things of Scripture moves from considering the things as such to considering the things as a kind of sign. Chapter 4 investigates the authors of Scripture, who lived among the things of Scripture as part of the same history and fabric so that they are themselves biblical realities along with the Temple and the Exodus and all the rest. Chapter 5 widens in scope to consider the history of Israel as a whole insofar as Israel had an anticipatory share in the mystery of Christ. Chapter 6 then considers how the realities of Scripture were themselves signs, what tradition has called the spiritual sense of Scripture, and chapter 7 rounds out the presentation with a closer look at the relationship of the spiritual and literal senses and an explanation of the traditional division of the spiritual sense into allegorical, moral, and tropological.

When we turn to the words of Scripture, we are dealing with the bookness of the Bible. Chapter 8 asks why the literal sense of Scripture is important, with a focus on the narrative portions of the Bible. Chapter 9 considers the subdivisions of the literal sense, asking why it is helpful to have different literary forms and the variety of ways they convey meaning. As a closely related issue, and because difficulties in Scripture arise chiefly in connection with the literal sense, chapter 10 examines the fact that difficulties do occur in Scripture and asks how, in general, we should think about that fact.

The final part of the book turns to the reader or hearer, in whom Scripture exists as more than blots on a page. Previous chapters have looked at the reader in his relationship to things and in his relationship to words, but this final part examines the reader precisely in his subjectivity. Chapter 11 asks whether the reader’s subjectivity contributes to the accomplishment of Scripture’s purpose, and chapter 12 concludes by arguing that the heart of Jesus is the place where Scripture has its definitive existence.

Given the top-down approach I have taken, there are many good things this book could have been but is not. It is not primarily a commentary on Scripture, although every chapter does interpret Scripture. It is not a practical guide to understanding Scripture, although I address a few of the more universal rules of exegesis. Least of all does the present work delve into the historical development of biblical texts or the history of interpretations, although certain broad outlines of that development are presumed.⁴ My hope has been to compose a work of theology, in the narrow sense of a reflection that takes God as its subject and everything else in relation to God. Too often Scripture is divided into its divine and human elements: we consider the inerrancy of Scripture as related to divine authorship and the literary forms of Scripture as relating to human authorship; we think of the unity of Scripture as coming from God and the distinctive notes in each book as coming from the human author. I want to treat every aspect of Scripture, including the human elements, as finally to be understood in relation to God, much as the Church Fathers speak of the one theandric energy of Christ.⁵

To work top down in this way without violating our practical experience of Scripture requires a philosophy in which the world is open to the divine.⁶ At each step along the way, I present and appeal to a philosophy based on participation and the analogy of being, guided especially by Saint Thomas Aquinas.⁷ Defending this decision is beyond the scope of this project, but others have made the case that biblical studies must find their bearings again in the perennial philosophy.⁸ For my part, I hope that I can contribute to that conclusion by taking it as a premise and showing at least something of how it opens up the question: Cur Deus verba?

1

Why God Created: The Trinity

When we look at the purpose for which something exists, we are looking at a good to be obtained. So when we ask why God created the world, we are asking about the good for the sake of which the world exists. I begin, therefore, with a reflection on the meanings of the word good.

A. The Goodness of God

If the Old Testament had a thesis statement, it might be something like this: All things are obliged to give all glory to the one true God who made them. The argument is long and has many stages, beginning with a commandment that Israel serve this God in preference to all others, proceeding through the disasters consequent on disobeying that command, and culminating in the realization that, in fact, no other God exists. Only one God created all things, and all were created for his glory. Saint Paul captures this Old Testament thesis statement in his Letter to the Romans: For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory for ever. Amen (Rom 11:36).

At the same time, Genesis punctuates its account of the stages of creation with the statement that God saw that it was good, and in fact very good.¹ The placement of this phrase at the end of various stages of creation seems to suggest that God created things for their goodness, because the world would be a very good thing to have made. The Psalms and the Wisdom literature love to detail the glories of creation—all to the praise of God, of course, but the reader is always left with the impression that creation is very good, a worthy thing for God to have brought into being. If the thesis statement of the Old Testament is that all things were created for the glory of God, a subordinate claim seems to be that the world was made because it is a good thing.

To understand why God created anything at all, one must somehow bring these two claims into a single account of the purpose of creation. Was the world created for God or for its own sake? Did God act egoistically or altruistically? The only way out of the bind is to distinguish between a private good and a common good. By a common good, I mean a good that can be shared among many persons without in any way being diminished or divided. This definition contains a great deal in a few words, so I will tease out some of its implications over the next few pages.²

Common Good

A cake is not a common good; it is a private good. My cake can only be shared by breaking it into parts so that I get less cake at the end of the deal. And upon examination, it turns out that cake is not really sharable: the part another gets is a part I cannot have, and the part I keep is a part another will never eat. What I really do when I cut my cake up is make a bunch of smaller things, and then I keep one of them and I give others away. So I can give cake away, but I cannot share it.

Upon even closer examination, it turns out that I cannot fully share my cake because I cannot fully possess it. I can keep a piece of cake in a container, hold it in my hands, and place it in my mouth, but in the moment of enjoying it, I destroy it. By the time I have drawn it fully to myself, it has been digested and disintegrated into nutrients that will be reconstructed into my own flesh. In the very moment of full possession, the cake vanishes.

Contrast this with a good such as friendship. Friendship is a common good. Not only can I share my friendship with a friend, but I cannot actually have friendship without sharing it. My portion of friendship is not diminished when another’s is increased; instead, my portion is increased by sharing it more. The fact that I can truly share friendship is related to the fact that I can truly possess it: a friendship seeps deeply into me, reshaping and improving me without ceasing to be itself.

Of course, the kind of friendship we usually have in mind when we use the word friend is not a perfectly common good: a person can have only a few very close friends, and even though friendship is perfectly shared between them, there is a limit to how many people can share in it. But this is to be expected. Goods come in different kinds, and they fall on a spectrum from the purely private to the most common and everywhere in between. Any time we find a common good, we will find that even though it is common, it has its limits. It will be more or less sharable, and more or less diminished when it is shared. The common good of the United States of America, for example, even though it is a great good and much more sharable without diminution than my personal friendships, can only extend to its people; the good folks in Argentina are excluded.

The reason goods range from purely private to most common is simply that they fall on a spectrum from less good to most good. A good that is better is, so to speak, more powerfully good. As a hotter fire not only heats a person up more but also heats up more people, so a better good is not only better for a person but is a good for more people: it is more common. Friendship is not only better for me than a cake but good for more people simultaneously. So goods that are more common are better goods, and the better the good, the more common it will be: as Aquinas says, quanto bonum est communius, tanto est divinius (the more common a good is, the more divine it is).³

The only absolutely common good is the good that is goodness itself: God. Every creature in the entire universe has God as its good, each in a way proportioned to what it is; in fact, every conceivable creature in every conceivable universe would have God as its good, because his goodness is never used up, so to speak, by what he has created. God is in a special way the good of every person, and he is not only every person’s good, but he is more intimately the good of each person than that person’s best friends. God can be not only the friend but even the lover of every person in creation, and yet this love never dilutes, the way human friendship is diluted when spread too far.

Trinity

But revelation tells us there is even more. Although reason rightly tells us that there is only one God, one being that is the source of every being and one good that is the good of every good, nonetheless, revelation tells us that three Persons are this one being. The word share explodes at this point, because the three Persons are each identical with the Divine Being rather than sharing in it, but something happens that is more sharing than sharing itself. Rather than three friends who each have a share in the group’s friendship, or rather than three citizens who each have a share in the country’s peace, there are three Persons who are each identical with the Divine Goodness without being identical to each other.

Fallen creatures that we are, this is the opposite of what we expect. We tend to listen to the voice of the serpent, who whispers to us that God clings jealously to his divinity, that he wants no one but himself to be like God. But when the second Person of the Trinity offered his definitive response to the serpent, he did not think equality with God something to be grasped at, to be clutched to himself as a merely private good: rather, he emptied himself, and took the form of a servant.⁴ The Incarnation of the Word revealed the Word’s eternal way of being as the unimaginably best and therefore inconceivably communicable good. Our reason cannot grasp it, and our sinful inclinations run counter to it, but the revelation of the Trinity tells us clearly: Goodness is even better than we thought.

Creation

The fact that God is goodness itself, a goodness that exceeds our grasp of the word goodness, means two things for creation. First, it means that God could not possibly have created the world out of any need for its goodness or out of any boredom or dissatisfaction with his own lot. The one whose life is identical with unbounded goodness could not look for a better life. So he must have created simply out of generosity, in order to give something away, as we say that someone did something, not because he had to, but out of the goodness of his heart.

Second, it means that God himself must be the goal of creation. If God did not create in order to receive something, then he must have created in order to give something, and the only thing he has to give is himself, his own goodness.⁵ So it is true that God does everything for his own sake, but he does not love himself as a private good, which would mean doing everything for his own utility, his own gain. No, he loves himself as a common good, which means that he does everything out of a joy in the beauty of what he is. He is like a man who is so enamored of Mozart’s symphonies that he cannot rest until all his friends love Mozart’s symphonies, too. God exists as a gift, and everything he does is for the sake of giving it.

If God creates to give his own goodness, the consequence is that creatures are truly good. If God had created out of need, for his own utility, then creatures might have been mere tools, not good in themselves, but only desirable as means. There would have been a gigantic but hollow universe with a single, lonely good standing at its center. But because God created out of generosity, to give his goodness to others, his creatures have goodness in them—that is to say, they are good in themselves. Just as a painting of a beautiful woman is itself beautiful and worthy of admiration, and just as an echo of a beautiful voice is itself beautiful and worthy of enjoyment, so the creatures who reflect God’s goodness are themselves good and worthy of love. As God is the supreme good of all creation, so in a lesser way one creature can be a good for another. The universe is thick, stocked with many goods that are good for one another.

To put this conclusion in other words, creatures are also generous.⁶ Just as God acted to give his own goodness, so his creatures act to give their own goodness to others. Every creature’s goodness is limited, and so is the extent to which it can be a good for others, but to the degree that it shares in God’s goodness, to that degree it can be a good for others. The stone heated by divine fire can warm the night for cold, grateful feet. Even though only God is the Creator, the reflections he has made of himself are and must be true causes themselves. This conclusion is necessarily true of all that God creates, whether it be the natural world, the realm of grace, or the final resolution of history.⁷

We see this borne out in revelation. Scripture presents a world in which God is the author of all history and yet human choice has real consequences, a world in which God is the supreme Creator and yet the weather is a true factor in the story. Scripture is even more specific about how God shares the goodness of his own life, but to elaborate that requires that we say more about God himself.

B. The Son

God has told us more about his interior life than simply that he exists as three Persons in one Being. He has also told us how each Person—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—is the Divine Being in his own way and that each Person’s unique way of being is a relation to the other Persons. Of course, this knowledge is precious simply because it is knowledge about God, but it is also important for our inquiry into creation because God, in giving us a share in his own goodness, has given us a share in the Trinitarian life. We begin our exploration of this mystery by looking at what God has revealed about his Son.

Old Testament

Speaking in the person of wisdom, the Book of Proverbs recounts that, before the world existed, before there were mountains or oceans or fields, the Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old (Prov 8:22). Wisdom goes on to narrate how at every stage of God’s creating act, I was beside him, like a master workman (Prov 8:30). The author of the Book of Wisdom expands on wisdom’s role as master workman by saying she is the fashioner of all things (Wis 7:22). He says that she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty, and explains, For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness (Wis 7:25-26).

It is easy to see how these meditations from Israel’s wisdom literature expand on what I have said about God creating in order to share his goodness. When God creates, he does so according to a wisdom he possessed before anything was created, and this wisdom is the pattern for creation because it reflects God himself like a mirror. It is an image of his goodness.

Outside of these clearly monotheistic reflections on creation, however, it may be difficult to see how Israel’s wisdom literature is especially theological. A commonplace in Old Testament studies is that the wisdom literature is international in character.⁸ While the Lord appears in some seventy of the proverbs, there are no references to Israel’s sacred history, to the covenants, to prophecies, or, indeed, to revelations of any kind. None of the famous names of Scripture appear there other than Solomon, to whom some number of proverbs are attributed. Instead, the proverbs are concerned with secular matters: dealings in the marketplace, etiquette at the palace, relationships within the home, and so on. While Israel’s Scriptures tower over the literature of surrounding nations when it comes to the creation account or the prophetic oracles, the wisdom literature of Babylon and Egypt is almost identical in character with the Book of Proverbs.⁹ In many cases, the maxims of foreign wise men are so similar to those of Israel that one might mistake them for something in Scripture. The same themes occur: injustice leads to disaster in the end; looking to another’s wife is playing with fire; the wise man lives in peace while the fool comes to misery.

One noticeable difference, however, is that the literature of the surrounding cultures did not personify God’s wisdom, either as a woman or as a man.¹⁰ In Proverbs, Wisdom calls out at the corners of busy streets, pleads with the elders in the gate, and threatens that she will laugh