The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  Yet, on Christmas Eve they are given lessons in biology for or against the Virgin Birth. The shepherds, rather than devout apostles of the sleeping Lord, become the victims of an oppressive economic system, and Mary and Joseph become the poster couple in the war against homelessness. Easter is no better. How much clerical jaw-breaking has been expanded upon making reasonable the incredible, and hence the extrarational, phenomena of Easter morning? Of course it matters that the tomb was empty and the stone rolled away, and that Mary had a chat with an angel and then with the risen Lord. Of course all of that matters, but it is not, at least at that point, about how it happened. What use are the functional, mechanical proofs that satisfy our small eighteenth-century minds? These are the wrong questions at the wrong time. People want to know, and have a right to know, both what it means and what it means for them, here and now. Explanations at Easter treat us all in the way the gospel writer describes the disciples’ reaction to Mary and the other women when they tell them that the Lord is risen and that they, of all people, had just seen him. The women had had an experience; the disciples wanted an explanation. Since the explanation is always inferior to the experience it seeks to contain and describe, Luke’s gospel says of the disciples’ reaction to the good news of Easter, “But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” (Luke 24:11)

  Perhaps it is, as the phrase has it, “too good to be true.” Perhaps Easter and Christmas are implausible truths, problems that must be solved rather than mysteries to be entered into. Or could it be that shepherds and women, the true worshipers and preachers of Christmas and Easter, know more than we give them credit for knowing, and in fact, know more than we do?

  The term “Easter Christians” began as an insult against those who came to church only at Easter, and impugned their motives for doing so only then. Those described by this term more often than not acknowledge sheepishly the truth of the charges made against them, but, wonder of wonders, that doesn’t stop them from coming. They have much to teach the rest of us, who, like the elder brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son, protest our faithfulness and object to being supplanted by the wandering absent one, upon whose return the fatted calf is killed and on whose behalf a great party is given.

  Surely on Christmas Eve we could wish that those who come to the manger and to the altar would do so on a more regular basis, and would in fact receive the benefit of regular instruction, discipline, and fellowship, but when they do come, we must realize that they have done so not to get a crash tutorial in all that they have missed but rather to obey the most fundamental and unavoidable of all invitations and commands: “O come let us adore Him, Christ the Lord.” It is no accident that the carol “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” of which this phrase forms the chorus, is perhaps the most beloved and well known of all the most beloved of music. It doesn’t invite us to an explanation of a discussion; it invites us to respond with the only human response available in the face of the mystery of the divine condescension: adoration. That promiscuous crowd on Christmas Eve knows a mystery when it sees one, and better than that, it still remembers from its primitive, half-remembered past how to respond to one. Perhaps one of the most sophisticated believers of our age was able to understand, in the only language capable of expressing it, what these Easter and Christmas Christians know:

  You are not here to verify,

  Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

  Or carry report. You are here to kneel

  Where prayer has been valid.**

  (T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”)

  The Instinct for Mystery

  “If it weren’t for the miracles in the Bible, I could take it all much more seriously.” I have heard this view expressed in a wide variety of forms over the years.

  “If it weren’t for the miracles in the Bible, I couldn’t possibly take what it says seriously.” I have heard this view expressed in a wide variety of forms over the years, and from within the very same congregation as the first.

  The biblical miracles are in place not so much to confound nature and reason, although they do that quite regularly, but to make the case for the credibility of God in Hebrew scripture, and to confirm the presence of God in Jesus in the New Testament. Their purpose is not so much to do good, although they do that. Their real purpose is to affirm the truth of the proposition that Jesus has within himself and his command the power of God. Miracles are meant to get our attention; they are spice to the gospel’s mutton.

  Miracles, however, have long posed a problem that we cannot imagine was anticipated by those faithful compilers of them in the gospel record. Rather than telling us more about Jesus and confirming in our minds and hearts who he is, the miracles have for many got in the way, and whatever lack of credibility we place in them now adheres to Jesus. So, for many, a faith that was meant to be advanced by means of the miracles to the Way, the Truth, and the Life, is now inhibited or compromised by those very means. The medium has become the message, and the messenger is held hostage to the limitations of the medium. Miracles, then, like Easter and Christmas, become problems to be solved or at least explained, preferably away or out of the way, and when we speak of a miracle as a mystery, for many that just sounds like a pious old fraud, a problem in search of a solution.

  In the summer of 1995, I visited the city of Montreal for the first time. Overlooking that splendid city on a very high eminence atop Westmount Mountain is a quite remarkable place, L’Oratoire St. Joseph, a domed phenomenon, which even from a distance exudes an aura of European French Catholicism. It is a place that demands attention and cries out for exploration, and so a friend and I set out to find its approach, which we did after some preliminary difficulty. The nearer we got the more we were joined by others, and by the time we reached the principal parking lot we were among thousands who had come on that late afternoon from all over the world. Yellow school buses disgorged the young and the old, the fit and the handicapped, and everywhere one looked there were nuns and priests. Standing at the foot of the great basilica one is meant to be dwarfed by the sheer enormity of the building, and the panoramic view of Montreal spread out before one seems second only to God’s view of the universe. In the center of the flight of steps to the principal entrance is a set of pilgrims’ stairs up which the faithful are meant to ascend on their knees, as an act of devotion, and of course my Protestant sensibilities were both intrigued and horrified by this. There were several faithful who were thus making their way up, but we decided not to wait to monitor their success, and went up in the conventional way and into the enormous ground-floor chapel. The heat within the chapel, from the thousands of flickering votive candles, was almost suffocating, but the most overwhelming sight awaited us in the next room. Upon the walls of this smaller chapel were suspended thousands of canes, sticks, and pairs of crutches lined up from floor to ceiling and leaving no space uncovered; these were the mute yet eloquent testimonials to the cures that had taken place there. Some of them had labels with the particulars of the former owners, some had prayers and thanksgivings, some had scripture verses, but whether they were labeled or not, they all told an incredible tale: People had come here with them and had left without them. This was a place of miracles, and these bits of wood and metal were proof of them. It was the evidence of the curative powers of place that fascinated the average visitor, and drew to the spot thousands upon thousands who were there not to gawk or to visit but to be cured of their afflictions.

  As we left, my friend said, “That was scary; impressive, but scary.” I agreed, for at first impact it was a little too much for an old Protestant from sober New England, and I remembered what that arch-skeptic David Hume, of whom I had read in my undergraduate Western civilization course, had said about miracles. I admit I was helped in the remembering by John Polkinghorne’s excellent summary of Hume’s objections to miracles in his Science and Providence, where he says that there are four reasons to believe that miracles never happened:

  There is
not a body of credible, intelligent, well-informed witnesses to confirm the miracle and “secure us against all delusion.”

  The passions of surprise and wonder that arise from miracles are agreeable and pleasant feelings and thus are likely to make us believe in their source as miraculous.

  Miracles are not to be taken seriously because these supernatural phenomena “abound among ignorant and barbarous nations.”

  All religions claim the miraculous to justify their exclusive claims to truth, and hence all of the claims cancel each other out.2

  I must confess that those four arguments have some force behind them despite their author’s unimpeachable credentials as a dead, white, and very Western male, and an Enlightenment figure into the bargain, and I know many who in a heartbeat could out-Hume Hume and have founded churches in order to do so. As we descended that great mountain, however, for the purpose of obtaining the most self-indulgent French cuisine that our U.S. dollars could buy, it seemed to me that those thousands of crutches and sticks were more compelling than Hume’s four points.

  Hume did not want an untidy, disorderly world. He wanted what my mother wanted in my boyhood room—a place for everything, and everything in its place—and in such a world miracles simply didn’t fit. They introduced a level of arbitrariness and capriciousness on the part of God, and they made of believers gullible dupes who, instead of learning about and sorting out their own problems, would wait and expect God to interfere. The “fixed and immutable laws of nature” that so delighted and reassured the scientific intellectuals of the eighteenth century were there for our guidance. They could be discovered, even revealed, but they could not be abrogated or interfered with.

  William Ellery Channing, that early-nineteenth-century preacher who so orchestrated the theology of liberal Christians that it gained coherence in the denomination of Unitarians, of whom he could be said to be the godfather, said in his “Baltimore Sermon” of 1819 that while the Bible is a record of God’s successive revelation to us, “Revelation is addressed to us as rational beings.” Reason must be used to harmonize scripture with “the human character and will of God, and with the obvious and acknowledged laws of nature.” He did not, in that remarkable sermon, address Augustine’s remark that “miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.” It was in the company of that provocative remark of Augustine that I left the Oratory and that ghastly, grisly collection of artificial limbs, wheelchairs, crutches, and canes. The question, of course, was not “Are miracles true or even possible?” The question was what was really real: the illness or the cure?

  Today, “after modernity,” my sense is that more and more people are less and less embarrassed to inquire more closely into those great mysteries and truths of which miracles were both the sign and the signpost. If the rule of life, of nature, of “normalcy” as Warren G. Harding once called it, is really, as that thoroughly premodern curmudgeon, Thomas Hobbes, described it, “nasty, brutish, and short,” then something that acts contrary to nature is neither a curse nor a conundrum but a blessing and an act of grace, and welcome as such, for it points us to the source of such blessing and grace with the possibility of more of the same.

  The Experience of the Miraculous

  My friend Dr. Charles G. Adams, one of America’s most distinguished and effective African-American preachers and a fellow graduate of Harvard Divinity School, was once asked to describe the difference between white and African-American preaching in late-twentieth-century America. Dr. Adams said that much white preaching is still very much inspired by the Teutonic origins and principles of what was once called the higher criticism. Here, objectivity and scientific clarity are valued. One takes up a text with tweezers and looks at it from afar, under glass, and from every possible angle, subjecting it to various tests and, like a good medical student performing the tasks of dissection on a cadaver, taking great care to record the results and come to a judicious conclusion or two, supported of course by the evidence. Distance, verifiability, and a scrupulous regard for facts and problems are the hallmarks of this tradition, and many of these values are to be found in the preaching that comes from it.

  Black preaching, on the other hand, owes next to nothing to any Teutonic inheritance, although people like Dr. Adams are very much aware of that tradition, and conversant with it. Black preaching, coming out of an oral and aural tradition, is overwhelmingly narrative, and the point of a story is to get into it as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. Rather than taking things apart to see how they work, and if they work, black preaching endeavors to remove as many barriers between the thing preached and those to whom it is preached as quickly as possible, so that the “objective” story becomes with very little effort, “our” story, or “my” story. Distinctions between then and now, while possibly of some rhetorical use, more often than not get in the way. Thus, when the black preacher preaches about the exodus of the Jews from Egypt under the leadership of Moses, he does not dwell on the fact that most black people have more in common culturally with the benighted Egyptians than with the Jews. We are the Jews, and their exodus is ours, not by analogy but by participation and experience. At the heart of such preaching is the notion that the “God who spake” now speaks, and it is the same God and the same message.

  Does this mean that African-American Christian preachers and believers are essentially fundamentalists and biblical literalists? Hardly. American fundamentalism, as formulated in the 1920s and 1930s, is essentially a white Protestant set of solutions to a set of white secular eighteenth-century problems.

  The worlds of the eighteenth-century skeptics and their twentieth-century fundamentalist antagonists were profoundly indifferent, and in America at least, profoundly hostile to the worldview of African-American Christians. Fundamentalism has done nothing for African-American Christianity, and the deepest traditions of African-American piety transcend the historic agendas of American fundamentalism. Why? Because African Americans who read and heard the Bible did not stop to ask if it was literally true, inspired, and inerrant, for they knew that on the authority of their own experience as a people troubled, transformed, and redeemed. The biblical world may be different from the new world to which they had been transported in chains and against their wills, but the view of God was to them the same in both worlds. Hence, what God did for Daniel and the three Hebrew children in the fiery, fiery furnace, God not only would do, but had already done with them. No black Christian ever had to make the necessary racial adjustments to the fact-that the crucified Jesus was a white Jew crucified by white Romans in a white Greco-Roman world. Far more than fact-obsessed white Protestant Christians, the African-American believer saw the story whole, saw that it had his face and name on it, and embraced the teller and the tale.

  The hermeneutical principle, that is, the principle of interpretation, for the African American was and always has been the authenticity and hence the authority of his own experience. Redemption was not a theory; it was an experience. Slavery was not a theory; it was an experience. The promises were not just that; they had been and were being fulfilled. Indeed, if the great and ironic truth be known, African-American Christians have infinitely more in common with devout and observant Jews in their view of the workings of scripture and the entrance into the mystery of redemption than they ever have had with their white Protestant co-religionists. For black Christians, miracles are not theories to be tested, or outmoded concepts from the prescientific age of the Bible, to be treated with reverent suspicion. Miracles are the stuff of every day, verified in the experience of the people, and by their very survival among God’s chosen and elect. Ask any Jew; he will tell you what I mean.

  An Empowering Modesty

  I began this chapter with a discussion of mystery and the inherent tendency of mystery to invite us into it, rather than to merely solve it. Problems give us the illusion of power, for in solving them we are able to put them out of the way and to clear the decks for the next problem; but
mystery lingers, deepens, and develops—dare we say it?—a meaningful relationship with the one who is drawn into it. Rather than looking for a way out we are enchanted by what we find within, and within the interstices of mystery one has a chance to discover, not to resolve, the greatest mystery of all, which is the love by which we are united to God and to one another.

  Nowhere in the Bible are we given to understand that by faithful study and good works, or even with a little bit of luck, we will be able to understand all that we need to know about the fundamental mystery of our relationship to God. Those who think that a careful, painstaking study of the scriptures will reveal all to them in the fullness of time have understood neither the scriptures nor God. If there were to be found such clarity, such a lifting of the veil of ignorance, as it were, there would be no need for all of the extra-biblical devices of theological and philosophical speculation by which we have long sought to make our way from the unknown to the unknowable by way of what we think we know. It always amazes me that certain of my Presbyterian friends think that because the Westminster Confession is so thorough, so eloquent, and so convinced of its own virtuous logic it somehow is able to take them where scripture, unaided by the marginal notes of those seventeenth-century divines, cannot. The Westminster Confession and the Shorter Catechism take the prize for theological immodesty. Thank God for the Bible. It is there, after all, that in II Chronicles 6:1, “The Lord has said that he would dwell in thick darkness.” It is in scripture, in that marvelous assault upon virtuous knowledge, in the book of Job, where the great question is asked: “Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty? It is higher than heaven—what can you do? Deeper than Sheol—what can you know?” (Job 11:7–8)