Raymond E. Brown and the Catholic Biblical Renewal by Donald Senior
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Galileo’s Revenge

You wouldn’t have read about him in your news feed but Raymond Brown was a remarkable biblical scholar. Remarkable not just because of his exceptional talent but also because of his persistent courage in facing down the intellectual oppression of the institution to which he devoted his life, the Catholic Church. His intellectual biography is a drama as significant as that of Alfred Loisy or Teilhard de Chardin, as the modern re-enactments of the 17th century persecution of Galileo. The most important difference being that Brown won (or at least didn’t lose) his battle against ecclesiastical authoritarianism and institutionalised anti-intellectualism. I’m not sure this victory calls for celebration given the continuing attitude of the Church toward reasonable thought; but at least it represents some sort of progress.

Brown started his career during a period that was the ecclesiastical equivalent of the McCarthy Witch Hunts in the USA or the Stalinist Purges in the Soviet Union. Instead of Communists under the bed or Trotskyites in the parlour, there were Modernists in the closet. Modernists, like their secular analogues, had essentially unspecified ‘attitudinal’ problems rather than explicitly erroneous beliefs. They were therefore difficult to spot in the general Catholic population.

To neutralize such incipient rebellion the Church had established in the early 20th century several inquisitorial Commissions charged with rooting out those, like Loisy and de Chardin , who made public pronouncements about intellectual responsibility. But the commissioners’ networks of informers and secret tribunals were also intended to reveal and silence the hidden mass of Modernist fellow-travellers, particularly among the clergy engaged in biblical research, who might pose a threat to the standard, official interpretation of scripture and thus to the authority of the church.

The ‘safe’ areas of Catholic biblical research during these intellectual Dark Ages were topics such as biblical languages, archaeology, and biblical geography. But very few dared venture out to investigate what biblical passages ‘really meant’ to the people who wrote them and for whom they were written. This would demand analysis of the history and social context of scripture which had already produced disconcerting results among Protestants during their century or so of serious biblical exegesis.

Hot topics like the virgin birth and the infancy narratives of Jesus (mostly metaphorical according to Brown), the biblical character of priesthood and the church hierarchy (rather different than the historical result), the ordination of women (no real impediment), the historicity of the accounts of Jesus’s passion and death (not reliably factual), and even the Resurrection of Jesus (not a resuscitation). These issues were treated with nuanced delicacy by Brown but he consistently, and successfully, challenged the rather naive literal interpretations that dominated official teaching.

Moreover, Brown didn’t discuss these things only among other ‘experts,’ he went public in the popular media. And, even more scandalously, he respected and cooperated with non-Catholic scholars, some of these Jews! Brown therefore was frequently criticized and sometimes ‘silenced’ for his views by the hierarchy and traditionalist Catholics. Much of this criticism was abusive, ad hominem, and unfounded. Twenty years after his death there are still those who view his work as heretical and a danger to the Church.

So Senior’s biography of Brown leaves me with nagging questions which seem relevant to us all, Catholic or not, scholarly or merely interested, believer or atheist. Questions such as: What are the limits of institutional loyalty? At what point does one have sufficient reason, or even an obligation, to abandon a commitment to a corporate group, a community, or a country? Does faithfulness, religious or secular, actually demand that one suppress one’s intellectual judgment, one’s conscience, for no good reason other than obedience to authority? When does an institutional regime deserve to be attacked rather than merely reformed?

Despite my admiration for Brown, it is unclear to me that his continued loyal participation in the Catholic Church did him or anyone else any good. It does, however, suggest where phenomena like the irrational loyalty of Republican supporters of Trump and his ilk originate, namely from some tribal instinct we rather imprecisely call religion. Expedient allegiance would seem an equally accurate description. Regardless of the term, I very much doubt its virtue.

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